Ah, della traviata sorridi al desio!" “Ah, smile on a lost soul!” - sings the unfortunate Violetta, a Parisian courtesan, anticipating an imminent death. This is the only place in the opera La Traviata where the word that Giuseppe Verdi put on the title page of his most famous work is heard. Violetta's request is addressed to God; world, secular society will not smile at the “stumbled”. The title of La Traviata is already a polemical challenge, and for a person in the middle of the 19th century, when the opera was written, it is an unprecedented scandal: a lady of the half world, in other words, an expensive cocotte, on the opera proscenium, in a recognizable modern setting! Dumas, the son whose "Lady of the Camellias" inspired Verdi to create his masterpiece, admitted that the composer immortalized the story of the famous bohemian beauty to a much greater extent than he himself. Both the writer and the composer knew what they wrote about: in the image of Marguerite Gautier, Dumas' lover, Marie Duplessis, was guessed, in the story of Violetta Valery and Alfred Germont, the family conflict of Verdi himself, who chose an opera singer with sick lungs, was reflected in his life. When Giuseppe and Giuseppina watched a play based on Dumas' novel together, both were shocked to tears. Today, audiences around the world are crying over La Traviata.
Self-sacrifice is one of the central themes of romanticism, and the plots of 19th century operas are inconceivable without selfless women. They leave their family and homeland, jump from rocks, put themselves under a knife, etc., but their exploits are always performed for the sake of a loved one. In the gallery of sacrificial heroines, Violetta Valerie stands apart, as she gives everything she has for the good of a complete stranger to her: a higher deed is hard to imagine. La Traviata - the lost, stumbled Violetta - unwittingly blocked the path to the happiness of a young woman and now must free this path. The last step of the “traviata” on the “crooked path” of her life is the step of a real martyr, and the “fallen one” takes off to an unattainable moral height. Looking at La Traviata from this point of view, one can see in it not only a story of doomed love, beautiful to the point of sentimentality,Christina Batyushina
