La Traviata - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Still today in Paris, flowers are placed on the tomb of Marguerite Gautier, the real protagonist of the drama of Alexandre Dumas son La dame aux camélias from which Verdi, together with his librettist F. M. Piave, drew the libretto of the Traviata. No coincidence that the work, based on a rather rough subject at the time, saw the light in Venice where censorship had already been tolerant with Verdi accepting the daring of Ernani and Rigoletto. For various reasons (including the inadequacy of the singers) the work suffered a resounding failure at the first but then became one of the most represented Italian operas of all time. On a musical level, La traviata is in many ways the last opera by Verdi and marks the passage from the model of the early nineteenth century, linked to an idealized vocal dimension, to the new more "realistic" path that Verdi himself will follow in the second half of the century. Third work of the so-called "popular trilogy" (together with Trovatore and Rigoletto), Traviata is perhaps the most dense score of psychological interiority of all the romantic opera theater. The violent passions of the previous works are transformed into subtle and often refined notations of feelings, of pain, of tenderness, of love, of resignation.

Subject to change