Organization

Supervisors

Aleksandra Ćorluka

Zrinka Petrušanec

Concert Masters

Vlatka Peljhan

Mojca Ramuscak

Artistic Director of the Opera Studio

Nina Cossetto

Vjekoslav Babić

Helena Borović

Silvana Čuljak

Singer

Tenor

Filip Filipović

Alfred Germont

Stage director

Hugo De Ana

Set designer

Costume designer

Chorus master

Luka Vukšić

Choreographer

Michele Cosentino

Lighting designer

Valerio Alfieri

Assistant Conductor

Assistant Director

Martina Zdilar Sertić

Cristina Aceti

Assistant Set designer

Nathalie Deana

Mezzo-soprano

Josipa Gvozdanić

Annina

Baritone

Ljubomir Puškarić

George Germont

Ozren Bilušić

The Baron Douphol

Bass

Marin Čargo

The Marquis of Obigny

Nikša Radovanović

Giuseppe

Conductor

Ivan Repušić

Soprano

Nina Minasyan

Violetta Valery

Marija Kuhar Šoša

Liparit Avetisyan

Emilia Rukavina

Flora Bervoix

Stefany Findrik

Josipa Bilić

George Petean

Siniša Galović

Gaston

Matic Zakonjšek

Benjamin Šuran

The doctor Grenvil

Siniša Štork

HNK Zagreb

Orchestra

Croatian National Theatre Ivan Zajc Opera Orchestra

Others

Choir HNK Zagreb

Alen Ruško

Commissioner

Flora's Servant

Robert Palić

La Traviata -  (La traviata)

Zagreb

Croatia

La traviata Verdi

Public

La traviata

Approved

Verdi prepared his La Traviata with great zeal, and it was all the more surprising when he, then a world-famous author, experienced a major failure with this new work at the La Fenice Theater in Venice on March 6, 1853. While writing the play, he wrote to a friend: It is impossible or almost impossible for someone else to guess what I long for. I long for new, great changes, full and bold content ... and I dare to the extreme, about new forms that can also be set to music ... In Venice, I am preparing a Lady with Camellias, which may be entitled La traviata. It is content from this time. Someone else might not do it because of the costume, because of the period, and because of many other stupid preconceptions: I do it with the greatest pleasure. Everyone was shouting when I dared to bring the hunchback to the stage. And I was happy to write Rigoletto.                                                                                                            

La Traviata was conceived in 1852, the same year that Dumas' play The Lady with the Camellias was premiered in Paris. But in July of that year, Verdi was still looking for a theme and libretto for his new opera at the La Fenice Theater in Venice. In a letter to Marzari, the leading man of the theater, he writes: If you could engage a first-class prima donna in Venice, I could accept works that simply cannot fail.
Verdi described the work, which cannot fail, as simple and full of love, and it was the story of Dumas' heroine Marguerite Gautier. Verdi composed it to the libretto of Francesco Marie Piave in Busset and Rome during the autumn and winter of 1852/53, and the opera was premiered only thirteen months after its dramatic premiere, a unique case in opera history.

Rehearsals began in the last week of February 1853, immediately after Verdi's arrival in Venice. While at the Europa Hotel on the Grand Canal, he was most concerned about the singer: they misunderstood both the piece and the music, ignored his instructions, and showed very little interest in the work at all. The day after the premiere, Verdi wrote: La traviata failed last night. My fault or the singer's fault? The time will show. For the next two days he wrote to his publisher Ricordi: I am sorry to have to tell you bad news, but I cannot hide the truth. La Traviata was a fiasco. Let's look for the causes of that. Goodbye, goodbye. To Luccardi, a Roman sculptor and friend, he wrote: Fiasco! A convincing fiasco! I don't know whose fault it is and it's better not to talk about it. I’m not going to say anything about the music, and let me say nothing about the singers either.

The mistake, of course, was not Verdi's. The failure occurred for several reasons. Tenor Lodovico Graziani was indisposed and hoarse, and baritone Felice Varesi deliberately sang completely indifferently, offended because he only got an aria in the second act. When Verdi came to express his regret, the composer replied: Express your regret to yourself and your colleagues who did not understand my music. Soprano Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, chosen to embody the protagonist, a tuberculosis-sick Parisian courtesan, did not fit the role.

Tommaso Locatelli, a well-known Venetian critic, wrote in the newspaper La Gazzetta Uffiziale di Venezia after the premiere: The orchestra played magnificently, so the brilliant prelude to the third act deservedly provoked shouts of approval. The audience was delighted with the wonderful melodies they had not heard for a long time ... The one who did not see the beauty of Un di, quando le veneri, who was not touched by Piangi, whose heart did not tremble at the musical sigh in Pietà, gran Dio, di me !, anyone who has not been touched by these moments has no right to talk about music. In addition, the critic notes that three things were missing for true musical art: voice, voice, and voice. Truth be told, Verdi created something truly wonderful, even though he didn’t have artists who could understand and perform what he created. He was unlucky last night.

However, he does not hide the basic reason for his failure in these objective problems. Lyrical drama with social elements from modern life in contemporary decor was inconsistent with the expectations of the then opera audience accustomed exclusively to historical themes, military campaigns, great revenge, royal courts ... Therefore, opera was difficult to accept. However, a year later, the opera was re-staged, with some changes, in another Venetian theater, the Teatro San Benedetto, then recording significant success, after which its triumphant journey through Italy and the world began.

The London performance of 1856 was, like others, a great success, in part because of Mlle Piccolomini, a favorite of the audience of the time. The work, as it turned out at the time, needed a strong personality like hers to oppose its opponents. Two days after the first performance in London, a long letter appeared in the Times to an angry viewer expressing disbelief that it was even allowed to perform a work of such immoral content. The letter was followed by addresses from several important speakers, and then another letter appeared, this time by Her Majesty's Impresario, who defended the libretto without seeing anything undesirable in it because it highlighted the eternal and unchanging reward of virtue and the punishment of vice. This public controversy, of course, aroused unprecedented interest in sinful opera. Anyway,

And, time has assessed the significance and quality of the work, but the fact remains that viewers at the premiere were confused by the contemporary costumes and content set in their time. After the failure, Verdi withdrew the work and after fourteen months performed it again in another Venetian theater with much more careful preparations. The Venetian audience redeemed itself for the premiere and this time the success was huge so Traviata set out into the world as one of the most popular and most performed operas.                                                                                                                                  

The main character of the play Margerita Gautier, in the opera became Violetta Valéry, a lover of the rich who accidentally meets a young man with whom she experiences sincere love, then loses it due to ruthless prejudices of society and eventually, abandoned and devastated by illness dies in poverty. The hypocrisy of the young girl's social condemnation is also indicated by the title of Verdi's opera - la traviata = stray, out of the way.                                                      

The dramatic conflict begins in the second act, after Alfred's father asks Violette to provoke a definite separation from Alfred, because otherwise Alfred's sister will not be able to marry a respectable family that can not digest his relationship with the famous Parisian courtesan. Even Germont’s realization that Violetta has sincerely broken with her past cannot help, but she must make a sacrifice for Alfred’s family, from which a tragic thread develops until the finale. But from the very beginning, another fateful component is present; Violetta's lung disease erodes her young but turbulent life and destroys her the moment she is left alone and abandoned, and then happiness, too late and just operatic, returns to, in fact, hold her a requiem.     

The music of the opera is for the most part in the muffledness of Violetta's sick character. The famous overture as well as the prelude to the third act are famous descriptions of the painful feelings of that unhappy young woman. Her great aria on the pleasures of life in the finale of the first act is imbued with the typical restlessness of tuberculosis patients, while the fibrous sick nature is fully revealed in the last picture, in Violetta's broken recitations, in the desperate faintness of the past it also goes out abruptly in a death rattle. Alfredo gets a typical Belcantian tenor aria at the beginning of the second act, while in the finale of the same picture his father sings his popular baritone stanza aria Di Provenza il mar il suol, chi dal cuor ti cancellò which immediately became a hit on piano albums, verglas and café music. not losing in more than a hundred years of shabby use any of its beauty and suggestive sensibility. Due to the melody, the duets of Alfred and Violette from the first and especially the third act are also popular, when, on her deathbed, they are united by a touching hope of wanting to leave Paris and start a new life somewhere. The drink from the first act, which, like the aforementioned duet from the finale, was written on a stereotypical three-part rhythm, which Verdi only gradually got rid of, gained special popularity.                                                                                

Although still in the traditional framework, the choir's performances appear in a new dramaturgical role, interfering in some places directly with the events. It is the monumental finale of the third picture, in which the drama of the three main characters of the opera is broken, with dramatic recitations by tenors, tearful arias of Violetta and noble pathos of old Germont, all against the background of restrained but engaged choral commentary. But in one, in fact the central scene of the opera Traviata, Verdi discovers a new way of approaching the psychological elaboration of content within a stage musical form. It is a long conversation between Alfred's father and Violette in the second act, in which the aggressive tone of old Germont is softened and turns into sincere sympathy for the unfortunate girl. In that duet, he expresses his desperate plea to Violetta to leave Alfred, so that their socially undesirable relationship would not be an obstacle to the happy marriage of his daughter. Verdi resolved this conversation with several thematically separate passages, which, by changing their psychological intonation, pass directly into each other; once it was the liquid coser of Germont's story, the second Violetta's earnest exposition, the third her weeping, then the moved consolation of old Germont, who would eventually say goodbye to her as a dear being. It is, as has been changed, a duet of deep human beauty, like the whole of Traviata Verdi’s first intimate music, his testimony of love as human destiny. once it was the liquid coser of Germont's story, the second Violetta's earnest exposition, the third her weeping, then the moved consolation of old Germont, who would eventually say goodbye to her as a dear being. It is, as has been changed, a duet of deep human beauty, like the whole of Traviata Verdi’s first intimate music, his testimony of love as human destiny. once it was the liquid coser of Germont's story, the second Violetta's earnest exposition, the third her weeping, then the moved consolation of old Germont, who would eventually say goodbye to her as a dear being. It is, as has been changed, a duet of deep human beauty, like the whole of Traviata Verdi’s first intimate music, his testimony of love as human destiny.                                                                                           

With La Traviata, Verdi closed his Latin trilogy (Rigoletto, 1851, Troubadour, 1853), which as a whole shows the influences of the French musical climate in his work, with a stronger permeation of recitatives and arias, and above all a fluent adherence to musical rhythm.

English

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