In essence, the story of the ‘fallen woman’ of Alexandre Dumas’s play (the literary source for Verdi’s opera) is simply a modern, secularised version of the age-old Christian trope of the wayward, sinful woman who repents and finds salvation, the archetype being the Biblical figure of St Mary Magdalene. What makes Violetta (Marguerite in the play) modern is that she is more of an independent spirit than the saintly figures of Christian lore. Initially she revels in her freedom to enjoy the pleasures she wishes which, in the context of 19th century Parisian bourgeois morality, has the tinge of revolutionary liberté about it. But her redemption and salvation come about not from a meek submission to otherworldly divine grace, but from her morally courageous, active decision to forego Alfredo, and from her wrestling with suffering that derives from her mortal illness, more or less as determined and wilful as any Greek or Romantic tragic hero.
For better or worse, then, Maxine Braham’s production recovers the latent religiosity of the narrative to make Violetta seem more of a typically Christian, saintly figure. Among her valuable possessions – and one she doesn’t pawn, but retains with her, in her deathbed scene – is a picture of the penitent Magdalene, setting up Violetta as more like an acolyte of the saint, rather than a truly independent spirit herself. Her devotion to that saint is made explicit in Act Three when Alfredo comes to ask her forgiveness, but she washes his feet with her hair, in a re-enactment of the scene from the Gospels. The choreography and staging often also pinpoint her as like a statuesque saint at the centre of the action, with the basic semi-circular arrangement of the set adapted for each scene, but in each case redolent of the apse of a church, where the altar would be situated, along with any particularly revered statues, icons, or images.
With some subtlety the production draws the connection between the social and religious (essentially Catholic) assumptions of mid-19th century society and Violetta’s status as a victim of those values, as hypocritically promoted by the Parisian bel monde around her. Some may find it genuinely enlightening to bring out those Christian elements of the story. But by subsuming Violetta’s identity so completely within the culture of those religious assumptions, without any overt irony or critique of these, this production seems to reduce her agency and obscures the manner in which her sacrifice and death render her as an ultimately better force than those around her, with their more limited moral compass. I admit to finding her drawn-out demise in the original opera’s Act Three rather sentimental in any case (in Joyce’s sense of ‘unearned emotion’) and the tendency to religiosity here sugars that to make it even more saccharine and doesn’t do justice to Violetta’s resolute spirit. Braham’s idea of shadowing her by a young girl at the very beginning of the opera and at her deathbed may be a vision of Violetta’s younger, innocent self, but it’s rather too ambiguous to salvage her convincingly as anything much more than a victim or martyr.
Musically the characters are more sharply focussed, above all in Samantha Clarke’s clear delineation between the vigorous, recuperated Violetta on the one hand and her emaciated, waning persona on the other. Nico Darmanin is a mature-sounding Alfredo where maybe there could be a more youthful and naïve flourish, but fortunately he’s not short on passion. By contrast, Dario Solari is a wearied, disappointed Giorgio Germont from the start, with quite a clipped account of ‘Di Provenza il mar’, transitioning naturally to regretfulness once he learns of Violetta’s tragic fate. Isabel Garcia Araujo and Peter Lidbetter offer movingly stoical accounts of Annina and Doctor Grenvil, the attendants at Violetta’s bedside during her final hours. More cheerful, but not forced, characterisations come from the salon-goers Peter Edge’s Baron Douphol (Violetta’s former protector), Annie Reilly’s playful Flora, and Leo Selleck’s Marquis d’Obigny.
Richard Farnes draws some fine nuances from the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in one of the most familiar of operatic scores. In particular, they draw out its various intimate and private moments with the intensity of chamber music, but they don’t compromise it’s more extrovert sections either, with an ebullient brindisi for example, and an urgent pace in the dialogue. In short, the music certainly gives the performance more of the opera’s worldly side.
Further performances to 6 July
The post The Grange Festival 2025 – Verdi’s La traviata – with Samantha Clarke, Nico Darmanin & Dario Solari; directed by Maxine Braham; conducted by Richard Farnes appeared first on The Classical Source.
