Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ 1930s-inspired “La traviata” glitters—but loses its way

Given the current preposterous moral miasma that shrouds our nation’s capital, a situation giving even the most disreputable cause to pause, anyone in the audience would be forgiven for thinking fundamentally that La traviata resembles more a school picnic than a tale of scandal and its consequences—individual heartbreak and personal tragedies that serve the purposes of metaphor.

However, to comprehend this subliminal message of the consequences of breaking hearts and the misery that dwells in the breakage, this opera, like all genuinely affecting operas, needs must be taut as a drumhead for percussive resonance, rather than merely decorative and lyrical, and especially more than clumsy.

Opera Theatre’s production of this popular show—the fifth “traviata” in the company’s 40-plus year history—did not fulfill that obligation on Saturday evening. 

La traviata—the woman who strayed—tiptoed across the keen edge of a straight razor held by the censor in Venice when it was brought to the stage in 1853. Verdi and his librettist Francisco Maria Piave wanted the opera to be in sync with the times, but the moralists, who found the general tone of the opera smutty, demanded it be set in the early 18th century. 

An attempt by Opera Theatre to bring the story into the 1930s was a bollix, a distraction rather than an innovation. It was without visual or material substance. When will directors learn to leave well enough alone?  

The central characters, Violetta Valéry and Alfredo Germont—lovers for a time, living together “in sin,” cause extraordinary distress in the Germont family. The scandal jeopardizes the marriage of Alfredo’s “sent from heaven” sister to a nobleman.

Alfredo is a provincial, a naïf, who has stepped into the morally dangerous demimonde of Paris and into the arms of Violetta, for a time at least—long enough to go through all the money. 

She is a well-established figure in this world of parties and banquets and balls and illicit sex. Doom hangs over the entire situation from the beginning. Envy rears its poisonous head, and there is a duel. Violetta’s affair with Alfredo ends in debilitating sadness, poverty and an impoverished Violetta dies, even with the alleviative visits of the Germonts, père et fils, to her death divan, and the house-call ministrations of a faithful physician.

Like so many operas, the plot, however commonplace and now predictable, rises from that quotidian status to the nearly tragic, crafted with genius by the greatest of the 19th century’s composers of operas. 

Giuseppe Verdi composed exultant, majestic music for serious, magisterial situations: Macbeth, Otello, Aida, Rigoletto. Traviata competes because of its working through the psychology of human emotional carelessness. And there, besides the rush a music lover feels as the music rises and falls, propelling the action along, there is the essence of traviata’s importance to us and the ages. What strikes us as a lesson for today are its observations of lives lived in wretched excess and the seductiveness of the thin grandeur of the courtesan’s life and the consequences of playing fast and loose with the emotions of relative innocents. 

La traviata especially played against the easy money and immoral complicities and fecklessness of life today in these disjointed United States, is like a storm warning—an observation that the worst is yet to come. 

Realizing that—realizing that there is poverty-generated crime, climate change, threats to public education and public housing and wholesale sex-based corruption—we are pulled up short by a 19th-century genius, Giuseppe Verdi. 

Or we should be, but we are not, because of the difficulties played out so obviously in this production. Its stagecraft is messy rather than taut, spare when sumptuous landscaping is demanded, and bedeviled by cliché and anachronism. Where there is talk of traveling in a coach-and-four, peep-toe shoes and a colorful, striped halter-top should be left in the costume shop. 

The finale is something of a cliché-joke, when the shade of Violetta rises from her death couch and makes a tedious progress to a happy ending in the white light of immortal redemption, the light that burns bright in the giant camellia set—an homage to the literary source of traviata, Alexandre Dumas, fils’s novel, La Dame aux Camellias.

Even though moral recklessness is not number eight on the roster of the seven deadly sins, as the foundation of so much unnecessary trouble in personal lives and in world affairs, it should be. 

La traviata runs through June 23. For more information on tickets and performance times, visit opera-stl.org.