_____________________________________________________________________

O PERA C LASSICS LIBRARY

_____________________________________________________________________

Verdi‘s

LA TRAVIATA

ALL ABOUT LA TRAVIATA!!!!

• Commentary and Analysis
• Principal Characters and Brief Synopsis
• Story Narrative with Music Highlight examples
• Discography • Videography
• Dictionary of Opera and Musical Terms
and COMPLETE LIBRETTO
with Music Highlight examples
 Verdi’s

LA TRAVIATA
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY™

Edited by Burton D. Fisher

Principal lecturer, Opera Journeys Lecture Series

_________________________________________
Opera Journeys™ Publishing / Coral Gables, Florida
 OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY ™

• Aida • The Barber of Seville • La Bohème • Carmen

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• Don Pasquale • The Elixir of Love • Elektra
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• L’Italiana in Algeri • Julius Caesar • Lohengrin
• Lucia di Lammermoor • Macbeth • Madama Butterfly
• The Magic Flute • Manon • Manon Lescaut
• The Marriage of Figaro • A Masked Ball • The Mikado
• Otello • I Pagliacci • Porgy and Bess • The Rhinegold
• Rigoletto • Der Rosenkavalier • Salome • Samson and Delilah
• Siegfried • The Tales of Hoffmann • Tannhäuser
• Tosca • La Traviata • Il Trovatore • Turandot
• Twilight of the Gods • The Valkyrie

Copyright © 2001 by Opera Journeys Publishing

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
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prior permission of the authors.

All musical notations contained herein are original transcriptions by Opera Journeys Publishing.
Discography and Videography listings represent selections by the editors.

Printed in the United States of America

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“Sleep in peace, Marguerite! Much will be forgiven you
for you have greatly loved!”
-The last words of Alexandre Dumas’s novel, La Dame aux Camélias.
 Contents

LA TRAVIATA Page 11
Commentary and Analysis Page 13

Principal Characters in LA TRAVIATA Page 31

Brief Story Synopsis Page 31
Story Narrative
with Music Highlight Examples Page 32
ACT I Page 32
ACT II -Scene 1 Page 34
ACT II - Scene 2 Page 38
ACT III Page 39

Libretto
with Music Highlight Examples Page 41
Act I Page 43
Act II - Scene 1 Page 55
Act II - Scene 2 Page 69
Act III Page 79

Discography Page 91

Videography Page 97

Dictionary of Opera and Musical Terms Page 101

a Prelude........
to OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY LA TRAVIATA
LA TRAVIATA, together with Rigoletto and Il Trovatore, inaugurated a new
phase in Verdi’s compositional style; in these operas Verdi brought to the opera stage
profound human passions, subjects with intense dramatic and psychological depth.
Specifically, LA TRAVIATA is an intimate human portrait of a woman’s agonizing defeat
against the forces of destiny; it is a story about spiritual values, intimate humanity, and
tender emotions.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY explores the greatness and magic of Verdi’s
poignant opera. The Commentary and Analysis offers pertinent biographical information
about Verdi, his mind-set at the time of LA TRAVIATA’s composition, the genesis of the
opera, its premiere and performance history, and insightful story and character analysis.
The text also contains a Brief Story Synopsis, Principal Characters in La
Traviata, and a Story Narrative with Music Highlight Examples, the latter containing
original music transcriptions that are interspersed appropriately within the story’s dramatic
exposition. In addition, the text includes a Discography, Videography, and a Dictionary
of Opera and Musical Terms.
The Libretto has been newly translated by the Opera Journeys staff with specific
emphasis on retaining a literal translation, but also with the objective to provide a faithful
translation in modern and contemporary English; in this way, the substance of the drama
becomes more intelligible. To enhance educational and study objectives, the Libretto also
contains musical highlight examples interspersed within the drama’s text.
The opera art form is the sum of many artistic expressions: theatrical drama,
music, scenery, poetry, dance, acting and gesture. In opera, it is the composer who is the
dramatist, using the emotive power of his music to express intense, human conflicts.
Words evoke thought, but music provokes feelings; opera’s sublime fusion of words,
music and all the theatrical arts provides powerful theater, an impact on one’s sensibilities
that can reach into the very depths of the human soul.
Verdi’s LA TRAVIATA, certainly a crown jewel of his glorious operatic inventions,
remains a masterpiece of the lyric theater, a tribute to the art form as well as to its ingenious
composer.

Burton D. Fisher
Editor
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY
LA TRAVIATA Page 11

LA TRAVIATA “The Fallen Woman”

Italian opera in three acts

Music
by
Giuseppe Verdi

Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave,

after the Alexandre Dumas (fils) novel,
La Dame aux Camélias

Premiere:
Gran Teatro La Fenice, Venice
March 1853
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 12
LA TRAVIATA Page 13

Commentary and Analysis

A
s the mid-nineteenth century unfolded, the thirty-seven year-old Giuseppe
Verdi had achieved recognition as the most popular opera composer in the
world: he had established himself as the foremost proponent of the great
legacy of Italian opera that had been preserved by his immediate predecessors, Rossini,
Bellini, and Donizetti. With Verdi, Italian opera remained the rage, and its focus on
the voice remained supreme and continued to be the vital force dominating the art
form.
Viewing the opera landscape at mid-century, Rossini had retired almost twenty
years earlier, Bellini died in 1835, Donizetti died in 1848, the premiere of Meyerbeer’s
Le Prophète took place in 1849, and Wagner’s Lohengrin premiered in 1850.
Between the years 1839 and 1850, Verdi composed fifteen operas. His first opera,
Oberto (1839), indicated promise for the young, twenty-six year old budding opera
composer, but his second opera, the comedy, Un Giorno di Regno (1840), was received
with indifference and failed.
It would be Verdi’s third opera, Nabucco (1842), that would become a sensational
triumph and catapult the young composer to immediate fame and recognition. Verdi’s
other great successes which followed were: I Lombardi (1843); Ernani (1844); I Due
Foscari (1844); Giovanna d’Arco (1845); Alzira (1845); Attila (1846); Macbeth
(1847); I Masnadieri (1847); Il Corsaro (1848); La Battaglia di Legnano (1849);
Luisa Miller (1849); and Stiffelio (1850). Verdi would eventually compose a total of
twenty-eight operas during his illustrious career, dying in 1901 at the age of seventy-
eight.

V
erdi’s early operas all contained an underlying theme: his patriotic mission
for the liberation of his beloved Italy from the oppressive rule of both France
and Austria. Verdi was temperamentally a product of the previous century’s
Enlightenment; as such, he was obsessed with the ideals of human freedom. Verdi
used his operatic pen to sound the alarm for Italy’s freedom: each of the stories
within those early operas was disguised with allegory that advocated individual liberty,
freedom, and independence for Italy; the suffering and struggling heroes and heroines
in those early operas were metaphorically his beloved Italian compatriots.
In Giovanna d’Arco (“Joan of Arc” 1845), the French patriot Joan confronts the
oppression of the English, her own French monarchy, and even the Church, and is
eventually martyred: the heroine’s plight synonymous with Italy’s struggle against
its own oppression. In Nabucco (1842), the suffering Hebrews, enslaved by
Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, were allegorically the Italian people themselves,
similarly in bondage by foreign oppressors.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 14

Verdi’s Italian audience easily read the underlying messages he had subtly injected
between the lines of his text and that he had nobly expressed through his musical
language. At Nabucco’s premiere, at the conclusion of the Hebrew slave chorus, “Va
Pensiero” (“Go hope!”), the audience wildly stopped the performance for fifteen
minutes with inspired shouts of “Viva Italia,” an explosion of nationalism that forced
the authorities to assign extra police to later performances of the opera. The “Va
Pensiero” chorus became the emotional and unofficial Italian “National Anthem,”
the musical inspiration for Italy’s patriotic aspirations. Even the name V E R D I had
a nationalistic, underlying meaning: homage to the great patriot which was expressed
as “Viva Verdi,” and also as an acronym for Italian unification; the letters V E R D I
stood for “Vittorio Emanuelo Re D’ Italia”, Italian liberation associated with the
return of King Victor Emanuel.

A
s the 1850s unfolded, Verdi’s creative genius had arrived at a turning point
in terms of his artistic inspiration, evolution, and maturity. He felt satisfied
that his objective for Italian independence was soon to be realized, sensing
the fulfillment of Italian liberation and unification in the forthcoming “Risorgimento”
(1861), that historic transformation that established Italian national independence.
Verdi now decided to abandon the heroic pathos and nationalistic themes of his
early operas and began to seek more profound operatic subjects: subjects that would
be bold to the extreme; subjects with greater dramatic and psychological depth;
subjects that accented spiritual values, intimate humanity, and tender emotions. From
this point forward, he would be ceaseless in his goal to create an expressiveness and
acute delineation of the human soul that had never before been realized on the opera
stage.
The year 1851 inaugurated Verdi’s “middle period,” a defining moment in his
career in which his operas would start to contain heretofore unknown dramatic qualities
and intensities, an exceptional lyricism, and a profound characterization of humanity.
Verdi’s creative art began a new flowering toward greater maturity. He introduced
operas that would eventually become some of the best loved works ever composed
for the lyric theater: Rigoletto (1851); Il Trovatore (1853); La Traviata (1853); I
Vespri Siciliani (1855); Simon Boccanegra (1857); Aroldo (1857); Un Ballo in
Maschera (1859); La Forza del Destino (1862); Don Carlos (1867); Aida (1871).
And as he neared the twilight of his career, he continued his advance toward a greater
dramatic fusion between text and music that would culminate in what some consider
his greatest masterpieces integrating music and drama: Otello (1887), and Falstaff
(1893).
LA TRAVIATA Page 15

I
n 1851, Verdi was approached by the management of La Fenice in Venice to
write an opera to celebrate the Carnival and Lent seasons. In seeking a story
source for the opera, Verdi turned to the new romanticism of the French dramatist,
Victor Hugo, a writer whose Hernani he successfully treated in his opera Ernani
seven years earlier (1844).
Victor Hugo’s play, Le Roi s’Amuse (“The King Has a Good Time”), was a
portrayal of the libertine escapades and adventures of François I of France (1515-
1547), the drama featured as its unconventional protagonist, an ugly, disillusioned,
and hunchbacked court jester named Triboulet: an ambivalent and tragically repulsive
character who possessed two souls; he was a physically monstrous and a morally
evil, wicked personality, but simultaneously, a magnanimous, kind, gentle, and
compassionate man who showered unbounded love on his daughter. Hugo’s Triboulet
became Verdi’s title character in his opera Rigoletto (1851).
Two years after Rigoletto, Verdi composed Il Trovatore (“The Troubadour”), an
opera based on the Spanish tragedy El Trovador by Antonio Garcia Gutièrrez. In this
story, Verdi portrayed another bold, bizarre, and unconventional character, in the
hideously ugly gypsy mother, Azucena, a half-demented woman who drives the
melodrama with her monomania to avenge her martyred mother.
Like the hunchbacked, mocked, and cynical Rigoletto, the powerful persona of
Azucena became the keystone of Il Trovatore: without Azucena’s obsessive passion,
the essential conflict of the opera is nonexistent. In fact, the Azucena character so
dominated the original source story, that the English stage version of Gutièrrez’s
play was titled The Gypsy’s Vengeance. Verdi responded by musically sculpting the
character of this haggard gypsy more profoundly than any character he had brought
to the stage thus far. Thus, Azucena’s two great conflicting passions drive the Il
Trovatore plot: her maternal love for her surrogate son, Manrico, and her obsession
to avenge her mother’s execution.
Azucena became an entirely new figure in Verdi’s female gallery which, up to
this time, had never made significant use of the mezzo-soprano or contralto voice in
a principal role. The introduction of Azucena in Il Trovatore represents the beginning
in a glorious pantheon of darker Verdian female voices; the sorceress Ulrica in Un
Ballo in Maschera, Princess Eboli in Don Carlo, and Princess Amneris in Aida.
Uncannily, Azucena is Rigoletto’s counterpart. Both characters are repulsive
outsiders, in many respects, shocking characters to Verdi’s nineteenth century
audiences who demanded beautiful heroines and handsome heroes on the stage;
villains could be ugly, but they were only to be presented as secondary figures.
Nevertheless, in these two characters, their shared passionate obsession for revenge
becomes the mainsprings of their actions, eventually concluding in horrible tragedy:
Rigoletto’s revenge unwittingly brings about the death of his own daughter, Gilda,
stabbed by the assassin he hired to murder his master, the Duke of Mantua; similarly,
Azucena causes the death of her adored surrogate son, Manrico, first by claiming
under torture by her enemy, Di Luna, that she is his mother, and secondly, and more
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 16

importantly, by hiding from Di Luna the fact that he and Manrico are actually brothers.
Together, Rigoletto and Azucena are the male and female faces of revenge that
become defeated: revenge that ultimately brings about fatal injustice. Both tragedies,
Rigoletto and Il Trovatore, are therefore loaded with irony because both protagonists
believe they are striking a blow for justice, and of course, their failure leads to horrific
catastrophe. Rigoletto proclaims, “Egli è delitto, punizion so io” (“He is crime, I am
punishment.”) Azucena repeatedly pronounces her dying mother’s demand for
vengeance: “Mi vendica” (“Avenge me”). Nevertheless, in the end, both see their
children lying dead, the only difference between them is that Rigoletto may live on
in agony, while Azucena will surely die at the stake as did her mother.
With Rigoletto and Il Trovatore, Verdi launched his crusade to bring more intensely
human personalities to the opera stage. Like Shakespeare, Verdi intended — and
succeeded — in presenting new characters who would stir passions and bare the soul
of humanity.

V
erdi’s next opera, pursuing his goal for more profound characterization, would
be La Traviata. The story source for La Traviata was the novel, and later the
play, by Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-1895), La Dame aux Camélias (1848)
(“The Lady with the Camellias.”) Dumas fils was the illegitimate son of the renowned
Alexandre Dumas, père, the writer of those famous novels, The Count of Monte
Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and hundreds of others. History records that the elder
Dumas actually sued his illegitimate son for taking his name, accusing him of flagrantly
capitalizing on his father’s fame and success.
Dumas fils was for a short time the lover of the real life courtesan, Alphonsine
Plessis, an extremely popular and successful demimondaine of Paris. She preferred
to be called Marie Duplessis, but became Marguerite Gautier in Dumas’s novel, and
eventually, Verdi’s heroine Violetta Valery in his opera La Traviata.
Dumas idealized his brief love affair with Marie Duplessis in his novel, and
transformed her rejection of his passionate love for her into a tragic love story whose
telling acquired almost mythological proportions. Their tempestuous affair ended
because of Dumas’s financial incapabilities, and Marie’s infidelity.
Dumas’s heroine, Marie, was born in the countryside at Nonant and was the
daughter of a textile merchant who apparently abandoned his family. At the age of
fifteen, she was sent to Paris, where she worked in a shop by day, but learned quickly
the financial rewards of prostitution by night. Within a short time she had risen to the
highest circles of the demimondaines, and was maintained as a mistress successively
by dukes and counts, all of whom installed her in apartments and provided her with
material luxuries.
Marie loved flowers, but because she was allergic to heavy aromas, she would
wear the almost odorless white camellia. Her life was filled with paradox; as a
courtesan, she would be reviled by society for her immoral life-style, but to others,
LA TRAVIATA Page 17

she was openly admired for her beauty and respected for her presumed refinement.
Franz Liszt, a patron who adored her, claimed that her wit, good sense, and elegant
conversation prompted sincere respect and esteem. Likewise, Marie was captivated
by Liszt; one of her greatest disappointments was that her illness prevented her from
accompanying Liszt on one of his tours.
While Marie was the mistress of Count Stackelberg, an elderly former ambassador
to Russia, Dumas accidentally met her while she was entertaining friends in her
apartment. She began to cough blood, and Dumas followed her to her bedroom
where his genuine concern for her health so touched her, that she admitted him as her
lover.
Dumas could not provide her with the luxury she required, and as a result, she
refused to renounce her other lovers. Their love affair became stormy, unhappy, and
eventually terminated. In parting, Dumas wrote: “My dear Marie, I am not rich enough
to love you as I would wish, and not poor enough to be loved as you would desire.
So let us both forget...”
In his novel, Dumas poured out his spurned soul, and at the same time, idealized
this woman who had caused him so much suffering, ultimately, ennobling himself as
a victim of his own sentimentality and impossible dreams, but begging the reader’s
pity. Nevertheless, Dumas père was not responsible for breaking up their relationship,
so the father’s intervention in both novel and play (Giorgio Germont in Verdi’s La
Traviata) was a fictional creation that had no basis in the reality of Dumas’s life.
Marie became ravaged by tuberculosis, and went from spa to spa to try to regain
her health, but eventually, her disease accelerated to total physical decline, presumably
as a result of her obsessive desire to maintain her professional life-style. Marie died
from the disease in 1847. She was twenty-three years old, and the next year, Dumas
published his novel.

M
uch of the story recounted in Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias mirrors
another celebrated novel, the Abbé Prévost’s eighteenth century
autobiographical novel, Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité,
the accepted English translation, “The History of the Cavalier Des Grieux and Manon
Lescaut.”
Manon Lescaut, also a courtesan, became the role model for the demimonde
society of the nineteenth-century, and the subject of operas by Auber, Puccini, and
Massenet.
The Abbé’s fictional Manon Lescaut was a beautiful, immoral courtesan who
genuinely falls in love with a young student, des Grieux, a man who is unable to give
her the luxury she cannot do without. Eventually, she abandons her lover in order to
return to her profession.
The Prévost/Dumas/Verdi stories are all related and deal with young impetuous
people whose lives become destroyed because their passions overcome reason: all of
the stories deal with the death of love and the tragic death of lovers.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 18

A turning point in all of these stories concerns abandonment: a lover is abandoned

for material reasons, money (Prévost), or a lover is abandoned because of a noble
sacrifice (Dumas/Verdi): the former and the latter come together at the end of Act II
- Scene 1 of La Traviata in a subtle — if not ironic — moment. When Alfredo
returns, and before Giuseppe, Violetta’s servant, delivers Violetta’s farewell letter to
Alfredo, stage instructions direct that the Abbé Prévost’s novel lay opened on a table
to the page containing Manon’s farewell letter to her lover:

But can you not see, poor dear soul, that in the condition to which we are
reduced, fidelity would be a foolish virtue? Do you think it possible to be
loving on an empty stomach? Hunger would cause me some fatal mishap,
and one day I would utter my last breath thinking it as a sigh of love……..

Nevertheless, La Traviata’s story elevates abandonment to noble sacrifice. Sarah

Bernhardt, for whom Sardou wrote the play La Tosca that later became the basis for
Puccini’s opera of the same name, recognized the suitability of Dumas’s play as a
vehicle for a great romantic actress: she immortalized Marguerite Gautier in La Dame
aux Camélias, and reputedly performed the role three thousand times. An equally
great actress, Eleanore Duse, performed the same role throughout Europe and America,
and in contemporary times, it became a brilliant role for Greta Garbo who played the
heroine in its film version: Camille. Nevertheless, it became the celebrated Bernhardt
who coined the famous epithet for the heroine when she referred to La Dame as the
legendary “whore with a heart of gold.”

V
erdi’s La Traviata resulted from a commission to write a new opera for the
1853 Carnival season that would be mounted at the Teatro La Fenice in
Venice. As his librettist, Verdi selected Francesco Maria Piave, librettist for
his previous Ernani, Macbeth, Rigoletto, and the poet who would later become his
librettist for La Forza del Destino.
Composer and librettist had seen a Paris production of Dumas’s play, and Verdi
considered it “a subject of the times.” Its initial title, Amore e morte (“Love and
Death”), would be changed to accommodate the censors: La Traviata (“The Fallen
Woman.”) They elected to base their opera on Dumas’s stage play rather than his
novel: the novel depicted the heroine as a rather promiscuous and crude personality,
but in the play, she was portrayed as a more refined and sedate woman.
Years before La Traviata, Verdi wrote to a friend, “I don’t like depicting prostitutes
on the stage,” a statement he made to defend his refusal to set Victor Hugo’s Marion
de Lorme for the opera stage. However, at this juncture in his life, Verdi was intuitively
urged, sensitive, and inspired toward this subject: he was deeply moved by the
poignancy of the doomed heroine’s plight, a tragedy involving the abandonment of
her one true love as well as the sacrifice of her life to illness. The story’s dramatic
LA TRAVIATA Page 19

events eerily paralleled Verdi’s own personal relationships, and those associations
served to direct him — consciously and unconsciously — toward this profoundly
human story.
A creative artist seeks truth and beauty, and expresses his ideals like a philosophical
barometer that measures society’s pulse. Verdi admittedly was a moralist: a man who
considered himself a priest, and would use his art to teach morality. Dumas’s story
had a very special attraction to him because it exposed immorality: therefore, it was
indeed, “A story of our times.” In one sense, Verdi intended his dramatization of the
story to expose the exploitation of women by wealthy men, well aware that the lives
of these courtesans could be heartless, loveless, and abusive, and almost always tragic
when they would be cast aside when their charms faded.
There are many moments in a composer’s life when life and art collide. Years
earlier Verdi suffered personal tragedies with the death of his young wife, which was
followed almost immediately by the death of his two children. So the tragic death of
Violetta in La Traviata corresponded uncannily with his own personal tragedies.
In another collision of life and art, Dumas’s heroine sells her jewels to pay for the
expenses of the lover’s country retreat. In the early years of Verdi’s marriage, he
became ill and was unable to pay the rent; his wife sold her jewels and paid the rent
with the proceeds. And at the time of her death, Verdi’s wife was young by any
standard: she was twenty-seven. A further coincidence, her name was Marguerita.

B
iographers speculate that the more emphatic underlying inspiration for Verdi’s
enthusiasm in setting La Traviata for the lyric stage concerned the story’s
parallels with his romance with Giuseppina Strepponi, a relationship that all
of Italy considered scandalous. Strepponi had been a renowned opera singer who
had become a guiding force in Verdi’s early operatic career. She was the prima
donna soprano in the premiere of his third opera, Nabucco, and was not only
instrumental in helping the twenty-nine year-old composer have Nabucco produced
in 1842, but afterwards became an important influence in his career.
After the death of Verdi’s wife, Strepponi and Verdi fell in love. They lived together
in the countryside outside Paris, their sinful love idyll hauntingly similar to Dumas’s
novel and play. Both became victimized by ferocious assaults of moral outrage from
the genteel elements of Parisian society, their relationship considered illicit and
scandalous by an adoring public who seemed to have demanded an unrealizable
sainthood from their beloved opera icon. Even Verdi’s esteemed former father-in-
law, Antonio Barezzi, felt obliged to reproach him for what he considered his
thoughtless association with Strepponi. (Verdi and Strepponi eventually married
years later.)
Subsequently, Strepponi became ill and depressed. It has been speculated that
much of her illness resulted from the loss of her voice; her career had been ruined
from overwork and from her attempt to support and raise her two illegitimate children
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 20

after their father’s death. Afterwards, in desperation, it is reputed that she had lovers
who fathered at least four more illegitimate children. Strepponi’s past, by any measure
of nineteenth century or even contemporary morality, was dark and outrageous, and
it ultimately became the cause for her rejection, repudiation, and condemnation,
particularly by Verdi’s fellow villagers after the couple eventually settled in his native
Busetto.
The immoral Strepponi was viewed by society as the “fallen woman,” a woman
deserving of scorn and derision, and as a result of her victimization, she suffered
much pain, despair, and anguish. Nevertheless, Verdi became her loving savior and
protector against a vicious and hypocritical society: it was ultimately through their
profound love that Strepponi was redeemed, and her spirits restored.
It became Verdi’s personal ideals of love, forgiveness, and redemption, noble
ideals which he acted out in his real-life relationship with Strepponi, that became the
powerful, inspirational, underlying forces that drove him toward the poignancy of
Dumas’s story. Verdi was determined to use his opera medium to arouse sympathy,
understanding, and compassion, for society’s outcasts. Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and
La Traviata, all composed within two years of each other, almost form a trilogy
whose basic themes deal with society’s cruelties, as well as relationships that have
become disrupted by irrational passions: the ugly and corrupt Rigoletto, the demented
and dangerous Azucena, the scorned Violetta.
The collision of Verdi’s life and art became the underlying inspiration for his
poignant musical outpouring in La Traviata. It is an opera story that occupied a very
special place in Verdi’s sentiments and affections, and therefore, became an extremely
intimate and personal expression: Violetta, the “fallen woman,” rejected and doomed,
was his real-life, beloved Giuseppina Strepponi, a woman whom the composer himself
redeemed through unbounded love and forgiveness.

E
urope’s mid-nineteenth century was a time of political and social unrest.
Napoleon’s earlier defeat and the political alliances that evolved from the
Congress of Vienna (1813-1815), had given Europe’s victorious monarchies
a renewed incentive to protect the status quo of their autocracies through force. The
eighteenth century Enlightenment awakened humanity to democracy and individual
liberty, inspiring one of the greatest transformations in human history: the French
Revolution. Napoleon arose from the ashes of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror,
but failed to destroy the monarchies. In the aftermath of his defeat, the monarchies
felt threatened by ethnic nationalism as well as new ideological and social forces
evolving from the transformations caused by the Industrial Revolution, colonialism,
materialism, and socialism. More importantly, society’s dreams of democracy were
propelling stormy winds of change that threatened Europe’s autocracies, generating
fear among the monarchies that their power was vulnerable. As a result, ideals about
human progress and reform were continually in tension and conflict, and revolutions,
bred by discontent, erupted in 1830 and 1848 in all the major cities throughout Europe.
LA TRAVIATA Page 21

The control of ideas was a coefficient of power. The ability of the continental
powers to control artistic truth was directly proportional to the stability and continuity
of their authority. Censorship was the engine to control and regulate ideas expressed
in the arts: nothing could be shown upon the stage that might in the least fan the
flames of rebellion and discontent. Kings, ministers, and governments, all reflected
an apparent paranoia, an irrational fear, and an almost pathological suspicion of new
ideas. It was through censorship that they exerted their power and determination to
protect what they considered “universal truths”: in order to survive, conservatism
and fundamentalism would of necessity overpower progress and new ideas.
In France, the censors suppressed Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi s’Amuse, the basis
for Verdi’s Rigoletto. Despite the French Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of
expression, the censors banned the play, deeming its subject immoral, obscenely
trivial, scandalous, and even a subversive threat. Similarly, in Verdi’s Italy, ruled by
both France, Austria, and the Roman Catholic Church, censors would reject and
prevent the performance of works by artists whose ideas they considered a threat to
the social and political stability of their regimes.
For Rigoletto, Verdi and Piave fought profusely with the censors who deemed its
curse theme antithetical and blasphemous: the portrayal of the misdeeds and frailties
of King François I was considered obscene and despicable; its plot contained political
incorrectness with a king manipulated by a crippled jester, eventually becoming an
intended assassination victim; its sleaziness in Sparafucile’s Inn had the “aura” of a
house of prostitution; and finally, it was considered repulsive when Gilda was “packed”
in a sack in the opera’s final moment.
Verdi would overcome their objections and substitute the Duke of Mantua for
King François I, in effect, the Duke bearing the anonymity of any Mantovani, an
insignificant ruler of a petty state rather than an historic King of France. But it was a
stroke of operatic Providence that redeemed both Verdi and Piave: the Austrian censor
himself, a man named Martello, was not only an avid opera lover, but a man who
venerated the great Verdi as well. Martello determined that the change of venue
from Paris to Mantua, and the renaming of the opera to Rigoletto from its originally
intended La Maledizione (“The Curse”), adequately satisfied censor requirements.
From the point of view of both Verdi and Piave, Rigoletto had returned from the
censors safely, and without severe fractures or amputations.
And indeed, Verdi’s La Traviata story prompted the censors to fury, considering
the mere portrayal of a courtesan on the stage as anathema. In addition, censors
considered “Libiamo,” the famous drinking toast in Act I, too licentious. But it
would be Alfredo’s outpouring of love for Violetta in Act I that prompted the censor’s
outrage and condemnation of La Traviata. Some of the text was considered
blasphemous: Alfredo’s words, “Croce e delizia al cor” (“pain and ecstasy to my
heart”) bore another connotation; “croce” also denoted “cross,” obviously a holy
association in Christian Europe. Verdi was urged to change “croce” to “pena,” a
synonym for pain.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 22

Verdi refused. But in the end Verdi was the victor. The opera was to premiere at
La Fenice in Venice, and the Venetian censor was again none other than his passionate
admirer, Martello, the savior of Rigoletto. La Traviata returned from the censors —
like Rigoletto — without severe amputation, and with inconsequential changes that
were far less than those he had experienced with Rigoletto.

V
erdi’s Il Trovatore premiered in Rome in 1853, just two months before La
Traviata’s premiere in Venice. Although seemingly written simultaneously,
no two operas could possibly be so different if not antithetical: their
fundamental differences in spirit, technique, and theme, certainly represent a
compliment to Verdi’s genius.
Perhaps one of La Traviata’s most famous legacies is that its premiere at La
Fenice in Venice in 1853 was reported to have been the most colossal operatic disaster
and fiasco of all time. The public did not quite agree with Verdi about the subject’s
poignancy and timeliness. It was considered too avant garde, an unusual work that
may have been too contemporary and too modern, and contrary to their expectations,
a work with no intrigues, no duels, and none of the ornamentation of high operatic
romance.
Verdi’s insistence on setting the story in contemporary costume, which would
emphasize “a subject of our times,” may have contributed to a sense of stark, ugly
realism for its audience. It would be at later performances that La Traviata’s setting
would be moved back one hundred years and be produced with the period costumes
of the early eighteenth century: Louis XIV. If anything, the immorality inherent in a
plot depicting the glorification of a courtesan’s life was entirely too repulsive, and
perhaps a little too bold for Verdi’s contemporary audience.
In the mid-nineteenth century, conservatives considered the realism that was being
portrayed in contemporary French literature to represent corrupting influences: those
contemporary literary realists such as Stendhal and George Sand were thought to be
twisting Enlightenment ideals, not merely excusing illicit love, but attacking the very
institution of marriage itself; their works were considered the ultimate immorality,
and La Traviata, a reflection of modern society, in many ways represented that
immorality.
Hypocritical criticism? A veil to hide those blatant truths and realities of their
society? The women in the audience plainly knew that many of their husbands
maintained girlfriends, but that was not a subject to be discussed around the dinner
table, and certainly far from something they wanted to face so realistically in a stage
portrayal. In addition, parents who brought along their young daughters were duly
appalled to have their protected youngsters witness the glorification of the heroine-
courtesan Violetta in Act I successfully selling sex and ultimately wearing the most
luxurious finery in the house.
LA TRAVIATA Page 23

But the premiere disaster had yet another dimension. The tenor had a cold and
was reported to have been croaking throughout the performance. And a Mme. Fanny
Salvini-Donatelli, an extremely stout and healthy looking soprano, looked anything
but the beautiful and consumptive courtesan, Violetta. It became obviously difficult
— if not ludicrous — for the audience to envision this monumentally hefty woman
in the role of a beautiful courtesan whose consumption wastes her away to nothing.
In retrospect, La Traviata’s momentary premiere failure was but a glitch in opera
history. Today, the opera is without question one of the most widely loved operas,
and perhaps the unequivocal sentimental favorite in the Verdi canon.

L
a Traviata is an overwhelmingly poignant portrait of a heroic woman who
becomes tormented in her struggle to overcome the tragic realities of her life.
In this exceptional creative outpouring, Verdi’s music language ingeniously
expresses her profound inner turmoil and psychological truths.
Those sentiments and human feelings expressed in La Traviata place it at the
summit of the nineteenth century Romantic movement. For earlier Enlightenment
thinkers, reason was the path to universal truth. But the Enlightenment bred the French
Revolution and its ultimate horror, the Reign of Terror, and Romanticism became the
counter-force — if not the backlash — to the failure of the Enlightenment. Romantics
turned to Rousseau, a spiritual founding father of the Romantic movement, who
championed the freedom of the human spirit when he said: “I felt before I thought.”
Thus, Romantic ideals stressed profound human sensibilities, and idealized human
achievement as a tension between desire and fulfillment. As a result, Romanticists
ennobled love and the nature of love; they glorified sentiments and virtues; they
expressed sympathy and compassion for man’s foibles; they idealized death as a
form of redemption, and rewarded noble acts and sacrifice.
Goethe expressed those Romantic sentiments in his Sorrows of the Young Werther
(1774), a story in which the tragedy portrays suicide as the ultimate solution to
unrequited love. Victor Hugo, in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, (1831), poignantly
portrayed human tragedy in his portrayal of the pathetic and sad plight of the deformed
Quasimodo.
In music, the Romantic spirit emphasized its liberation from Classical restrictions
by eliminating rigid structural constraints, such as strict adherence to rhythms,
balances, and preestablished forms. Liberated from Classicism, the Romantics
portrayed their art with a freer musical expression that resulted in grandiose and
extravagant musical representations: Chopin’s Ballades, Impromptus, and Nocturnes,
and Liszt’s Symphonic Poems and Rhapsodies.
Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805) was the first Romantic opera, an idealization of
freedom from oppression in which the rescue of a political prisoner is portrayed as a
thrilling ode to love and freedom, all accented with a deep sense of human struggle
hammered into every note. But the icons of nineteenth-century Romanticism in opera
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 24

were Giuseppe Verdi in Italy, and Richard Wagner in Germany: each composer had
an agenda and mission that reflected his own contemporary vision of a more perfect
world.
Wagner was the quintessential cultural pessimist who proposed that the path to
human salvation could only be achieved through the sacrificing love of a woman.
Goethe had ennobled woman in his ending of Faust: “Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns
hinan.” (The eternal woman draws us onward.”) Wagner and the German Romanticists
became obsessed with the ideal of the “eternal woman”: in Wagner’s The Flying
Dutchman (1843), the heroine Senta sacrifices her life to redeem the doomed
Dutchman, her sacrifice serving to eliminate his curse. In Wagner’s colossal Ring
operas, it is Brünnhilde’s love for the hero Siegfried that ultimately leads to her self-
immolation, a sacrificial act that redeems the world from evil.
And in the dramatic truth portrayed in La Traviata, its deep sentiment and poignant
portrait of the entire range of human feelings and emotions, Verdi represented the
essence of the Romantic spirit and soul.

A
s an artist with high moral ideals, Verdi unveiled the human soul in La
Traviata. Verdi was a man possessing Romantic ideals: he was an extremely
compassionate and sensitive man, most assuredly a humanistic man.
Verdi believed that a single act of sin, an injustice, or an indiscretion, should not
blacken a life: forgiveness, atonement, and penitence were essential redemptive forces
that led to the path of personal salvation. But Verdi was a true Romantic: love was
the ultimate fulfillment that would achieve redemption. Love and its redeeming power
could transform and rescue an amoral life. Verdi practiced what he preached: his
unbounded love for Giuseppina Strepponi was indeed the redeeming force in her
life, and it was his selfless love for her that liberated her from a dark and sinful past.
Personal salvation and redemption are the core spiritual themes of La Traviata. The
heroine, Violetta Valery, is a courtesan, a sinful woman who by her profession
blasphemously confronts the moral standards of society: she is immoral and amoral. In
that sense, Violetta is indeed the lost soul of the story: the traviata, variously translated as
“the woman astray,” “the wayward woman,” “the woman amiss,” and “the fallen woman.”
Nevertheless, humanity is flawed, and lives are continually threatened by duplicity
and double standards. Mozart, in his operas Don Giovanni (1787), and The Marriage
of Figaro (1786), portrays despicable, promiscuous, and immoral men, but if viewed
in the context of morality plays in which good triumphs over evil, men must repent
or be punished: an essential necessity in order to preserve humanity and society. But
promiscuous women, especially courtesans, were considered beyond sympathy and
certainly salvation, and they, not their consorts, became the condemned.
In the spirit of the Romantic ideal, Violetta Valery can rise above her past and can
be redeemed, but she must perform a noble deed, a heroic act, a selfless sacrifice in
order to earn her redemption and forgiveness. Her sacrifice is the heart of the opera
LA TRAVIATA Page 25

story. It is a heroic moment indeed when Violetta agrees to abandon her passionate
love for Alfredo for the good of his family; her sacrifice is a selfless act of true love,
and the moment in which she thinks of everyone but herself. It is indeed a poignant
moment, during her second act confrontation with Giorgio Germont, when Violetta
reflects: “Conosca il sacrifizio ch’io consumai d’amore che sarà suo fin l’ultimo
sospiro del mio cor” ( “One day Alfredo should know the sacrifice I made for him,
and with my last breath, I loved only him.) And a no less poignant moment of
selflessness occurs later when she embraces Germont and reflects: “Tra breve ei vi
fia reso, ma afflitto oltre ogni dire” (“Soon you will have him back, but he will be so
brokenhearted!”) These are truly moments of selflessness and noble human
magnanimity.
Ultimately, Violetta’s sacrifice achieves forgiveness for her sinful past, and her
heroism becomes a transcendence that serves to spiritually elevate her and redeem
her soul.
In so many poignant moments of the La Traviata story, deep psychological
complexities and intense emotions build to a fierce pathos. And as the tragedy
progresses, the mood develops into a deep sense of pity and sorrow. Violetta, selflessly
and compassionately, has nobly and heroically sacrificed her love for Alfredo for a
greater good, but in the end, her final sacrifice will be life itself. With Verdi’s poignant
and dramatic musical portrait of the heroine’s struggles and her intense sentiments,
she truly earns her epithet: “the woman with a heart of gold.”

V
erdi’s magical and sublime music portrays the pathos and tragedy of his
doomed heroine with a deep sense of dramatic realism. His score is
almost a bittersweet symphonic-opera that sweeps like an emotional tide
while it conveys powerful moments of emotional truth in each stage of the heroine’s
plight. Verdi even uses the vocal character of the heroine to arouse our consciousness
of the true soul of the woman: vocally, Violetta becomes transformed from the
ornamented and exuberant coloratura in Act 1, to her more lyric, dramatic, and more
passionate expressiveness as she approaches her ultimate doom.
In the orchestral prelude, Verdi introduces the heroine Violetta with two heartfelt
and moving musical themes that portray the entire emotional spectrum of the drama.
At first, softly played on divided strings, Verdi’s musical language presents a theme
that conveys a profound sadness and melancholy, a reflection on the fatal illness that
undermines Violetta’s health and serves to evoke a sense of suffering and pain.
A second intensely moving theme relieves that pathos and sadness and announces
love: Violetta’s profound and devoted love for Alfredo. Verdi ends the prelude
ingeniously by adding ornamentation to the love theme, a subtle musical suggestion
of the shallowness and superficiality of the professional courtesan’s world and its
decadent salons. This is, beyond any doubt, Verdi’s “story of our times,” and his
musical expressions from the very beginning serve to emphasize his very human
moral outrage.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 26

Violetta is quite candid, if not fearful, when she advises the impetuous Alfredo
that a woman committed to her profession could never expose herself to the
extravagance of a serious love affair; nevertheless, it becomes Alfredo’s ardent
declaration of love that unconsciously lays bare her protected inner feelings. Violetta
is indeed human, and at this moment, her capacity to reason has become daunted.
In the first act, Alfredo’s outpouring of love, and in particular, the refrain from
his aria expressed in the words “Di quel amor” (“It is a love that throbs like the entire
universe”), bears an astonishing musical resemblance to Violetta’s love music first
heard in the prelude. Nevertheless, Alfredo’s variation is now full of verve and energy,
whereas Violetta’s version bears a suggestion of femininity and passiveness. Verdi
obviously intended their music to be complementary, a subtly romantic idea that
implies a sense of mutual dependency, and an even more subtle suggestion that these
two individuals are destined for each other.
Violetta, the woman dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, begins to function on
an unconscious level: she is apparently confused, but indeed receptive and deeply
moved by Alfredo’s great offer of love. She has been touched by the transforming
power of desire and fulfillment and is ready to give up everything: her friends, her
profession, her security, and all her defenses. Although she is haunted by doubts and
fears concerning her illness, she momentarily defies everything and submits herself
to fate and destiny: to emotion rather than reason..
Violetta closes the first act with her aria “Sempre libera” ( “Always free”), a
cabaletta, in this definition, a two-part aria with fast and slow tempos intended in its
style to be a dazzling display piece that shows off the singer’s virtuosity. “Sempre
libera” is the vocal centerpiece of the first act, if not the entire opera: the aria places
excruciating demands on the singer because its florid passages rest in the highest
area of the soprano’s range; several sustained high Cs, as well as several short D-
flats, are all embellished with a variety of trills and falling scales.
Violetta’s words are ironic and are not to be taken literally. In fact, everything
Violetta says during the finale of Act I means the opposite: Violetta is saying no
when she means yes. Violetta is not a “free” woman as she claims, but rather, a slave
to her profession and its rewards: a slave to those who maintain and possess her. In
truth, Violetta is a prisoner of her life-style, and unconsciously yearns to escape from
it.
So in the end, the “Sempre libera” aria contains an emotional subtext: Violetta is
a woman in fear, despair, and guilt, and her presumed rejection of Alfredo seems to
represent an excuse to pursue the frivolous life, but in truth, it represents no more
than a disguise for her self-hatred; it is psychological denial, because after all, Violetta,
like all humanity, craves and yearns for love. “Sempre libera” is Violetta’s attempt to
rationalize her freedom and independence, but under its surface, it expresses the
emotional hysteria of a woman in deep conflict: a woman in tension between desire
and fulfillment; a woman craving true love whose inner self is in conflict between
emotion and reason..
LA TRAVIATA Page 27

Alfredo’s voice is heard from offstage, or Violetta imagines she hears Alfredo’s
voice. Verdi is repeating his most recent tour-de-forces in which offstage voices serve
to heighten the music drama: in Il Trovatore’s “Miserere”, Leonora hears Manrico’s
lamenting voice from the Aliaferia prison; in Rigoletto, the Duke’s voice is heard
offstage singing “La donna è mobile,” ultimately awakening Rigoletto to horrible
realities.
In hearing Alfredo’s voice, Violetta’s resolution to remain free is challenged: an
opportunity for her to repeat her refrains and add a renewed and forceful outburst to
her determination to remain free; her words deny love, but in truth, her unconscious
yearns for the freedom to love; this is the irony of the “Sempre libera.”

T
he arrival to Act II is a sudden transition: almost without explanation. After
Violetta’s rejection of Alfredo in her Act I “Sempre libera,” the scene suddenly
moves to the happy idyllic life in the countryside outside Paris. The frivolous
courtesan of Act I no longer exists, but rather, a happy and contented woman. However,
from the beginning of Act II to the conclusion of the opera, Violetta becomes a
woman in continuous conflict, cruelly tested both morally and emotionally. Verdi,
the narrator of this story, tells us through his music that there is a sure sense that
something will go wrong, and certainly, everything does go wrong for Violetta.
Giorgio Germont, Alfredo’s father, a noble, respectable, high-minded, religious
and God-fearing gentleman from Provence, arrives to persuade Violetta to renounce
her love for Alfredo: Alfredo’s sister, “pure as an angel,” whose “fiance will refuse
to marry her” if the scandalous and profane liaison of his prospective brother-in-law
(Alfredo) continues.
Germont makes a terrifying presence, musically and textually, and Violetta’s
confrontation with him becomes a monumental battle of wills: duets that become
duels. Violetta struggles, becomes agitated, and communicates in breathless sentences.
At first, Violetta remains steadfast, unwilling to give up her new-found love: she
pleads frantically with Germont, attempting to persuade him that she is ill, that the
end of her life is near, that she has no family or friends, and that her love for Alfredo
has become the essence of her life as well as her salvation.
Germont pontificates, assuring her that she will have future happiness, a reward
inspired by God; she will find Heaven, her soul will be saved, she will be forgiven
for her sins, and she will be redeemed. Violetta reasons — the core of the opera story
— that she cannot become an obstacle and burden to Alfredo’s happiness: she must
accede to Germont, because if not, society will never forgive her.
Eventually, it is the elder Germont, the father who has come to challenge the
courtesan for his son’s sake, who develops a profound respect for the woman whose
heart he must break, rather than for his own son for whose sake he has intervened.
Germont’s poignant “Piangi, piangi,” urging Violetta to cry to relieve her emotions,
represents the human side of Germont: he weeps with and for Violetta, as if she were
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 28

his own daughter, ultimately developing respect and love for the woman whose heart
he has come to destroy.

E
very artist treads on autobiographical terrain, and Giuseppe Verdi certainly
cannot be excluded. Verdi’s operatic “father figures” dominate his operas.
There is a certain psychological truth when those fathers and their offspring
are seemingly alone in the world, as in Rigoletto, where a father obsessively
overprotects his child, when his child seems to be threatened by an alternate man,
and when the father-daughter relationship possesses an almost incestuous structure.
Verdi’s relationship with his father was full of constant conflict, tension, and
bitterness. He claimed that his father never seemed to have understood him, and
even accused his father of jealousy and envy as he transcended his parents’ social
and intellectual world. As a result, Verdi was virtually estranged from his father, but
within his inner self, he longed for fatherly affection and understanding. In a more
tragic sense, Verdi’s young daughter and son died in their childhood, preventing him
from lavishing parental affection on his own children, an ideal that lies deep within
the soul of Italian patriarchal traditions.
But Verdi would express the paternal affection he never had, and the paternal
affection he could never give to his own children, in his own unique musical language:
his operatic creations became the aftershock of those paternal relationships he lacked
and yearned for in his own life.
In many of his operas, Verdi presents us with a whole gallery of passionate,
eloquent, and often self-contradictory father figures, fathers who are passionately
devoted to, but often in conflict with their children. Those father figures — almost
always baritones or basses — present some of the greatest moments in all of Verdi’s
operas: fathers who gloriously pour out their feelings with floods of honest emotion
and intense passion.
In La Forza del Destino (“The Force of Destiny”- 1865), the tragedy of the opera
concerns a dying father laying a curse on his daughter Leonora, as the heroine struggles
in her conflict between her love for her father versus her lover, Don Alvaro. In Don
Carlos (1867), a terrifying old priest, the Grand Inquisitor, approves of King Philip
II’s intent to consign his son to death, the father agonizing and weeping in remorse
and desperation. And in Aida (1871), a father, Amonasro, uses paternal tenderness
and nostalgia — as well as threats — to bend his daughter Aida to his will and betray
her lover, Rhadames.
In Verdi, those fathers are powerful and ambivalent personalities. The tempestuous
passions of fathers churn the cores of his operas as suffering sons and daughters sing
“Padre, mio padre” in tenderness, or in terror, or in tears. Fathers and their conflict
with their progeny intrigued Verdi to such an extent that throughout his life he would
contemplate, but not bring to fruition, an opera based on one of the greatest and
conflicted father figures: Shakespeare’s King Lear.
LA TRAVIATA Page 29

A
s Violetta rises to the sacrifice, she asks Germont: “Embrace me like a
daughter.” But the essence of the drama, hers inner conflicts and fears of her
destiny, are revealed as an aside to herself during her confrontation with
Germont: “Così alla misera, ch’è un di caduta, di piu risorgere speranza è muta”
(“Such is the misery of a fallen woman who cannot be reborn, and for whom all hope
has ended!”) Violetta cannot shake her curse: in her own mind she is a guilty sinner.
Violetta knows she is La Traviata, “the fallen woman.”
Violetta faces confusion: how will she separate from Alfredo? She reasons that
her only alternative is to make Alfredo hate her, and she will achieve this by telling
Alfredo that she has decided to return to her former courtesan life of luxury and
pleasure.
It is a heartbreaking moment when Violetta writes her parting letter to Alfredo,
underscored with short, lamenting phrases from the clarinet that serves to narrate her
excruciating pain. When Alfredo suddenly returns, Violetta pours out her heart: “Love
me Alfredo, love me as I love you.” It is a painful and agonizing moment, made more
poignant by its underscore of the passionate love theme music from the prelude. Her
next meeting with Alfredo will be humiliating as Alfredo’s passionate love for Violetta
will turn so abruptly into denunciation and hate: at Flora’s party, in Act II - Scene 2,
Alfredo will vent the agony of his betrayal and vengeance, made all the more heart-
wrenching because Violetta is duty-bound to secrecy.
In the final act, Violetta senses death: she has consoled herself by giving what
little money she has left to the poor. She reads aloud Giorgio Germont’s letter, a
moment of spoken rather than sung words that is underscored by a solo violin playing
Alfredo’s love melody: “Di quel amore.”
In his letter, Germont is contrite and admits that he now realizes that he has been
the cause of so much of her anguish. He has seen his son disgrace her in public, and
he has heard her say in forgiveness: “Alfredo, Alfredo, you don’t know how much I
love you!” Begging forgiveness is the underlying theme of La Traviata, and contrition
applies to all of the characters in the story.
With Alfredo’s arrival, Violetta’s final wishes have been fulfilled, and together
they dream of their love’s renewal. The grandeur and nobility of La Traviata music
and story is revealed most emphatically in its final moments: Violetta is eloquent and
heroic when she gives Alfredo her picture and asks him to give it to his future wife:
her music is serene, understanding and compassionate, yet Verdi’s mighty punctuated
chords in his orchestral accompaniment represent pounding heartbeats that betray
Violetta’s agony: it is music that earned Verdi the epithet that he can bring tears from
a stone.

T
he role of Violetta is perhaps the most demanding in the operatic repertory,
but a fine singing actress with perfect vocal and dramatic perception and
perspective can make it a supreme career achievement. Essentially, with the
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 30

exception of the earlier moments of Act II - Scene 2, Violetta never leaves the stage.
Verdi made Violetta’s music diverse: her music itself represents a metaphor for
her changing character and temperament. In Act I, Violetta is a coloratura soprano
whose florid and ornamented music represent her abandonment to pleasure: in Act
II, she is a lyric soprano, a transformed woman who is no longer the radiant courtesan
of Parisian society, but rather, a gracious and modest woman struggling in her battle
with the inevitability of her fate; and in Act II - Scene 2 and Act III, she is a lirico
spinto, her voice containing vigorous lyricism reflecting her battle against tragic forces
of destiny.
The real crowning achievement for a Violetta-soprano is to bestow upon the role
its full meaning and power by conceiving the virtuoso music with brilliance and
security, and at the same time, portray the character with aristocratic sensibility.
The singing-actress must never exaggerate, but at the same time, she must
emphasize expressive details: her expressions of passion or agony must never lose
dignity or betray her profound sorrow; and in her centerpiece, “Sempre libera,” she
must display an elan in its attack, a sophisticated bravura that can make the pulse
quicken, but never lose the mood of desperate gaiety of those condemned courtesans.
Violetta’s second act must pace the tension to effectively provide dramatic truth
and feeling; it must convey her frightful agitation and premonition of doom, if not
evil; she must feel oppressed while her heart breaks; her eternal parting must contain
a pathos that wrings the heart. In the end, her portrayal must be an outcry from a
stricken spirit, and therefore the role must be portrayed with a sense of tragic dignity.

L
a Traviata is a poignant story in which profound dramatic truth lies in the
fullness and depth of the human suffering it portrays, and in the self-sacrificing
love of a truly noble personality. Verdi’s dignified expression of genuine
humanity, and his miraculous power to convey those sentiments in his music, confirms
his supreme understanding of the human heart.
Dumas wrote his story La Dame aux Camélias, begging the world to pity a spurned
lover. Verdi added nobility, heart, and soul to the infamous “Lady of the Camellias,”
and provided immortality to the “woman with a heart of gold.”
In La Traviata, Verdi expressed his exalted vision of humanity and the human
spirit: in his story, “the fallen woman” is redeemed through the nobility of her sacrifice.
His La Traviata story is not about the death of love, nor the death of lovers. His
story is a thundering yet intimate declaration about the redemptive value of humanity’s
greatest aspiration: love.
LA TRAVIATA Page 31

Principal Characters in LA TRAVIATA

Violetta Valery, a beautiful young Parisian courtesan Soprano

Alfredo Germont, a young nobleman from Provence Tenor
Giorgio Germont, Alfredo’s father Baritone
Flora Bervoix, a courtesan friend of Violetta Mezzo-soprano
Baron Douphol, Violetta’s friend and protector Bass
Dr. Grenvil, Violetta’s friend and her doctor Bass
Marquis d’Obigny, Flora’s friend Bass
Gastone, a friend of Alfredo Tenor
Annina, Violetta’s maid Mezzo-soprano
Giuseppe, Violetta’s servant Tenor

Ladies and gentlemen, friends, guests, and servants of Violetta

and Flora, entertainers dressed as matadors, picadors, and gypsies.

TIME and PLACE: 1850. Paris, and the countryside.

Brief Story Synopsis

Violetta Valery, a courtesan, has become afflicted with consumption (tuberculosis).

A young nobleman, Alfredo Germont, falls in love with her, and persuades her to
abandon her profession and live with him in the countryside outside Paris.
Alfredo’s father, Giorgio Germont, visits Violetta and demands that she must
abandon her affair with his son because their relationship has created a scandal that
has ruined his daughter’s prospects for marriage. Violetta accedes to his demands
and abandons Alfredo by telling him in a letter that she no longer loves him: she is
returning to her former life as a courtesan.
Shortly thereafter, at a party, the spurned Alfredo rages at Violetta and publicly
denounces her. Violetta is helpless and honor-bound by her promise to Alfredo’s
father, and cannot reveal that in truth, she sacrificed their love for his family’s honor.
Violetta’s illness becomes fatal. Alfredo returns to her after he learns that her
betrayal was in truth a noble sacrifice. The lovers renew their intimacy and dream of
a future together, but Violetta’s illness overcomes her, and she dies.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 32

Story Narrative with Music Highlights

Prelude:

La Traviata’s prelude presents two contrasting musical themes; both are musical
portraits of the heroine, Violetta Valery. The first theme is extremely poignant, intended
to convey the tragic heroine’s suffering and despair. The theme reappears at the
beginning of Act III, emphasizing the hopelessness of Violetta’s illness.

Violetta’s theme of despair:

The second theme is the Love theme, the consuming passion of Alfredo and
Violetta that reappears in Act II..

Love theme:

Act 1: Violetta’s Drawing Room in Paris

Violetta and her courtesan friends host a sumptuous party. Alfredo Germont, a
young nobleman from Provence who has been secretly admiring Violetta, is formally
introduced to the beautiful hostess by his friend, Gastone. The guests and Violetta
encourage Alfredo to improvise a toast celebrating the joys of wine, love, and carefree
pleasure, leading to the exuberant Drinking Song: “Libiamo.” During the interplay
of words between Violetta and Alfredo, he suggests that their destiny is to fall in love
with each other.

Drinking Song: “Libiamo, libiamo nei lieti calici”

LA TRAVIATA Page 33

The guests depart to an adjoining salon, but Violetta remains behind because she
suddenly feels ill and faint. She is besieged by a racking cough, unaware that these
symptoms are omens of fatal tuberculosis (consumption).
Of all of her guests, only Alfredo has remained behind. Alfredo suspects the
depth of her illness and boldly blames it on the immoral and fatiguing life she leads.
He then daringly proposes that if they were to fall in love, he would take care of her
and nurture her back to health.

Impetuously, he pours out his love for Violetta, revealing that for over a year he
has been tormented by his secret passion for her. Alfredo’s aria, “Un di felice eterea”
(“One happy, heavenly day, your image appeared before me”). Alfredo’s passionate
expression of love for Violetta climaxes with the words “Di quell’amor, quell’amor
ch’è palpito” (“It is a love that throbs like the entire universe.”)

“Di quell’amor, quell’amor ch’è palpito”

Violetta is surprised yet flattered by Alfredo’s impassioned expressions of love

for her. Even though deep sensibilities have been aroused in her, she frivolously
pretends indifference and dismisses his passions: “I can only offer you friendship.”
Violetta gives Alfredo a camellia and invites him to visit her again when the
flower has faded. When he impetuously asks when that will be, she answers,
“tomorrow.” Alfredo ecstatically kisses her hand and leaves.

The guests make their farewells, and Violetta, now alone, admits to herself that
she is truly moved by Alfredo’s sincere affection and tender words of love. She admits
to herself that she is experiencing sudden mysterious sensations, feelings that no
man has ever awakened in her.
Violetta soliloquizes, “to love, or not to love.” She confronts her inner
contradictions and anxieties, and concludes that Alfredo’s words of love are indeed
foolish illusions: she is a sick woman, and her life has become an indulgence in the
fleeting joys and worldly pleasures of courtesan life. Her life-style precludes real
love: a love affair would only be nonsense and a folly; Violetta must always be free.
As Violetta addresses the conflict of her strange feelings, she comments, “È strano”
(“I feel so strange”), and then she speculates, “Ah fors’ è lui che l’anima” (“Perhaps
he will rid me of my unhappiness, and bring joy to my tormented soul!”)
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 34

“Ah fors’è lui che l’anima”

Violetta shakes off her fantasizing and reverses gear, rejecting the idea of love as
“Follie” (“What nonsense! This folly is a mad illusion.”). She proceeds to praise
liberty, freedom, and pleasure in the dazzling coloratura aria “Sempre libera” (“I
must always be free.”)
But Violetta’s protective armor has been pierced. Emotion has overpowered reason,
and Violetta’s praise of liberty becomes haunted by her imagination as she hears the
echo of Alfredo’s ecstatic love song, “Di quell’amor, quell’amore ch’è palpito.”
Nevertheless, Violetta reaffirms her rejection of love by vowing resolutely that she
will always be free.

“Sempre libera”

Act II - Scene 1: Violetta’s country villa outside of Paris

Five months have passed, and Alfredo and Violetta are now living an idyllic life
together in her country villa far from the social whirl of Paris. Violetta, fully conquered
by love, obeyed the call from her heart and abandoned her courtesan life.

Alfredo rejoices in the fulfillment and peace of their life together.

“De’miei bollenti spiriti”

LA TRAVIATA Page 35

Violetta has been paying for their country life of romantic bliss, but she is running
out of money. Annina, Violetta’s maid, tells Alfredo that to offset their mounting
expenses, she had gone to Paris to arrange for the sale of some of Violetta’s
possessions. Alfredo is shocked and chagrined, his pride and honor tarnished. He
decides to leave for Paris himself in order to personally raise money.
Violetta’s new life has transformed her: she is no longer the radiant courtesan of
Parisian society, but now a gracious and modest woman. The core and pivotal moment
in the drama occurs with the arrival of Alfredo’s father, Giorgio Germont.
Germont’s musical entrance expresses a sense of coldness and hostility: Germont
symbolizes morality, worldly and family values.

Germont’s entrance:

Germont ceremoniously introduces himself and attacks at once: “You are looking
at Alfredo’s father,” and he continues, “Yes, I am the father of that reckless young
man who is rushing to ruin by his infatuation for you.”
Germont has arrived to implore — and demand — that Violetta give up her
scandalous liaison with his son, a relationship he conceives not only to be Alfredo’s
boyish entanglement, but one that is ruining their family’s reputation. They confront
each other in a series of duets, more aptly, a series of duels that are filled with Violetta’s
passionate lyric outbursts expressing shock, anguish, tears, and despair, but eventually,
defeat and concession to his demands.
Germont tells Violetta, “But he wants to give you his fortune.” Violetta maintains
her dignity against his accusations and proudly advises Germont that she herself has
sold most of her own possessions in order to maintain their life-style; in effect, she
proves that she is not a kept woman, nor that she is dependent on his son’s financial
support. Germont controverts her defense and his momentary defeat by accusing
Violetta of living on immoral earnings.
Germont pleads with Violetta to abandon Alfredo, explaining that the sacrifice
he asks is not for Alfredo’s sake alone, but for both his children; in particular, his
“pure and angelic daughter.” He explains that his daughter cannot marry until Alfredo
— and his family — is freed from the disgrace of his scandalous liaison with Violetta.

“Pura siccome un angelo”

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Violetta persuades Germont that she truly loves Alfredo; nevertheless, Germont
is intransigent and will not ease up on his demand that they separate. Their conversation
takes on a new dimension as Germont changes from the voice of morality to that of
patronizing respect, sympathy, and understanding: his move from harshness to
sympathy and understanding will become his ultimate weapon that he will use to
persuade Violetta in order to gain his victory.
Violetta herself is shaken by his demands, and moves through an entire spectrum
of profound and distraught feelings and emotions; nevertheless, she will slowly be
forced from strength to defeat. Violetta imagines that to fulfill Germont’s request,
she must only part from Alfredo for a short time: until after his sister’s marriage. But
Germont insists that she must abandon Alfredo totally — and forever.
Violetta protests that she would rather die than leave Alfredo, explaining that she
senses that she is mortally ill, that she has no friends or family, and that their love has
become her only comfort and solace. Germont does not believe that Violetta is really
ill. (In Dumas’s original he says, “Let us be calm and not exaggerate. You mistake
your illness for what is nothing more than the fatigue caused by your restless
(courtesan) life.”)
Germont is relentless. He tries to persuade Violetta to think of the future when
she will no longer be young, and Alfredo, with male fickleness, will have allowed his
affections to stray. He condemns their love as an unholy affair that has not been
blessed by the church, and therefore, there is nothing sacred to hold them together
for a lifetime.
Violetta senses defeat, and reflects on the hopelessness of her position. She
senses that she has no alternative and reluctantly decides to yield to Germont: Violetta
agrees to abandon Alfredo; her ultimate reasoning is that if she harmed Alfredo’s
future, her soul would be damned and condemned.
Violetta asks Germont to tell Alfredo’s sister that, for her sake, an unfortunate
woman is sacrificing her only dream of happiness, the joy she has finally found
through her love for Alfredo.

“Dite alla giovane, si bella e pura”

Germont praises Violetta’s generosity, and tells her to be courageous; her noble
sacrifice will bring its own just and heavenly reward. Violetta makes a last request,
that only after she is dead shall Germont tell Alfredo that she loved him so profoundly
LA TRAVIATA Page 37

that she would sacrifice her own happiness for his sake. Germont departs, assuring
Violetta again that “Heaven will reward her” for her noble deed.
Violetta, now alone, writes a farewell letter to Alfredo. In order to make her
parting believable to Alfredo, she concludes that she must make him hate her: she
explains to Alfredo in her letter that the call of her former life is too strong to resist,
and therefore, she has decided to leave him and return to Paris.
While Violetta is writing, Alfredo suddenly appears: both are overcome with a
strange sense of tension and uneasiness. Agonizingly, Violetta embraces Alfredo,
and then bursts into a passionate declaration of her love for him; the underlying
music is the theme heard earlier in the Prelude identifying their love for each other.
Violetta then abruptly tears herself from Alfredo, and rushes out, her “addio” intended
to be a final farewell.

“Amami Alfredo”

Giuseppe, a servant, advises the bewildered and perplexed Alfredo that Violetta
has left for Paris. Alfredo assumes that she has gone to sell more of her possessions.
But a messenger suddenly arrives to deliver Violetta’s farewell letter. Alfredo reads
the letter, and becomes devastated: Violetta has betrayed him.
Anticipating Violetta’s actions and his son’s remorse, Giorgio Germont had been
waiting patiently in the outside garden, fulfilling his promise to Violetta to provide
consolation to his son. Alfredo is distraught by Violetta’s abandonment of him, but
his father, aware of her motives, is duty bound to conceal the truth from his son.
Germont tries to persuade Alfredo that his loss of Violetta will ultimately be for his
own good, and then, evoking Provence, appeals to him to return to the serenity of
home and family.

“Di Provenza il mar il sol che dal cor il cancelò?”

OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 38

Nevertheless, Germont’s reasoning and consolation to his son are in vain. Alfredo
has seen Flora’s invitation, feels betrayed, and rages in anger and jealousy; he rushes
off for revenge on the woman who has abandoned him. He will go to Flora’s party
and confront Violetta.

Act II - Scene 2: Flora’s Villa

At a masked ball at Violetta’s friend Flora’s villa, fortune-telling gypsies read

palms, and dancers, dressed as matadors and picadors, entertain the guests.
A bitter Alfredo joins the party and sits down to play at the gaming tables. Violetta
enters on the arm of Baron Douphol, her friend and “protector.” Douphol joins the
card game and Alfredo wins every hand, claiming sarcastically that he is “lucky at
cards but unlucky in love.”
Alfredo’s sarcastic comments to his rival Baron Douphol, and his continuing
luck in winning, provoke Douphol’s resentment. Insults follow, but their quarrel is
temporarily avoided as the company departs to an adjoining room for dinner.

Violetta leaves the dinner in agitation and alarm and sends for Alfredo to warn
him that Baron Douphol is resolved to challenge him to a duel. Violetta fears for
Alfredo’s life, and urges him to leave, but Alfredo, in his jealous rage, accuses Violetta
of being more afraid that she might lose Douphol, her “protector.”.
Alfredo affirms that he will only leave if Violetta joins him, but Violetta cannot
leave with Alfredo: in effect, reuniting with Alfredo would violate her sacred promise
to Giorgio Germont. With supreme effort to dissuade Alfredo, Violetta lies, telling
Alfredo that she cannot leave with him because she indeed now loves Baron Douphol.
Alfredo erupts in jealousy and rage. He summons all the guests, and before the
entire assemblage, denounces and insults Violetta, admitting his own shame at having
allowed a woman to squander her fortune on him.
Alfredo hurls a purse containing his winnings at Violetta: he wants all to witness
that he has repaid her in full for her favors. The entire gathering becomes shocked
and outraged, and responds to his outburst with indignation.
Suddenly, Giorgio Germont appears. He has overheard Alfredo’s contemptible
insults at Violetta, and humiliated by his son’s wayward behavior, severely reproaches
him.
Alfredo awakens to his foolishness, and becomes overcome with remorse and
shame. Violetta, restrained by her promise to Alfredo’s father, regrets that she cannot
reveal the truth to Alfredo and express her true and heartfelt love for him. In a majestic
and powerful ensemble with heartrending music of sublime, heroic proportions,
Violetta prays that one day Alfredo will know the truth of her sacrifice. As the scene
concludes, Violetta faints, and Baron Douphol, breathing fury and revenge, challenges
Alfredo to a duel.
LA TRAVIATA Page 39

“Alfredo, Alfredo”

Act III: One month later. Violetta’s bedroom

The entire mood of the final act of La Traviata conveys a deep sense of desolation,
despair, and pity. Violetta’s illness, her suffering and pain, have now become more
intense and recovery is beyond hope: the beautiful courtesan has now become a mere
shadow of her former self and senses that she is close to death. Dr. Grenvil tries to
instill hope and courage in his friend and patient, but in an aside to the maid Annina,
he confesses that all hope is futile and the end is near.
Violetta reads a letter from Giorgio Germont which thanks her for having kept
her promise. She also learns that the duel had taken place, that Alfredo was unharmed,
and that Baron Douphol was only slightly wounded. Germont confesses that he has
told Alfredo the truth about Violetta’s profound and selfless sacrifice, and that Alfredo
is en route to see her to beg her forgiveness for his rashness.
With touching nostalgia, Violetta yearns for a reunion with Alfredo, and reminisces
about the happy months they spent together. Violetta prays to God to pardon and
have pity on the traviata, the “fallen woman.” (The only time traviata is mentioned
in the opera.)

“Addio del passato”

Alfredo arrives and the reunited lovers exchange ecstatic and rapturous sentiments
of love and forgiveness. They reminisce about their past happiness, and in the duet
“Parigi o caro” (“Dear Paris”), they dream of leaving Paris for a new and radiant
future together.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 40

Violetta’s strength begins to fail rapidly, and she appeals to God not to let her die
so young: now that Alfredo has returned, she has been rejuvenated and wants to live.
Giorgio Germont arrives and struck with remorse and guilt, penitently admits
that he had been the cause of so much of Violetta’s sorrow, and fulfilling his promise,
embraces her as if she were his own daughter..
Violetta, in a noble gesture, gives Alfredo a medallion containing a portrait of
herself. She tells him that if he marries in the future, he is to give it to his wife as
assurance that Violetta is in Heaven and praying for them.

“Prendi quest’è l’imagine”

Violetta feels a strange and mysterious sense of new strength, a momentary

resurgence of life. In one last gesture, she tries to hold on to Alfredo and to life, but
suddenly, the last breath leaves Violetta.
“La Traviata,” the “fallen women” has died.
LA TRAVIATA Page 41

LA TRAVIATA
Libretto
ACT I Page 43

ACT II - Scene 1: Page 55

ACT II - Scene 2: Page 69

ACT III Page 79

OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 42
LA TRAVIATA Page 43

ACT I

Prelude

Violetta’s theme of despair:

Love theme:

The banquet hall of Violetta Valery’s elegant home in Paris. Violetta is in

conversation with Doctor Grenvil and several friends. Other guests arrive,
among them Baron Douphol, and Violetta’s friend, Flora, who arrives on the
arm of the Marquis d’Obigny.

CORO I: CHORUS I:
Dell’invito trascorsa è già l’ora. You’ve arrived much later than
Voi tardaste. expected.

CORO II: CHORUS 2:

Giocammo da Flora. E giocando We were at Flora’s playing cards, and
quell’ore volar. the time seemed to fly by.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Flora, amici, la notte che resta Flora, my friends, let’s enjoy the rest
d’altre gioie qui fate brillar. of the evening. Have a drink and the
Fra le tazze è più viva la festa. party will be livelier.

FLORA E MARCHESE: FLORA and MARQUIS:

E goder voi potrete? Will you join the fun?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Lo voglio; al piacere m’affido, ed io Of course I will, a good time always
soglio col tal farmaco i mali sopir. cures my pains.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 44

TUTTI: ALL:
Sì, la vita s’addoppia al gioir. Yes, joy makes us live longer!

The Viscount arrives, then Gastone with his friend, Alfredo Germont.

GASTONE: GASTONE: (introducing Alfredo)

In Alfredo Germont, o signora, ecco My dear lady, you will find yet another
un altro che molto vi onora; pochi admirer in Alfredo Germont. I assure
amici a lui simili sono. you that there are few friends like him.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Mio Visconte, mercè di tal dono. Viscount, thank you for the privilege.

Violetta extends her hand to Alfredo, who kissing it politely.

MARCHESE: MARQUIS:
Caro Alfredo My dear Alfredo!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Marchese! Why, it's the Marquis!
(They shake hands)

GASTONE: GASTONE: (aside to Alfredo)

T’ho detto: l’amistà qui s’intreccia al Didn’t I tell you that pleasure and
diletto. friendship go together here.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (to the servants)

Pronto è il tutto? Is everything ready?
(a servant nods)
Miei cari sedete: È al convito che My friends, be seated and enjoy the
s’apre ogni cor. banquet wholeheartedly.

TUTTI: ALL:
Ben diceste le cure segrete. Fuga It is true that all troubles vanish with
sempre l’amico licor. wine.

The guests assume their places at the dinner table. Violetta sits between Alfredo
and Gastone. During a momentary lull in the conversation, while the guests are
being served, Violetta and Gastone converse in a whisper.
LA TRAVIATA Page 45

GASTONE: GASTONE: (to Violetta)

Sempre Alfredo a voi pensa. Alfredo is always thinking about you.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Scherzate? Are you joking?

GASTONE: GASTONE:
Egra foste, e ogni dì con affanno qui During your illness he came here every
volo di voi chiese. day to ask how you were.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Cessate. Nulla son io per lui! Come now! I don’t mean anything to him!

GASTONE: GASTONE:
Non v’inganno. I'm serious.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (to Alfredo)

Vero è dunque? Onde è ciò? Is it really true? Is it so?
Nol comprendo. I don’t understand.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (sighing)

Si, egli è ver. Yes, it’s true.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Le mie grazie vi rendo. Then I am indeed grateful.
(turning to the Baron)
Voi Barone, feste altrettanto You, Baron, were not so attentive.

BARONE: BARON:
Vi conosco da un anno soltanto. But I only know you for a year.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ed ei solo da qualche minuto. And he only knows me for barely a minute.

FLORA: FLORA: (aside to the Baron.)

Meglio fora se aveste taciuto. It would have been better if you had
kept quiet.

BARONE: BARON: (to Flora, indicating Alfredo)

Mi è increscioso quel giovin. That young man really annoys me.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 46

FLORA: FLORA:
Perchè? A me invece simpatico egli è. Why? I find him quite charming.

GASTONE: GASTONE: (to Alfredo)

E tu dunque non apri più bocca? You have nothing else to say?

MARCHESE: MARQUIS: (to Violetta)

È a madama che scuoterlo tocca. You will have to inspire him.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Sarò l’Ebe che versa. I'll be Hebe and pour the wine for you.
(Violetta pours wine for Alfredo.)

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (gallantly)

E ch’io bramo immortal come quella. And like her I’ll immortalize you.

TUTTI: ALL:
Beviamo! Let’s drink!

GASTONE: GASTONE:
O barone, nè un verso, nè un viva Baron, do you have a verse or a toast
troverete in quest’ora giuliva? to enliven this festive hour?
(The Baron nods negatively. Gastone
turns to Alfredo)
Dunque a te. Then it’s up to you.

TUTTI: ALL:
Sì, sì, un brindisi. Yes, let’s have a toast!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
L’estro non m’arride. I’m not inspired yet.

GASTONE: GASTONE:
E non sei tu maestro? Aren’t you a master at it?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (to Violetta)

Vi fia grato? Would you like me to?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Sì. Yes.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Sì? L’ho già in cor. Yes? Then I'll be delighted.
LA TRAVIATA Page 47

MARCHESE: MARQUIS:
Dunque attenti! Attention everybody!

TUTTI: ALL:
Sì, attenti al cantor! Yes, listen to the toast!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Libiamo nei lieti calici che la bellezza Let’s drink from theses cups adorned
infiora, e la fuggevol ora s’inebri a with flowers, to the fleeting hours of
voluttà. pleasure.

Libiamo nei dolci fremiti che suscita Let’s drink to love’s gentle throbbing,
l’amore, poiché quell’occhio al core that pierces the heart with all its power.
ogni potente va.

Libiamo, amor fra i calici più caldi Let’s drink to love’s warm kisses
baci avrà. flowing from these cups.

TUTTI: ALL:
Libiamo, amor fra i calici più caldi Let’s drink to love’s warm kisses
baci avrà. flowing from these cups.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Tra voi saprò dividere il tempo mio I spend my time happily amongst you.
giocondo; tutto è follia nel mondo ciò Everything in the world is folly if one
che non è piacer. cannot enjoy pleasure.

Godiam, fugace e rapido è il gaudio Let’s enjoy pleasure, for the joys of
dell’amore; è un fior che nasce e love fade quickly, like a flower that is
muore, nè più si può goder. born and dies.
Godiam c’invita un fervido accento Let’s enjoy pleasure, while its passion
lusinghier. and temptation invite us.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 48

TUTTI: ALL:
Godiam la tazza e il cantico la notte Let’s enjoy drinking and singing which
abbella e il riso; in questo paradiso ne enhance the night with laughter. May
scopra il nuovo dì. dawn never arrive in this paradise.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (to Alfredo)

La vita è nel tripudio. Life is full of pleasure.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (to Violetta.)

Quando non s’ami ancora. Until one discovers love.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (to Alfredo)

Nol dite a chi l’ignora. That’s something I haven’t discovered yet.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (to Violetta.)

È il mio destin così. Well then that’s my destiny.

TUTTI: ALL:
Godiam la tazza e il cantico la notte Let’s enjoy drinking and singing which
abbella e il riso; in questo paradiso ne enhance the night with laughter. May
scopra il nuovo dì. dawn never arrive in this paradise.

(Music is heard from the drawing room)

Che è ciò? What is that?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Non gradireste ora le danze? Wouldn’t you like to dance now?

TUTTI: ALL:
Oh, il gentil pensier! Tutti accettiamo! How gracious of you! We’d love to!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Usciamo dunque! Let’s go then!

Violetta suddenly has a coughing spell, falters and turns pale.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
È colta da subito pallore. Ohimè! All of a sudden I don’t feel well!

TUTTI: ALL:
Che avete? What’s the matter?
LA TRAVIATA Page 49

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Nulla, nulla! It's nothing, nothing!

TUTTI: ALL:
Che mai v’arresta? Then why do you stay behind?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Usciamo! Let’s go on!

(Violetta sinks into a chair)

O Dio! Oh, God!

TUTTI: ALL:
Ancora! Again!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Voi soffrite? Are you in pain?

TUTTI: ALL:
O ciel! Ch’è questo? Oh heavens! What can it be?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Un tremito che provo or là passate. I felt a sudden chill but it passed.
(Motioning all toward the drawing room.)
Tra poco anch’io sarò. I'll join you in a minute.

TUTTI: ALL:
Come bramate. As you wish.

(All enter the drawing room except Alfredo)

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (looking into a mirror)

O qual pallor! Goodness, how pale I am!
(She turns and sees Alfredo)
Voi qui! You’re still here?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Cessata è l’ansia che vi turbò? Are you feeling better?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Sto meglio. Yes, I'm better.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 50

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Ah, in cotal guisa v’ucciderete aver This life-style will kill you. You must
v’è d’uopo cura dell’esser vostro. take better care of yourself.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
E lo potrei? You think I could?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Se mia foste, custode io veglierei pe’ If you were mine, I would take care of
vostri soavi dì. you day and night.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Che dite? What are you saying?
Ha forse alcuno cura di me? Does someone really care for me?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (impetuously)

Perchè nessuno al mondo v’ama. No one in the world loves you.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Nessun? No one?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Tranne sol io! No one except me!

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA: (laughing)

Gli è vero! Sì grande amor dimenticato Really! I had forgotten about your
avea. great love for me!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Ridete? E in voi v’ha un core? Are you mocking me? Have you no heart?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Un cor? Sì forse e a che lo richiedete? A heart? Perhaps, but why do you ask?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
O, se ciò fosse, non potreste allora Oh, because if you had a heart, you
celiar. would not joke about this.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Dite davvero? Are you serious?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Io non v’inganno. I wouldn’t deceive you.
LA TRAVIATA Page 51

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Da molto è che mi amate? Have you loved me for a long time?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Ah sì, da un anno. Yes, for a year.
Un dì, felice, eterea, mi balenaste One happy, heavenly day, your image
innante, appeared before me,
e da quel dì tremante vissi d’ignoto and since that trembling moment, I
amor. have secretly loved you.

Di quell’amor ch’è palpito dell’univer- It is a love that throbs like the entire
so intero, misterioso, altero, croce e universe, bringing mysterious pain and
delizia al cor. ecstasy to my heart.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ah, se ciò è ver, fuggitemi solo If that’s true, then leave me, for I can only
amistade io v’offro: amar non so, nè offer you friendship! I don’t know love,
soffro un così eroico amor. nor want to suffer in heroic amours.
Io sono franca, ingenua; altra cercar I must tell you frankly and genuinely,
dovete; non arduo troverete dimenti- that you won’t receive arduous love
carmi allor. from me. So find another and forget me.

GASTONE: GASTONE: (joining them)

Ebben! Che diavol fate? Well! What are you up to?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Si foleggiava. Just talking nonsense.

GASTONE: GASTONE:
Ah! Ah! Sta ben, restate. So! Very well then, go on.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (to Alfredo)

Amor dunque non più.Vi garba il patto? No more talk of love then. Agreed?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Io v’obbedisco. Parto. I’ll do whatever you say. I’m leaving.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 52

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
A tal giungeste? You’re leaving already?
(giving him a flower from her corsage)
Prendete questo fiore. Here, take this flower.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Perchè? Why?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Per riportarlo. To bring it back to me.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Quando? When?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Quando sarà appassito. When it has faded.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
O ciel! Domani. Tomorrow then?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ebben, domani. Very well, tomorrow.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:(excitedly)
Io son felice! I’m so happy!

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA:
D’amarmi dite ancora? And do you still say you love me?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Oh, quanto v’amo! Oh, I adore you immensely!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Partite? You're leaving?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Parto. Yes I am.

(Alfredo kisses her hand)

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA:
Addio. Goodbye.
LA TRAVIATA Page 53

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Di più non bramo? Could I want anything more?
(Alfredo departs)

The party guests return from the ballroom.

TUTTI: ALL:
Si ridesta in ciel l’aurora, e n’è forza Dawn is breaking, telling us that we
di partir. must leave now.
Mercè a voi, gentil signora, di sì Thank you, genteel lady, for the
splendido gioir. wonderful enjoyment this evening.
La città di feste è piena, volge il tempo In the city, the sounds of laughter fill
dei piacer. the silence of the night.
Nel riposo ancor la lena si ritempri per But we must rest so that we can again
goder, enjoy life’s pleasures.
(All the guests depart)

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA: (alone)

È strano! È strano! In core scolpiti ho I feel so strange! I feel so strange! His
quegli accenti! Sarìa per me sventura words are carved in my heart. Would a
un serio amore? Che risolvi, o turbata serious love be fatal to me? What is
anima mia? the solution for my troubled soul?

Null’uomo ancora t’accendeva. No man has yet stirred love in me. Oh,
O gioia ch’io non conobbi, essere I've never known such joy, to be loved
amata amando! E sdegnarla poss’io and loving! Should I reject it now for all
per l’aride follie del viver mio? the empty follies in my life?

Ah, fors’è lui che l’anima solinga nè Perhaps he will rid me of my unhappi-
tumulti godea sovente pingere de’ suoi ness, and bring joy to my tormented
colori occulti! soul!

Lui che modesto e vigile all’egre He is modest, forthright and honor-

soglie ascese, e nuova febbre accese, able, and has stirred my emotions by
destandomi all’amor. awakening love.
A quell’amor ch’è palpito dell’univer- It is a love that throbs like the entire
so intero, misterioso, altero, croce e universe, bringing mysterious pain and
delizia al cor. ecstasy to my heart.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 54

A me fanciulla, un candido e trepido When I was a child, I had gentle

desire questi effigiò dolcissimo Signor visions of the man in my future, whose
dell’avvenire. Quando nè cieli il raggio beauty and wonder was divine. I felt
di sua beltè vedea. E tutta me pascea di love throbbing like the entire universe,
quel divino error. Sentì a che amore è bringing mysterious pain and ecstasy to
palpito dell’universo intero, misterioso, my heart!
altero, croce e delizia al cor!
(After pausing in rapt concentration,
she cries out)

Follie! Follie delirio vano è questo! What nonsense! This folly is a mad
Povera donna, sola abbandonata in illusion! I’m an unfortunate, lonely
questo popoloso deserto che appellano woman, abandoned in this populous
Parigi. Che spero or più? desert called Paris. What more can I
Che far degg’io? hope for? What must I do?
Gioire, di voluttà nei vortici perire. Just seek pleasure and perish in this turmoil.

Sempre libera degg’io folleggiar di I must always be free to enjoy the

gioia in gioia. Vo’ che scorra il viver pleasures of life. I want to glide
mio pei sentieri del piacer. Nasca il through my life on the path of pleasure.
giorno, o il giorno muoia, sempre lieta Whether day or night I aspire to
ne’ ritrovi a diletti sempre nuovi dee happiness and toward new joys, always
volare il mio pensier. flying on the wings of my desire.
LA TRAVIATA Page 55

ACT II - Scene 1

Some months later.

A country villa on the outskirts of Paris.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Lunge da lei per me non v’ha diletto! I am unhappy away from her! Three
Volaron già tre lune dacché la mia months have now passed since my
Violetta agi per me lasciò, dovizie, beloved Violetta gave up that luxury and
onori, e le pompose feste ove, agli glitter that she was accustomed to, as
omaggi avvezza, vedea schiavo well as the gay festivities where men
ciascun di sua bellezza. were captives of her beauty.
Ed or contenta in questi ameni luoghi Yet, she is content in this idyllic place
tutto scorda per me. Qui presso a lei io living only for me. Here, by her side, I
rinascer mi sento, e dal soffio d’amor feel myself reborn, rejuvenated by love,
rigenerato scordo nè gaudii suoi tutto il and forgetting the indulgences of the
passato. past.

Dè miei bollenti spiriti. Il giovanile She has tempered my ardent passions

ardore. Ella temprò col placido sorriso with her smile, devotion, and love!
dell’amore! Dal dì che disse: vivere io Since she first said: “I want to live for
voglio a te fedel. Dell’universo immemo- your love,” I live as if I am in heaven.
re io vivo quasi in ciel.
(The maid Annina enters)
ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Annina, donde vieni? Annina! Where have you been?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Da Parigi. To Paris.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Chi tel commise? Who sent you there?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Fu la mia signora. My mistress.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 56

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Perchè? But why?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Per alienar cavalli, cocchi, e quanto To sell her horses, carriages, and other
ancor possiede. possessions.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Che mai sento! What are you saying?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Lo spendio è grande a viver qui It's expensive to live here by your-
solinghi. selves.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
E tacevi? Why didn’t you tell me?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Mi fu il silenzio imposto. I was warned not to say anything.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Imposto! Or v’abbisogna? Warned! How much money is needed?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Mille luigi. A thousand louis.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Or vanne andrò a Parigi. Questo Go now! I will go to Paris, but not a
colloquio ignori la signora. Il tutto word of this to your mistress. I still may
valgo a riparare ancora. be able to straighten everything out.

(Annina departs leaving Alfredo alone)

O mio rimorso! O infamia e vissi in tale Oh what remorse! Oh what shame

errore? Ma il turpe sogno a frangere il from my mistakes? Truth has crushed
ver mi balenò. Per poco in seno the dream. I must quickly restore my
acquetati, o grido dell’onore; m’avrai honor, and wash away this shame!
securo vindice; quest’onta laverò.

After Alfredo exits, Violetta appears.

She is followed by Annina and then Giuseppe.
LA TRAVIATA Page 57

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Alfredo! Alfredo!

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Per Parigi or partiva. He has just left for Paris.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
E tornerà? And when is he coming back?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Pria che tramonti il giorno dirvel m’impose. He said to tell you before sunset.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
È strano! That's strange!

GIUSEPPE: GIUSEPPE: (handing Violetta a letter)

Per voi. This is for you.

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA:
Sta bene. In breve giungerà un uom Thanks. Soon a man will arrive to discuss
d’affari. Entri all’istante. a business matter. Show him in at once.
(Annina and Giuseppe exit)

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (reading the letter)

Ah, ah, scopriva Flora il mio ritiro! E Ah, ah! So Flora has found me, and
m’invita a danzar per questa sera! invites me to a ball tonight! I won’t
Invan m’aspetterà. go; I’m no longer part of that life.
(Violetta places Flora’s invitation on a table)

GIUSEPPE: GIUSEPPE:
È qui un signore. A gentleman is here to see you.

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA:
Ah! sarà lui che attendo. Ah, he must be the man I'm expecting.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Madamigella Valery? Mademoiselle Valery?
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 58

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA:
Son io. That is me.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
D’Alfredo il padre in me vedete! You are looking at Alfredo's father.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (surprised)

Voi! You!

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Sì, dell’incauto, che a ruina corre, Yes, I am the father of that reckless
ammaliato da voi. young man who is rushing to ruin by his
infatuation for you.

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA: (affronted and resentful)

Donna son io, signore, ed in mia casa; ch’io Sir, I am a lady, and I think it would be
vi lasci [Link]ù per voi che per me. advisable for you to leave my house.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
(Quai modi!) Pure... (What gentility!) But...

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Tratto in error voi foste. You are making a false presumption.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Dè suoi beni dono vuol farvi. But he wants to give you his fortune.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Non l’osò finora rifiuterei. He has not dared. I would refuse it!

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Pur tanto lusso? Yet all this luxury?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
A tutti è mistero quest’atto a voi nol Everyone wonders and is puzzled by
sia. it.

(Violetta hands him some papers)

GERMONT: GERMONT: (after examining them)
Ciel! Che discopro! D’ogni vostro Heavens! What a revelation! You
avere or volete spogliarvi? Ah, il intend to sell all your possessions? Ah,
passato perchè, perchè v’accusa? but why? Does your past haunt you?
LA TRAVIATA Page 59

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Più non esiste or amo Alfredo, e Dio Since I love Alfredo, the past no
lo cancellò col pentimento mio. longer exists. God has forgiven me.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Nobili sensi invero! Noble sentiments indeed!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
O, come dolce mi suona il vostro Oh, how soothing your words sound to
accento! me!

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Ed a tai sensi un sacrificio chieggo But from those sentiments I ask a sacrifice.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ah no, tacete. Terribil cosa chiedereste Ah no, don't say it! You’ll surely ask
certo il previdi v’attesi era felice something dreadful of me. I knew it, I
troppo. was too happy.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
D’Alfredo il padre la sorte, l’avvenir Fate demands that Alfredo's father
domanda or qui de’ suoi due figli. pleads for the future of his two children.

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA:
Di due figli? Two children?

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Sì. Pura siccome un angelo Iddio mi God gave me a daughter, who is pure
diè una figlia; se Alfredo nega riedere as an angel. If Alfredo does not give
in seno alla famiglia, l’amato e amante up this sinful life and return to his
giovane, cui sposa andar dovea, or si family, my daughter’s fiance will
ricusa al vincolo che lieti ne rendea. refuse to marry her.
Deh, non mutate in triboli le rose Don’t upset the future of their love.
dell’amor ai preghi miei resistere non Don’t resist me, follow your heart, and
voglia il vostro cor. heed a father’s prayers.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 60

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA:
Ah, comprendo, dovrò per alcun Ah, I understand. I must leave Alfredo
tempo da Alfredo allontanarmi for a short time, as painful as that will
doloroso fora per me pur. be for me.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Non è ciò che chiedo. That’s not all that I ask.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Cielo, che più cercate? Heaven, what more then?
Offersi assai! I have already offered so much!

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Pur non basta. It is not enough.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Volete che per sempre a lui rinunzi? You want me to give him up forever?

GERMONT: GERMONT:
È d’uopo! That’s how it has to be!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ah, no giammai! Non sapete quale Ah, no, never! Do you know the
affetto vivo, immenso m’arda in petto? immense love that consumes me?
Che nè amici, nè parenti Io non conto That I have no friends, no relatives, and
tra i viventi? E che Alfredo m’ha no one left in the world? And that Alfredo
giurato che in lui tutto io troverò? swore that he would be everything to me?

Non sapete che colpita d’altro morbo è Do you know how terribly sick I am?
la mia vita? Che già presso il fin ne That the end is near? And you want to
vedo? Ch’io mi separi da Alfredo? separate me from Alfredo?
Ah, il supplizio è si spietato, che morir Ah, death would be less cruel than to
preferirò. give up Alfredo.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
È grave il sacrifizio. Ma pur tranquilla It is a great sacrifice, but listen calmly.
udite. Bella voi siete e giovane col You are still young and beautiful, and
tempo... with time...

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ah, più non dite v’intendo m’è Please, say no more! It’s impossible
impossibile lui solo amar vogl’io. for me because I love him too much.
LA TRAVIATA Page 61

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Sia pure ma volubile sovente è l’uom. But remember that man is fickle.

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA: (reacting in shock)

Gran Dio! Dear Heaven!

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Un dì, quando le veneri il tempo avrà Some day, when his passions have
fugate, fia presto il tedio a sorgere che faded, and weariness and boredom sets
sarà allor? Pensate. Per voi non avran in, then what? Think about it. Remem-
balsamo i più soavi affetti poiché dal ciel ber that your relationship has not been
non furono tai nodi benedetti. blessed by Heaven.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
È vero! That’s true!

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Ah, dunque sperdasi tal sogno Ah, therefore forget your brazen
seduttore siate di mia famiglia l’angiol dreams and be a consoling angel to my
consolatore. Deh, pensateci, ne siete in loved ones. Think Violetta, that it is
tempo ancor. è Dio che ispira, o giovine tai God who inspires you to heed the
detti a un genitor. words of a father.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (sorrowfully)

(Così alla misera ch’è un dì caduta, di (Such is the misfortune of a fallen woman
più risorgere speranza è muta! Se pur who cannot be reborn, and for whom all
beneficio le indulga Iddio, l’uomo hope has ended! God is merciful but man
implacabile per lei sarà.) condemns her forever.)

Dite alla giovine. sì bella e pura, Tell the young woman, so beautiful and
ch’avvi una vittima della sventura, cui pure, that an unfortunate woman,
resta un unico raggio di bene, che a lei crushed by despair, makes a sacrifice
il sacrifica e che morrà! for her to be happy, and then will die!
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 62

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Sì, piangi, o misera, supremo il Yes, cry, unfortunate lady. It is a great
veggo. È il sacrificio ch’ora io ti sacrifice that I ask. I feel your pain in
chieggo. Sento nell’anima già le tue my soul. Take heart, your sacrifice is
pene; coraggio e il nobile cor vincerà. noble and courageous.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Or imponete! Tell me what to do!

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Non amarlo ditegli. Tell him that you no longer love him.

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA:
Nol crederà. He won’t believe it.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Partite. Then just leave him.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Seguirammi. He’ll follow me.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Allor.... And so....

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Qual figlia m’abbracciate forte così I’ve made up my mind. Embrace me
sarò. Tra breve ei vi fia reso, ma like a daughter. Soon you will have him
afflitto oltre ogni dire. A suo conforto back, but he will be so brokenhearted.
di colò volerete. You must be here to console him.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Che pensate? What are you planning to do?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Sapendol, v’opporreste al pensier mio. If I told you, you wouldn’t agree.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Generosa! E per voi che far poss’io? Noble lady. How can I repay you?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Morrò! La mia memoria non fia ch’ei I will die! My sins cannot be erased,
maledica, se le mie pene orribili vi sia but let everyone know the horrible
chi almen gli dica. agony I have suffered.
LA TRAVIATA Page 63

GERMONT: GERMONT:
No, generosa, vivere, e lieta voi No, generous lady, you must live and
dovrete, mercè di queste lagrime dal enjoy life. One day Heaven will reward
cielo un giorno avrete. you for all the tears you have shed.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Conosca il sacrifizio ch’io consumai One day Alfredo should know the
d’amor che sarà suo fin l’ultimo sacrifice that I made for him, and that
sospiro del mio cor. with my last breath, I loved only him.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Premiato il sacrifizio sarà del vostro Be proud and noble. You shall be
amor; d’un opra così nobile sarete rewarded for the supreme sacrifice of
fiera allor. your love.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Qui giunge alcun. Partite! Someone is coming. Please go!

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Ah, grato v’è il cor mio! I am most grateful to you!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Non ci vedrem più forse. We may never see each other again.

A DUE: BOTH: (embracing each other)

Siate felice. Addio! Be happy. Farewell!
Germont exits into the garden.
VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Dammi tu forza, o cielo! Oh God, please give me strength!

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Mi richiedeste? You rang for me?

Violetta sits down to respond to Flora’s invitation.

She rings for Annina who looks at the address in surprise.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Sì, reca tu stessa questo foglio. Yes. I want you to deliver this letter.
Silenzio va’ all’istante. Don’t say anything! Go at once!
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 64

Ed ora si scriva a lui. Che gli dirò? And now I must write to Alfredo. What
Chi men darà il coraggio? shall I say? Who will give me the courage?

Violetta writes, seals the letter, and suddenly Alfredo appears.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Che fai? What are you doing?
.
VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (concealing the letter)
Nulla. Nothing.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Scrivevi? Were you writing?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (Violetta is disturbed)

Sì, no. Yes, no.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Qual turbamento! A chi scrivevi? You’re so disturbed! To whom were
you writing?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
A te. To you.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Dammi quel foglio! Give me that letter!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
No, per ora. No, not now.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (apologetically)

Mi perdona, son io preoccupato. Forgive me, I'm not myself.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Che fu? What is it?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Giunse mio padre. My father is coming.
.
VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Lo vedesti? Have you seen him?
LA TRAVIATA Page 65

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Ah no: severo scritto mi lasciava però No, but he left me a harsh note and
l’attendo, t’amerà in vederti. wants to see me. He’ll love you when
he sees you.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (agitated)

Ch’ei qui non mi sorprenda. Lascia Oh, he must not find me here! I’ll leave
che m’allontani tu lo calma. Ai piedi while you meet with him. Then I’ll throw
suoi mi getterò divisi ei più non ne myself at his feet. Surely he wouldn’t
vorrà sarem felici. Perchè tu m’ami, want to separate us now. We shall be
Alfredo, non è vero? happy, for you do love me Alfredo, right?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
O, quanto. Perchè piangi? Oh so very much. But why are you crying?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Di lagrime avea d’uopo or son My heart was so heavy, but I am calm
tranquilla. Lo vedi? Ti sorrido. Sarò là, now. You see? I can even smile. I shall be
tra quei fior presso a te sempre. there, in the garden, always near you.

Amami Alfredo, quant’io t’amo. Love me Alfredo, love me as much as

Addio. I love you. Goodbye.

Violetta rushes out into the garden.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Ah, vive sol quel core all’amor mio! Ah, that dear heart lives only for my love!
Alfredo sits down, takes a book, and reads.
He then rises and looks at the clock on the mantel.
È tardi: ed oggi forse più non verrà It's late. Maybe my father isn’t coming
mio padre. today.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 66

GIUSEPPE: GIUSEPPE: (hurrying in)

La signora è partita l’attendeva un The mistress has left in a carriage, en
calesse, e sulla via già corre di Parigi. route to Paris. Annina left earlier.
Annina pure prima di lei spariva.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Il so, ti calma. I know all that. Be calm.

GIUSEPPE: GIUSEPPE: (aside)

(Che vuol dir ciò?) (What does all this mean?)
(Giuseppe exits)

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (aside)

Va forse d’ogni avere ad affrettar la She's gone, ruining herself by rushing to sell
perdita. Ma Annina lo impedirà. everything, but Annina will prevent her.
Germont is seen approaching from the garden.
Qualcuno è nel giardino! Chi è là? Someone’s in the garden. Who is it?

MESSAGIERO: MESSENGER: (at the door)

Il signor Germont? Monsieur Germont?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Son io. That’s me.

MESSAGIERO: MESSENGER:
Una dama da un cocchio, per voi, di A short while ago, a lady in a carriage
qua non lunge, mi diede questo scritto. gave me this letter to give to you.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Di Violetta. Perchè son io commosso! It's from Violetta. Why am I so unnerved?
A raggiungerla forse ella m’invita. Io Perhaps she's asking me to join her. I’m
tremo! Oh ciel! Coraggio! trembling! Oh Heaven! Be strong!

“Alfredo, al giungervi di questo “Alfredo, by the time you read this

foglio” letter”
As he cries out in shock, he finds himself facing his father.
Father and son embrace.
Ah! Padre mio! Oh! Father!
LA TRAVIATA Page 67

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Mio figlio! Oh, quanto soffri! Tergi, My son! What suffering! But stop
ah, tergi il pianto ritorna di tuo padre crying and return to be your father’s
orgoglio e vanto. honor and pride.

Di Provenza il mar, il suol, chi dal cor Are the land and sea of Provence
ti cancello? Al natio fulgente sol, qual erased from your memory? Wasn’t its
destino ti furò? O rammenta pur nel radiant sun your destiny? Oh remember
duol, ch’ivi gioia a te brillò; e che pace that you knew happiness there. May
colà sol, su te splendere ancor può. peace again fall on all your sorrows.

Dio mi guidò! Ah! Il tuo vecchio God led me here! Oh, how your old
genitor, tu non sai quanto soffrì. Te father has suffered since you brought
lontano, di squallor il suo tetto si shame and grief upon our home. But if
coprì. Ma se alfin ti trovo ancor, se in I truly have found my son again, and
me speme non fallì, se la voce the voice of honor is still in you, then
dell’onor, in te appien non ammutì, God has granted my will! Are you
Dio m’esaudì! Nè rispondi d’un padre unresponsive to your father's affec-
all’affetto? tion?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Mille serpi divoranmi il petto! I am being devoured by grief!
Mi lasciate! Leave me!

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Lasciarti? Leave you?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
(Oh vendetta!) (Oh, vengeance!)

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Non più indugi; partiamo t’affretta. Stop indulging yourself. Let’s leave
right away.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
(Ah, fu Douphol!) (Ah, it was Douphol!)
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 68

GERMONT: GERMONT:
M’ascolti tu? Are you listening to me?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
No!. No!

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Dunque invano trovato t’avrò! No, non Then my efforts were futile! No, I
udrai rimproveri; copriam d’oblio il won’t reproach you, but we must
passato; l’amor che m’ha guidato, sa forget the past. The love that guided
tutto perdonar. Vieni, i tuoi cari in me here has taught me to forgive
giubilo con me rivedi ancora: a chi everything. Come, your loved ones
penò finora tal gioia non negar. Un await you joyfully. Your father and
padre ed una suora t’affretta a consolar. your sister will console you.

Alfredo sees Flora's invitation on the table and reads it.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Ah! Ell’è alla festa! volisi. Ah! She’s left to go to Flora's party!
L’offesa a vendicar. Such an insult must be avenged.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Che dici? Ah, ferma! What did you say? Stop it!

Alfredo rushes out, followed by his father.

LA TRAVIATA Page 69

ACT II - SCENE 2

The salon of Flora's Paris mansion, elegantly furnished

and brilliantly illuminated.
Immediately present are Flora, the Marquis, and Doctor Grenvil.

FLORA: FLORA:
Avrem lieta di maschere la notte: n’è For entertainment this evening, we have
duce il viscontino. masqueraders, a gift from the Viscount.
Violetta ed Alfredo anco invitai. Violetta and Alfredo are also invited.

MARCHESE: MARQUIS:
La novità ignorate? Don't you know the news?
Violetta e Germont sono disgiunti. Violetta and Alfredo have separated.

DOTTORE E FLORA: DOCTOR and FLORA:

Fia vero? Really?

MARCHESE: MARQUIS:
Ella verrà qui col barone. She's coming with the Baron.

DOTTORE: DOCTOR:
Li vidi ieri ancor, parean felici. I just saw them yesterday, and they
seemed quite happy.

FLORA: FLORA:
Silenzio! Udite! Hush! Listen!

TUTTI: ALL:
Giungono gli amici. Our friends are arriving.

Ladies dressed as Gypsies enter.

ZINGARE: GYPSIES:
Noi siamo zingarelle venute da We are gypsies who have come from
lontano; d’ognuno sulla mano afar. We read the future from your
leggiamo l’avvenir. Se consultiam le hand. When we consult the stars, all of
stelle null’avvi a noi d’oscuro, e i casi your secrets are revealed so we can
del futuro possiamo altrui predir. predict your future.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 70

One gypsy examines Flora's hand.

Vediamo! Voi, signora, rivali alquante Let's see now! You, my lady, have
avete. many rivals.
Another reads the hand of the Marquis.

Voi, Marchese, voi non siete model di You, Marquis, are not a model of
fedeltà. fidelity.

FLORA: FLORA: (to the Marquis)

Fate il galante ancora? Ben, vò me la You’re still a philander? You'll pay me
paghiate dearly for this!

MARCHESE: MARQUIS: (to Flora)

Che dianci vi pensate? L’accusa è You can’t be serious? What she says is
falsità. not true.

FLORA: FLORA:
La volpe lascia il pelo, non abbandona The fox may leave its hair, but never
il vizio Marchese mio, giudizio o vi its manners. Dear Marquis, watch it or
farò pentir. I’ll make you regret it.

TUTTI: ALL:
Su via, si stenda un velo cui fatti del Away then, forget past mistakes. What
passato; già quel ch’è stato è stato. is done is done.
Badate all’avvenir. Pay attention to the future.
Flora and the Marquis shake hands.
Gastone and others arrive, disguised as Spanish Matadors and Picadors.

GASTONE E MATTADORI: GASTONE and MATADORS:

Di Madride noi siam mattadori, siamo i We’re from Madrid, and are the pride
prodi del circo dè tori, testè giunti a of the bullring. We’ve come to Paris to
godere del chiasso che a Parigi si fa pel share your enjoyment, and if you
bue grasso; è una storia, se udire would listen, we’ll tell you the story of
vorrete, quali amanti noi siamo saprete. what great lovers we are.

GLI ALTRI: ALL:

Sì, sì, bravi: narrate, narrate! Yes, yes, brave ones, tell us!
Con piacere l’udremo. We’d love to hear it.

GASTONE E MATTADORI: GASTONE and MATADORS:

Ascoltate. È Piquillo un bel gagliardo Listen! Our Piquillo, the handsome
biscaglino mattador: forte il braccio, Matador comes from Biscay. With his
fiero il guardo, delle giostre egli è strong arms and proud look, he is the
signor. hero of the bullring.
LA TRAVIATA Page 71

D’andalusa giovinetta follemente A fair Andalusian maiden fell in love

innamorò; ma la bella ritrosetta così al with him passionately. She told him: “I
giovane parlò: cinque tori in un sol personally want to see you slay five
giorno vò vederti ad atterrar; e, se fierce bulls within one day, and if you
vinci, al tuo ritorno mano e cor ti vò succeed, I will give you my heart and
donar. hand.”
Sì, gli disse, e il mattadore, alle giostre The Matador agreed, walked into the
mosse il piè; cinque tori, vincitore ring, and triumphantly slew five bulls
sull’arena egli stendè. in the arena.

GLI ALTRI: ALL:

Bravo, bravo il mattadore, ben Bravo, bravo for the Matador. He
gagliardo si mostrò se alla giovane proved that he was a valiant fighter and
l’amore in tal guisa egli provò. how much he loved the young lady.

GASTONE E MATTADORI: GASTONE and MATADORS:

Poi, tra plausi, ritornato alla bella del Then, amidst the applause, he knelt
suo cor, colse il premio desiato tra le before his loved one and took his
braccia dell’amor. prize in his arms.

GLI ALTRI: ALL:

Con tai prove i mattadori san le belle With such trials, the matadors conquer
conquistar! beautiful women!

GASTONE E MATTADORI: GASTONE and MATADORS:

Ma qui son più miti i cori; a noi basta But here, hearts are easier to win.
folleggiar. But enough, let’s rejoice.

TUTTI: ALL:
Sì, sì, allegri or pria tentiamo della Yes, let’s rejoice and be happy! But
sorte il vario umor; la palestra first let’s test our luck. Let’s go to the
dischiudiamo agli audaci giuocator. tables to try our chances.

The men begin to play at the gaming tables.

Alfredo arrives.

TUTTI: ALL:
Alfredo! Voi! Alfredo! You!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Sì, amici. Yes, my friends.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 72

FLORA: FLORA:
Violetta? Where is Violetta?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Non ne so. I don't know.

TUTTI: ALL:
Ben disinvolto! Bravo! Or via, giuocar He doesn’t seem to care. Bravo! Then
si può. let’s go and play.

Gastone cuts the cards. Alfredo joins the game.

Violetta enters, escorted by the Baron.

FLORA: FLORA: (to Violetta)

Qui desiata giungi. We’ve been anxiously waiting for you.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Cessi al cortese invito. I couldn’t’ resist your charming invitation.

FLORA: FLORA:
Grata vi son, barone, d’averlo pur I'm grateful that you and the Baron
gradito. accepted.

BARONE: BARON: (whispering to Violetta)

(Germont è qui! Il vedete!) (Germont is here! Do you see him?)

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (aside)

(Ciel! gli è vero). Il vedo. (Heaven! It's true.) I see him.

BARONE: BARON:
Da voi non un sol detto si volga a You're not to say a word to this
questo Alfredo. Alfredo.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (aside)

(Ah, perchè venni, incauta! Pietà di (Ah, why did I come. So stupid of me!
me, gran Dio!) Dear God, have mercy on me!)

FLORA: FLORA: (to Violetta)

Meco t’assidi: narrami quai novità Sit here beside me. Tell me about this
vegg’io? news I’m hearing?

While Flora and Violetta converse quietly, Alfredo plays in the card game.
LA TRAVIATA Page 73

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Un quattro! A four!

GASTONE: GASTONE:
Ancora hai vinto! You win again!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Sfortuna nell’amore Vale fortuna al giuoco! Unlucky in love, lucky in the game!

TUTTI: ALL:
È sempre vincitore! He always wins!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Oh, vincerò stasera; e l’oro guadagna- Oh, I’ll win tonight, and as before, I’ll
to poscia a goder tra campi ritornerò spend my winnings on country
beato. pleasures.

FLORA: FLORA:
Solo? Alone?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
No, no, con tale che vi fu meco ancor, No, no, but with the person who had
poi mi sfuggia. earlier left me.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
(Mio Dio!) (Dear God!)

GASTONE: GASTONE: (to Alfredo, indicating

Pietà di lei! Violetta) Have mercy on her!

BARONE: BARON: (to Alfredo wrathfully)

Signor! Sir!

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA: (whispering to the Baron)

Frenatevi, o vi lascio. Behave yourself or I’ll leave you!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO. (sarcastically)

Barone, m’appellaste? Baron, were you talking to me?

BARONE: BARON: (with irony)

Siete in sì gran fortuna, che al giuoco You're having such extraordinary luck
mi tentaste. that I’m tempted to challenge you.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 74

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Sì? La disfida accetto. Really? I accept the challenge.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (aside)

(Che fia? morir mi sento.) (What will happen? I feel like dying.)

BARONE: BARON: (at the gaming tables)

Cento luigi a destra. A hundred louis to the right.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Ed alla manca cento. And a hundred to the left.

GASTONE: GASTONE: (dealing)

Un asse un fante hai vinto! An ace, a jack (to Alfredo) You've won!

BARONE: BARON:
Il doppio? Do you want to double it?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Il doppio sia. I’ll double it.

GASTONE: GASTONE: (dealing)

Un quattro, un sette. A four, a seven.

TUTTI: ALL:
Ancora! Again!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Pur la vittoria è mia! I’ve won again!

CORO: CHORUS:
Bravo davver! La sorte è tutta per Alfredo! Bravo, really! Alfredo has all the luck!

FLORA: FLORA:
Del villeggiar la spesa farà il baron, I see now that it’s the Baron who’ll be
già il vedo. paying for Alfredo’s country expenses.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (to the Baron)

Seguite pur. Go on.

SERVO: SERVANT:
La cena è pronta. Dinner is served.
LA TRAVIATA Page 75

FLORA: FLORA:
Andiamo. Let’s go.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (aside to the Baron)

Se continuar v’aggrada. If you'd like to continue.

BARONE: BARON:
Per ora nol possiamo: più tardi la Not right now, but later we’ll have the
rivincita. final rematch.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Al gioco che vorrete. At whatever game you choose.

BARONE: BARON:
Seguiam gli amici; poscia. Later, but now let's follow our friends.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Sarò qual bramerete. Whatever you wish.

All enter the dining room. Violetta, much agitated, returns to the salon,
and is soon followed by Alfredo.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Invitato a qui seguirmi. Verrà desso? I sent for him. Will he meet me? Will he listen
vorra udirmi? Ei verrà, che l’odio to me? He will come because his hatred for
atroce puote in lui più di mia voce. me is stronger than my love for him.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Mi chiamaste? che bramate? Did you send for me? What do you want?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Questi luoghi abbandonate. Un I beg you to leave this place. You're in
periglio vi sovrasta. great danger.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Ah, comprendo! Basta, basta e sì vile Oh, now I understand! It is enough.
mi credete? Do you think I am a coward?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ah no, mai! Oh, no, of course not!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Ma che temete? Then why are you so afraid?
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 76

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Temo sempre del Barone. It’s the Baron I’m afraid of.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
È tra noi mortal quistione s’ei cadrà It’s true we have a deadly feud. If I
per mano mia un sol colpo vi torrì a would kill him you would lose both
coll’amante il protettore. V’atterrisce lover and protector in one blow. Is that
tal sciagura? what you’re so afraid of?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ma s’ei fosse l’uccisore? Ecco l’unica Oh, but what if he kills you? That would
sventura ch’io pavento a me fatale! by a most fatal misfortune for me!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
La mia morte! Che ven cale? My death! What does that mean to you?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Deh, partite, e sull’istante! Go, I beg you! Leave right now!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Partirò, ma giura innante che dovun- I’ll leave, but only if you swear to
que seguirai i miei passi. come with me.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ah, no, giammai! Oh no, never!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
No! Giammai? No! Never?

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA:
Và, sciagurato. Scorda un nome ch’è Go, unfortunate one. Forget my disgraced
infamato. Va mi lascia sul momento di name and leave me immediately. I have
fuggirti un giuramento sacro io feci. sworn a sacred oath to give you up.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
E chi potea? And who wanted that?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Chi diritto pien ne avea. One whose right was beyond question.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Fu Douphol? Was it Douphol?
LA TRAVIATA Page 77

VIOLETTA:: VIOLETTA: (with supreme effort)

Sì! Yes!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Dunque l’ami? Then you love him?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ebben l’amo! Yes, I love him!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (impetuously to the guests)

Or tutti a me. Everybody come here!

TUTTI: ALL:
Ne appellaste? Che volete? Did you call us? What do you want?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (pointing to Violetta)

Questa donna conoscete? Do you all know this woman?

TUTTI: ALL:
Chi? Violetta? Who? Violetta?

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Che facesse non sapete? Do you know what she has done?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ah, taci. Oh, spare me.

TUTTI: ALL:
No. No.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Ogni suo aver tal femmina per amor This woman spent all that she owned
mio sperdea. Io cieco, vile, misero, on her lover. I was blind, vile, foolish,
tutto accettar potea. and accepted it all.
Ma è tempo ancora! tergermi da tanta But there’s still time to clear myself
macchia bramo. from this shame and dishonor.
Qui testimoni vi chiamo che qui pagata io l’ho. Witness as I pay my debts to her.

Alfredo violently flings his winnings at Violetta. She faints in Flora's arms.
Suddenly, Germont appears. He has heard Alfredo curse Violetta.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 78

TUTTI: ALL:
Oh, infamia orribile tu commettesti! You have committed a dreadful
Un cor sensibile così uccidesti! Di injustice! With your wretched insult
donne ignobile insultator, di qui you have broken a tender heart!
allontanati, ne desti orror. Leave! Your behavior horrifies us.

GERMONT: GERMONT: (reproachfully).)

Di sprezzo degno se stesso rende chi For any man who offends a woman
pur nell’ira la donna offende. like that, there is insufficient disdain.
Dove’è mio figlio? Più non lo vedo: in Where is my son? I no longer see him.
te più Alfredo trovar non so. You, Alfredo, are not my son.
(Io sol fra tanti so qual virtude di (Aside) (I alone know what a virtuous
quella misera il sen racchiude io so heart beats in that woman's unhappy
che l’ama, che gli è fedele, eppur, soul, and how loving and true she is. It
crudele, tacer dovrò!) is cruel that I cannot reveal the truth!)

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (Aside.)

Ah sì che feci! Ne sento orrore. Gelosa What have I done? I am horrified! My
smania, deluso amore mi strazia l’alma action appalls me! The raging jealousy
più non ragiono. in my soul is what destroyed my reason.
Da lei perdono, più non avrò. Volea She won’t forgive me. I wanted to flee
fuggirla non ho potuto! Dall’ira spinto from her, but I could not. My rage led me
son qui venuto! Or che lo sdegno ho to come here; a disdain that turned to
disfogato, me sciagurato! Rimorso madness. I am so ashamed, and I feel
n’ho. such remorse.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Alfredo, Alfredo, di questo core non Alfredo, Alfredo, you don’t know how
puoi comprendere tutto l’amore; tu much I love you! You'll never know that
non conosci che fino a prezzo del tuo I created your contempt in order to prove
disprezzo, provato io l’ho! my love for you.
Ma verrò giorno in che il saprai But some day you'll know how much I
com’io t’amassi confesserai Dio dai loved you, and then you will confess your
rimorsi ti salvi allora; io spenta ancora remorse to God, who will save you. But
pur t’amerò. even in death, I will always love you.
LA TRAVIATA Page 79

BARONE: BARON: (aside to Alfredo)

A questa donna l’atroce insulto qui We’ve all heard how outrageously you
tutti offese, ma non inulto fia tanto have insulted this lady, and we’re all
oltraggio, provar vi voglio che tanto deeply offended. I want to redeem her
orgoglio fiaccar saprò. pride, and I know how to do it.

TUTTI: ALL: (to Violetta)

Ah, quanto peni! Ma pur fa core qui Oh, such sorrow! But be comforted that
soffre ognuno del tuo dolore; fra cari we have compassion for your anguish.
amici qui sei soltanto; rasciuga il Dry your tears Violetta, for you are not
pianto che t’inondò. alone, but among loving friends.

Germont leads Alfredo out, but not before the Baron challenges Alfredo to a duel.

ACT III

One month later. Violetta's bedroom.

Violetta is sleeping, and Annina is dozing in a chair.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (awaking)

Annina? Annina?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Comandate? You called me?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Dormivi, poveretta? Were you asleep, poor girl?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Sì, perdonate. Yes. Forgive me.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Dammi d’acqua un sorso. Please give me a drink of water.
Osserva, è pieno il giorno? Look, is it morning already?
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 80

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Son sett’ore. It is seven o'clock.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Dà accesso a un po’ di luce. Let a little light in.

ANNINA: ANNINA: (opens the shutters)

Il signor di Grenvil! Oh, there's Mr. Grenvil!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Oh, il vero amico! Oh, he’s such a true friend!
Alzar mi vo’ m’aita. Help me. I want to get up.

She rises with difficulty from the bed, and then

walks unsteadily toward a chair.
Doctor Grenvil arrives.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Quanta bontà pensaste a me per How good of you to think of me so
tempo! often!

DOTTORE: DOCTOR: (feels her pulse)

Or, come vi sentite? How are you feeling now?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Soffre il mio corpo, ma tranquilla ho My body suffers, but my soul is at
l’alma. Mi confortò iersera un pio peace. Last night a priest comforted me
ministro. Religione è sollievo a greatly. Religion brings relief to the
sofferenti. suffering.

DOTTORE: DOCTOR:
E questa notte? And how did you sleep?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ebbi tranquillo il sonno. I slept quite peacefully.

DOTTORE: DOCTOR:
Coraggio adunque la convalescenza Have courage then. You’ll soon be
non è lontana. well again.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Oh, la bugia pietosa a medici è Oh, a pious lie is a doctor's preroga-
concessa! tive!
LA TRAVIATA Page 81

DOTTORE: DOCTOR: (clasps her hand)

Addio a più tardi. Goodbye. I will see you later.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Non mi scordate. Don’t forget me.

ANNINA: ANNINA: (whispering to the Doctor)

Come va, signore? How is she, Doctor?

DOTTORE: DOCTOR:
La tisi non le accorda che poche ore. She has only a few hours to live.

The Doctor leaves.

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Or fate cor! Cheer up!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Giorno di festa è questo? Is today a holiday?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Tutta Parigi impazza è carnevale. All Paris is going mad because of carnival.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ah, nel comun tripudio, sallo il cielo In all this gaiety, Heaven only knows how
quanti infelici soffron! many poor creatures are suffering! How
Quale somma v’ha in quello stipo? much money do we have in that cupboard?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Venti luigi. Twenty louis.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Dieci ne reca ai poveri tu stessa. Go out and distribute ten among the poor.

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Poco rimanevi allora. Then you’ll have very little left.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Oh, mi sarà bastante; Oh, it will be enough for me!
cerca poscia mie lettere. Please bring me my mail.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 82

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Ma voi? But you?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Nulla occorrà sollecita, se puoi. I don’t need anything, only don't be long.
(Annina exits)

Violetta reads the letter that she received earlier from Giorgio Germont.

“Teneste la promessa la disfida ebbe “You kept your promise. The duel took
luogo! il barone fu ferito, però place. The Baron was wounded, but he
migliora Alfredo è in stranio suolo; il is now recovering. Alfredo is out of the
vostro sacrifizio io stesso gli ho country. I myself told him about your
svelato; egli a voi tornerà pel suo sacrifice. He will be coming to you to
perdono; io pur verrò curatevi meritate ask your forgiveness. I too will come to
un avvenir migliore — Giorgio see you. Get well. You deserve a better
Germont.” future. Giorgio Germont.”

È tardi! Attendo, attendo nè a me How late it is! I wait and wait but they
giungon mai! never come!

(Gazing at herself in the mirror)

Oh, come son mutata! Ma il dottore a Oh, how I’ve changed! And yet the Doctor
sperar pure m’esorta! Ah, con tal told me that there is hope! Oh, with such
morbo ogni speranza è morta. an illness, the only hope is death.

Addio, del passato bei sogni ridenti. Farewell, bright memories of the past.
Le rose del volto già son pallenti; My rosy cheeks are pale. I miss
l’amore d’Alfredo pur esso mi manca, Alfredo’s love, whose comfort
conforto, sostegno dell’anima stanca. sustained my weary soul.

Ah, della traviata sorridi al desio; a lei, Oh God, grant pardon to this fallen
deh, perdona; tu accoglila, o Dio, or tutto woman for whom life is ending. The
finì. Le gioie, i dolori tra poco avran fine, joys and pains will soon be over, and
la tomba ai mortali di tutto è confine! the tomb of this mortal will be covered.
LA TRAVIATA Page 83

Non lagrima o fiore avrà la mia fossa, There will be no tears or flowers, and
non croce col nome che copra quest’os- no name on the cross that covers these
sa! Ah, della traviata sorridi al desio; a remains! Oh God, grant pardon to this
lei, deh, perdona; tu accoglila, o Dio. fallen woman.
Or tutto finì! All is over!

CORO DI MASCHERE: CHORUS: (offstage)

Largo al quadrupede sir della festa, di Make way for the lord of the festivities, the
fiori e pampini cinto la testa. Largo al most docile of horned beasts. He is adorned
più docile d’ogni cornuto, di corni e with flowers and vine-leaves on his head.
pifferi abbia il saluto. We salute him with pipe and horn.

Parigini, date passo al trionfo del bue Come Parisians, make way for the
grasso. L’Asia, nè l’Africa vide il più celebration of the fat bull. Asia or
bello, vanto ed orgoglio d’ogni Africa have no equal. Happy masquer-
macello allegre maschere, pazzi aders and wild children, boasting with
garzoni, tutti plauditelo con canti e pride, greet and cheer him with song
suoni! and applause!
Parigini, date passo al trionfo del Bue Come Parisians, make way for the
grasso. celebration of the fat bull.

ANNINA: ANNINA: (returning excitedly)

Signora! Madam!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Che t’accade? What is it?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Quest’oggi, è vero? Vi sentite meglio? Are you really feeling better today?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Sì, perchè? Yes, but why do you ask?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
D’esser calma promettete? Do you promise not to get excited?

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Sì, che vuoi dirmi? Yes, what do you want to tell me?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Prevenir vi volli una gioia improvvisa. I want to prepare you for a joyous surprise.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 84

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Una gioia! dicesti? Did you say a joyous surprise?

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Sì, o signora. Yes, Madam.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Alfredo! Ah, tu il vedesti? Ei vien! It's Alfredo! You've seen him?
L’affretta! He's coming! Hurry!

(Annina nods and opens the door.)

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (runs to the door)
Alfredo! Alfredo!

Violetta and Alfredo fall into each other’s arms.

Amato Alfredo! My beloved Alfredo!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Mia Violetta! Colpevol sono so tutto, My Violetta! It’s all my fault, my love.
o cara. I know everything now.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Io so che alfine reso mi sei! I only know that you've come back to me.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Da questo palpito s’io t’ami impara, My heartbeats reveal all my devotion. It
senza te esistere più non potrei. is only with you that life is worth living.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ah, s’anco in vita m’hai ritrovata, One does not die from sorrow. Look at
credi che uccidere non può il dolor. me, I’m rejuvenated.
.
ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Scorda l’affanno, donna adorata, a me My love, forget your sorrow, and
perdona e al genitor. forgive me and my father.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ch’io ti perdoni? La rea son io: ma Forgive you, Alfredo? If my love for you
solo amore tal mi rendè. can be blamed, then it was my fault.
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A DUE: BOTH:
Null’uomo o demone, angelo mio, mai My angel, neither man nor demon will
più staccarti potrà da me. ever tear us away from each other.
Parigi, o cara/o noi lasceremo, la vita We’ll leave Paris, my love, and our life
uniti trascorreremo: se’ corsi affanni together will change. Sorrow will be
compenso avrai, la mia/tua salute replaced by happiness. My/your health will
rifiorirà. Sospiro e luce tu mi sarai, improve and you will light up my life. Our
tutto il futuro ne arriderà. future together will be full of happiness.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ah, non più, a un tempio Alfredo, Oh, no more! Alfredo, let’s go to
andiamo, del tuo ritorno grazie church to offer our thanks for your
rendiamo. return.

(Violetta has a sudden spasm)

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Tu impallidisci! You've turned pale!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
È nulla, sai! Gioia improvvisa non It's nothing, really. Sudden happiness
entra mai senza turbarlo in mesto core. can always affect a sad heart.

(She sinks down into a chair)

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Gran Dio! Violetta! Oh God! Violetta!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
È il mio malore fu debolezza! ora son It’s my illness. I felt myself growing
forte. faint. Now I’m stronger.
Vedi! Sorrido. See, I’m smiling.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (aside)

(Ahi, cruda sorte!) (Oh, cruel fate!)

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Fu nulla. Annina, dammi a vestire. It was nothing. Annina, give me
something to wear.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Adesso? Attendi! Right now? Wait awhile!
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 86

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
No voglio uscire. No. I want to go out.

Violetta tries to dress, but becomes faint.

Gran Dio! Non posso! Oh God, I can’t!

She throws the dress aside, and falls back into the chair.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO: (to Annina)

(Cielo! che vedo! Heavens! What's happened?
Va pel dottor. Get the doctor right away.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA: (to Annina)

Digli che Alfredo è ritornato all’amor Tell him that Alfredo has returned to me.
[Link] che vivere ancor vogl’io. Tell him that I desperately want to live.
(Annina exits)

Ma se tornando non m’hai salvato, a But if by coming back you have not
niuno in terra salvarmi è dato. saved me, then nothing can save me.

Gran Dio! Morir sì giovane, io che Oh God! For me to die so young, and
penato ho tanto! Morir sì presso a to have suffered so much! To die when
tergere il mio sì lungo pianto! there is hope of a happier tomorrow!

Ah, dunque fu delirio la cruda mia Therefore my fierce hope was just an
speranza; invano di costanza armato illusion, a futile strengthening of my
avrò il mio cor! Alfredo! heart.
Oh! Il crudo termine serbato al nostro Oh Alfredo, this is a cruel ending to
amor! our love!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Oh mio sospiro, oh palpito, diletto del cor Oh my loved one, the ecstasy and
mio! Le mie colle tue lagrime confondere delight of my heart! My soul shares
degg’io ma più che mai, deh, credilo, m’è your tears. More than ever, we must be
d’uopo di costanza, Ah! Tutto alla faithful to each other, and never give
speranza non chiudere il tuo cor. up hope in our hearts.
LA TRAVIATA Page 87

Germont and the Doctor arrive.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Ah, Violetta! Ah, Violetta!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Voi, Signor! You, sir!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Mio padre! Father!

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Non mi scordaste? You didn’t forget me?

GERMONT: GERMONT:
La promessa adempio a stringervi qual Generous woman, I’m fulfilling my
figlia vengo al seno, o generosa. promise to embrace you as my own child.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Ahimè, tardi giungeste! Pure, grata Alas! You’ve come too late! But still, I
ven sono. am grateful. (embraces him)
Grenvil, vedete? Tra le braccia io spiro Do you see, Grenvil, I'll be dying in the
di quanti ho cari al mondo. arms of those I hold dearest in the world.

GERMONT: GERMONT: (aside)

Che mai dite? What are you saying?
(Oh cielo è ver!) (Too late, alas!)

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
La vedi, padre mio? You see her, Father?

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Di più non lacerarmi troppo rimorso Don't torment me further! The remorse
l’alma mi divora quasi fulmin in my soul devours me. Her every
m’atterra ogni suo detto oh, malcauto word shatters me. I was a fool and
vegliardo! Ah, tutto il mal ch’io feci only now do I see the extent of my
ora sol vedo! mistakes!
Violetta opens a drawer and takes out a locket.
VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Più a me t’appressa ascolta, amato Come close and listen to me, beloved
Alfredo! Alfredo!
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 88

Prendi: quest’è l’immagine de’ miei Take this portrait of me from the past,
passati giorni; a rammentar ti torni as a remembrance of how much I
colei che sì t’amò. Se una pudica loved you. If some day a virtuous
vergine degli anni suoi nel fiore a te young woman offers her heart to
donasse il core sposa ti sia lo vò. you, I want you to marry her.
Le porgi questa effigie: dille che Give her this portrait and tell her it is a
dono ell’è di chi nel ciel tra gli gift from someone among the angels
angeli prega per lei, per te. in Heaven, who prays for both of you.

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
No, non morrai, non dirmelo dei viver, No, don’t die. Don’t tell me that! You
amor mio a strazio sì terribile qui non mi shall live for me, my dear, and not die!
trasse Iddio sì presto, ah no, dividerti Don’t doom me to such cruel misery!
morte non può da me. Ah, vivi, o un Live, or I will join you in death.
solo feretro m’accoglierà con te.

GERMONT: GERMONT:
Cara, sublime vittima d’un disperato Dear one, sublime victim of despairing
amore. Perdonami lo strazio recato al love, forgive me for the anguish I
tuo bel core. caused you.

GERMONT, DOTTORE E GERMONT, DOCTOR and

ANNINA: ANNINA:
Finché avrà il ciglio lacrime io I will cry and mourn forever, because
piangerò per te vola a beati spiriti; you left us for the blessed spirits.
Iddio ti chiama a sè. God calls you to Him.

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
È strano! How strange I feel!
Violetta rises, her strength seemingly renewed.

TUTTI: ALL:
Che? What is happening?
LA TRAVIATA Page 89

VIOLETTA: VIOLETTA:
Cessarono gli spasmi del dolore. In me The spasms from the pain have ceased.
rinasce m’agita insolito vigore! I feel reborn with an unusual resur-
Ah! io ritorno a vivere. gence of strength! Oh! I will live.
Oh gioia! Oh what joy!

(Violetta falls back)

TUTTI: ALL:
O cielo! Muor! Oh Heavens, she is dying!

ALFREDO: ALFREDO:
Violetta! Violetta!

ANNINA E GERMONT: ALL:

Oh Dio, soccorrasi! Oh God, save her!

DOTTORE: DOCTOR: (after feeling her pulse)

È spenta! She’s dead!

TUTTI: ALL:
Oh mio dolor! Oh what unbearable grief!

FINE END
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LA TRAVIATA

Discography
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1928 Capsir (Violetta); Cecil (Alfredo); Galeffi (Germont);

La Scala Chorus and Orchestra;
Molajoli (Conductor)

1930 Rosza (Violetta); Ziliani (Alfredo); Borgonovo (Germont);

La Scala Chorus and Orchestra;
Sabajno (Conductor)

1946 Albanese (Violetta); Peerce (Alfredo); Merrill (Germont)

NBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus;
Toscanini (Conductor)

1946 Guerrini (Violetta); Infantino (Alfredo); Silveri (Germont);

Rome Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Bellezza (Conductor)

1952 Noli (Violetta); Campora (Alfredo); Tagliabue (Germont);

Rome Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Berrettoni (Conductor);

1952 Schimenti (Violetta); Pola (Alfredo); Monachesi (Germont);

Rome Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Ricci (Conductor)

1953 Callas (Violetta); Albanese (Alfredo); Savarese (Germont);

Turin Radio Chorus and Orchestra;
Santini (Conductor);

1954 Tebaldi (Violetta); Poggi (Alfredo); Protti (Germont);

Santa Cecilia Academy Chorus and Orchestra;
Molinari-Pradelli (Conductor)

1954 (Russian) Shumskaya (Violetta); Kozlovsky (Alfredo);

Lisitsian (Germont);
Bolshoi Theatre Chorus and Orchestra;
Orlov (Conductor)

1955 (Live performance) Callas (Violetta); di Stefano (Alfredo);

Bastianini (Germont);
La Scala Chorus and Orchestra;
Giulini (Conductor)
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 94

1955 Callas (Violetta); di Stefano (Alfredo); Bastianini (Germont);

La Scala Chorus and Orchestra;
Giulini (Conductor)

1956 Carteri (Violetta); Valletti (Alfredo); Warren (Germont);

Rome Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Monteux (Conductor)

1956 Stella (Violetta); di Stefano (Alfredo); Gobbi (Germont);

La Scala Chorus and Orchestra;
Serafin (Conductor)

1958 Callas (Violetta); Kraus (Alfredo); Sereni (Germont);

San Carlos Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Ghione (Conductor)

1959 De Los Angeles (Violetta); del Monte (Alfredo); Sereni (Germont);

Rome Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Serafin (Conductor)

1960 Zeani (Violetta); Savio (Alfredo); Gorin (Germont);

Hamburg State Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Annovazzi (Conductor)

1960 Moffo (Violetta); Tucker (Alfredo); Merrill (Germont);

Rome Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Previtali (Conductor

1962 Scotto (Violetta); Raimondi (Alfredo); Bastianini (Germont);

La Scala Chorus and Orchestra;
Votto (Conductor)

1962 Sutherland (Violetta); Bergonzi (Alfredo); Merrill (Germont);

Florence Festival Chorus and Orchestra;
Pritchard (Conductor)

1963 (Hungarian) Déery (Violetta); Ilosfalvy (Alfredo); Palócz (Germont);

Budapest State Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Gardelli (Conductor)
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1967 Caballé (Violetta); Bergonzi (Alfredo); Milnes (Germont);

RCA Italiana Chorus and Orchestra;
Prêtre (Conductor)

1968 (Romanian) Zeani (Violetta); Buzea (Alfredo); Herlea (Germont);

Bucharest Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Bobescu (Conductor)

1968 Lorengar (Violetta); Aragall (Alfredo); Fischer-Dieskau (Germont);

German Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Maazel (Conductor)

1971 Sills (Violetta); Gedda (Alfredo); Panerai (Germont);

Alldis Choir, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra;
Ceccato (Conductor)

1973 Freni (Violetta); Bonisolli (Alfredo); Bruscantini (Germont);

Berlin State Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Gardelli (Conductor)

1977 Cortrubas (Violetta); Domingo (Alfredo); Milnes (Germont);

Bavarian State Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Carlos Kleiber (Conductor)

1979 Sutherland (Violetta); Pavarotti (Alfredo); Manuguerra (Germont);

London Opera Chorus, National Philharmonic Orchestra;
Bonynge (Conductor)

1980 Masterson (Violetta); Brecknock (Alfredo); du Plessis (Germont);

English National Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Mackerras (Conductor)

1980 Scotto (Violetta); Kraus (Alfredo); Bruson (Germont);

Ambrosian Opera Chorus, Philharmonic Orchestra;
Muti (Conductor)

1981 Stratas (Violetta); Domingo (Alfredo); MacNeil (Germont);

Metropolitan Opera Chorus and Orchestra;
Levine (Conductor)
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1989 Aliberti (Violetta); Dvorsky (Alfredo); Bruson (Germont);

Fukiwara Opera Chorus, Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra;
Paternostro (Conductor)

1995 Gheorghiu (Violetta(; Lopardo (Alfredo); Nucci (Germont);

Royal Opera House Chorus and Orchestra;
Solti (Conductor)
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LA TRAVIATA

Videography
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SONY VHS
Fabbricini (Violetta); Alagna (Alfredo); Coni (Germont);
La Scala Chorus and Orchestra;
Muti (Conductor);
Cavani (Director and Video Director)

DECCA VHS
Gheorghiu (Violetta); Lopardo (Alfredo);
Nucci (Germont);
Royal Opera House Chorus and Orchestra;
Solti (Conductor)
Eyre (Director)
Burton and Maniura (Video Directors)

PICKWICK VHS
McLaughlin (Violetta); MacNeil (Alfredo);
Ellis (Germont);
Glyndebourne Choir, London Philharmonic Orchestra;
Haitink (Conductor);
Hall (Director and Video Director)

TELDEC
Gruberova (Violetta); Shicoff (Alfredo);
Zancanaro (Germont);
La Fenice Chorus and Orchestra;
Rizzi (Conductor);
Pizzi (Director);
Bailey (Video Director)

VAI VHS
Sills (Violetta); Price (Alfredo); Fredericks (Germont);
Wolf Trap Choir, Filene Center Orchestra;
Rudel (Conductor);
Capobianco (Director);
Browning (Video Director)
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DICTIONARY OF OPERA AND MUSICAL TERMS

Accelerando - Play the music faster, but gradually.

Adagio - At slow or gliding tempo, not as slow as Largo, but not as fast as Andante.

Agitato - Restless or agitated.

Allegro - At a brisk or lively tempo, faster than Andante but not as fast as Presto.

Andante - A moderately slow, easy-going tempo.

Appoggiatura - An extra or embellishing note preceding a main melodic note or

tone. Usually written as a note of smaller size, it shares the time value of the main
note.

Arabesque - Flourishes or fancy patterns usually applying to vocal virtuosity.

Aria - A solo song usually structured in a formal pattern. Arias generally convey
reflective and introspective thoughts rather than descriptive action.

Arietta - A shortened form of aria.

Arioso - A musical passage or composition having a mixture of free recitative and

metrical song.

Arpeggio - Producing the tones of a chord in succession but not simultaneously.

Atonal - Music that is not anchored in traditional musical tonality; it uses the
chromatic scale impartially, does not use the diatonic scale and has no keynote or
tonal center.

Ballad Opera - 18th century English opera consisting of spoken dialogue and music
derived from popular ballad and folksong sources. The most famous is The Beggar’s
Opera which was a satire of the Italian opera seria.

Bar - A vertical line across the stave that divides the music into units.

Baritone - A male singing voice ranging between the bass and tenor.

Baroque - A style of artistic expression prevalent in the 17th century that is marked
generally by the use of complex forms, bold ornamentation, and florid decoration.
The Baroque period extends from approximately 1600 to 1750 and includes the
works of the original creators of modern opera, the Camerata, as well as the later
works by Bach and Handel.
OPERA CLASSICS LIBRARY Page 102

Bass - The lowest male voices, usually divided into categories such as:

Basso buffo - A bass voice that specializes in comic roles like Dr. Bartolo
in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.

Basso cantante - A bass voice that demonstrates melodic singing quality

rather than comic or tragic: King Philip in Verdi’s Don Carlos.

Basso profundo - the deepest, most profound, or most dramatic of bass

voices: Sarastro in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

.Bel canto - Literally “beautiful singing.” It originated in Italian opera of the 17th
and 18th centuries and stressed beautiful tones produced with ease, clarity, purity,
evenness, together with an agile vocal technique and virtuosity. Bel canto flourished
in the first half of the 19th century in the works of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti.

Cabaletta - Typically a lively bravura extension of an aria or duet that creates a

climax. The term is derived from the Italian word “cavallo,” or horse: it
metaphorically describes a horse galloping to the finish line.

Cadenza - A flourish or brilliant part of an aria commonly inserted just before a

finale.

Camerata - A gathering of Florentine writers and musicians between 1590 and

1600 who attempted to recreate what they believed was the ancient Greek theatrical
synthesis of drama, music, and stage spectacle; their experimentation led to the
creation of the early structural forms of modern opera.

Cantabile - An expression indication urging the singer to sing sweetly.

Cantata - A choral piece generally containing Scriptural narrative texts: Bach

Cantatas.

Cantilena - A lyrical melodic line meant to be played or sung “cantabile,” or with

sweetness and expression.

Canzone - A short, lyrical operatic song usually containing no narrative association

with the drama but rather simply reflecting the character’s state of mind: Cherubino’s
“Voi che sapete” in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Shorter versions are called
canzonettas.

Castrato - A young male singer who was surgically castrated to retain his treble
voice.
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Cavatina - A short aria popular in the 18th century without the da capo repeat
section.

Classical Period - The period between the Baroque and Romantic periods. The
Classical period is generally considered to have begun with the birth of Mozart
(1756) and ended with Beethoven’s death (1830). Stylistically, the music of the
period stressed clarity, precision, and rigid structural forms.

Coda - A trailer or tailpiece added on by the composer after the music’s natural
onclusion.

Coloratura - Literally colored: it refers to a soprano singing in the bel canto tradition
with great agility, virtuosity, embellishments and ornamentation: Joan Sutherland
singing in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.

Commedia dell’arte - A popular form of dramatic presentation originating in

Renaissance Italy in which highly stylized characters were involved in comic plots
involving mistaken identities and misunderstandings. The standard characters were
Harlequin and Colombine: The “play within a play” in Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci.

Comprimario - A singer portraying secondary character roles such as confidantes,

servants, and messengers.

Continuo - A bass part (as for a keyboard or stringed instrument) that was used
especially in baroque ensemble music; it consists of a succession of bass notes
with figures that indicate the required chords. Also called figured bass, thoroughbass.

Contralto - The lowest female voice derived from “contra” against, and “alto”
voice, a voice between the tenor and mezzo-soprano.

Countertenor, or male alto vocal range - A high male voice generally singing
within the female high soprano ranges.

Counterpoint - The combination of one or more independent melodies added into

a single harmonic texture in which each retains its linear character: polyphony. The
most sophisticated form of counterpoint is the fugue form in which up to 6 to 8
voices are combined, each providing a variation on the basic theme but each retaining
its relation to the whole.

Crescendo - A gradual increase in the volume of a musical passage.

Da capo - Literally “from the top”: repeat. Early 17th century da capo arias were in
the form of A B A, the last A section repeating the first A section.
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Deus ex machina - Literally “god out of a machine.” A dramatic technique in

which a person or thing appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly; it
provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble dramatic difficulty.

Diatonic - Relating to a major or minor musical scale that comprises intervals of

five whole steps and two half steps.

Diminuendo - Gradually getting softer, the opposite of crescendo.

Dissonance - A mingling of discordant sounds that do not harmonize within the

diatonic scale.

Diva - Literally a “goddess”; generally refers to a female opera star who either
possesses, or pretends to possess, great rank.

Dominant - The fifth tone of the diatonic scale: in the key of C, the dominant is G.

Dramma giocoso - Literally meaning amusing, or lighthearted. Like tragicomedy

it represents an opera whose story combines both serious and comic elements:
Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Falsetto - Literally a lighter or “false” voice; an artificially produced high singing

voice that extends above the range of the full voice.

Fioritura - Literally “flower”; a flowering ornamentation or embellishment of the

vocal line within an aria.

Forte, Fortissimo - Forte (f) means loud: mezzo forte (mf) is fairly loud; fortissimo
(ff) even louder, and additional fff ’s indicate greater degrees of loudness.

Glissando - A rapid sliding up or down the scale.

Grand Opera - An opera in which there is no spoken dialogue and the entire text
is set to music, frequently treating serious and dramatic subjects. Grand Opera
flourished in France in the 19th century (Meyerbeer) and most notably by Verdi
(Aida): the genre is epic in scale and combines spectacle, large choruses, scenery,
and huge orchestras.

Heldentenor - A tenor with a powerful dramatic voice who possesses brilliant top
notes and vocal stamina. Heldentenors are well suited to heroic (Wagnerian) roles:
Lauritz Melchoir in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

Imbroglio - Literally “Intrigue”; an operatic scene with chaos and confusion and
appropriate diverse melodies and rhythms.
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Largo or larghetto - Largo indicates a very slow tempo; Larghetto is slightly faster
than Largo.

Legato - Literally “tied”; therefore, successive tones that are connected smoothly.
Opposing Legato would be Marcato (strongly accented and punctuated) and Staccato
(short and aggressive).

Leitmotif - A short musical passage attached to a person, thing, feeling, or idea

that provides associations when it recurs or is recalled.

Libretto - Literally “little book”; the text of an opera. On Broadway, the text of
songs is called “lyrics” but the spoken text in the play is called the “book.”

Lied - A German song; the plural is “lieder.” Originally German art songs of the
19th century.

Light opera, or operetta - Operas that contain comic elements but light romantic
plots: Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus.

Maestro - From the Italian “master”: a term of respect to conductors, composers,

directors, and great musicians.

Melodrama - Words spoken over music. Melodrama appears in Beethoven’s Fidelio

but flourished during the late 19th century in the operas of Massenet (Manon).
Melodrama should not be confused with melodrama when it describes a work that
is characterized by extravagant theatricality and by the predominance of plot and
physical action over characterization.

Mezza voce - Literally “medium voice,” or singing with medium or half volume; it
is generally intended as a vocal means to intensify emotion.

Mezzo-soprano - A woman’s voice with a range between that of the soprano and
contralto.

Molto - Very. Molto agitato means very agitated.

Obbligato - An elaborate accompaniment to a solo or principal melody that is

usually played by a single instrument.

Octave - A musical interval embracing eight diatonic degrees: therefore, from C to

C is an octave.

Opera - Literally “a work”; a dramatic or comic play combining music.

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Opera buffa - Italian comic opera that flourished during the bel canto era. Buffo
characters were usually basses singing patter songs: Dr. Bartolo in Rossini’s The
Barber of Seville, and Dr. Dulcamara in Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love.

Opéra comique - A French opera characterized by spoken dialogue interspersed

between the arias and ensemble numbers, as opposed to Grand Opera in which
there is no spoken dialogue.

Operetta, or light opera - Operas that contain comic elements but tend to be more
romantic: Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, Offenbach’s La Périchole, and Lehar’s The
Merry Widow. In operettas, there is usually much spoken dialogue, dancing, practical
jokes, and mistaken identities.

Oratorio - A lengthy choral work, usually of a religious or philosophical nature

and consisting chiefly of recitatives, arias, and choruses but in deference to its
content, performed without action or scenery: Handel’s Messiah.

Ornamentation - Extra embellishing notes—appoggiaturas, trills, roulades, or

cadenzas—that enhance a melodic line.

Overture - The orchestral introduction to a musical dramatic work that frequently

incorporates musical themes within the work.

Parlando - Literally “speaking”; the imitation of speech while singing, or singing

that is almost speaking over the music. It is usually short and with minimal orchestral
accompaniment.

Patter - Words rapidly and quickly delivered. Figaro’s Largo in Rossini’s The Barber
of Seville is a patter song.

Pentatonic - A five-note scale, like the black notes within an octave on the piano.

Piano - Soft volume.

Pitch - The property of a musical tone that is determined by the frequency of the
waves producing it.

Pizzicato - A passage played by plucking the strings instead of stroking the string
with the bow.

Polyphony - Literally “many voices.” A style of musical composition in which two

or more independent melodies are juxtaposed in harmony; counterpoint.

Polytonal - The use of several tonal schemes simultaneously.

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Portamento - A continuous gliding movement from one tone to another.

Prelude - An orchestral introduction to an act or the whole opera. An Overture can

appear only at the beginning of an opera.

Presto, Prestissimo - Very fast and vigorous.

Prima Donna - The female star of an opera cast. Although the term was initially
used to differentiate between the dramatic and vocal importance of a singer, today
it generally describes the personality of a singer rather than her importance in the
particular opera.

Prologue - A piece sung before the curtain goes up on the opera proper: Tonio’s
Prologue in Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci.

Quaver - An eighth note.

Range - The divisions of the voice: soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, tenor,

baritone, and bass.

Recitative - A formal device that that advances the plot. It is usually a rhythmically
free vocal style that imitates the natural inflections of speech; it represents the
dialogue and narrative in operas and oratorios. Secco recitative is accompanied by
harpsichord and sometimes with cello or continuo instruments and accompagnato
indicates that the recitative is accompanied by the orchestra.

Ritornello - A short recurrent instrumental passage between elements of a vocal

composition.

Romanza - A solo song that is usually sentimental; it is usually shorter and less
complex than an aria and rarely deals with terror, rage, and anger.

Romantic Period - The period generally beginning with the raiding of the Bastille
(1789) and the last revolutions and uprisings in Europe (1848). Romanticists
generally found inspiration in nature and man. Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805) is
considered the first Romantic opera, followed by the works of Verdi and Wagner.

Roulade - A florid vocal embellishment sung to one syllable.

Rubato - Literally “robbed”; it is a fluctuation of tempo within a musical phrase,

often against a rhythmically steady accompaniment.

Secco - The accompaniment for recitative played by the harpsichord and sometimes
continuo instruments.
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Semitone - A half-step, the smallest distance between two notes. In the key of C,
the notes are E and F, and B and C.

Serial music - Music based on a series of tones in a chosen pattern without regard
for traditional tonality.

Sforzando - Sudden loudness and force; it must stick out from the texture and
provide a shock.

Singspiel - Early German musical drama employing spoken dialogue between songs:
Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Soprano - The highest range of the female voice ranging from lyric (light and
graceful quality) to dramatic (fuller and heavier in tone).

Sotto voce - Literally “below the voice”; sung softly between a whisper and a quiet
conversational tone.

Soubrette - A soprano who sings supporting roles in comic opera: Adele in Strauss’s
Die Fledermaus, or Despina in Mozart’s Così fan tutte.

Spinto - From the Italian “spingere” (to push); a soprano having lyric vocal qualities
who “pushes” the voice to achieve heavier dramatic qualities.

Sprechstimme - Literally “speak voice.” The singer half sings a note and half
speaks; the declamation sounds like speaking but the duration of pitch makes it
seem almost like singing.

Staccato - Short, clipped, rapid articulation; the opposite of the caressing effects
of legato.

Stretto - A concluding passage performed in a quicker tempo to create a musical

climax.

Strophe - Music repeated for each verse of an aria.

Syncopation - Shifting the beat forward or back from its usual place in the bar; it
is a temporary displacement of the regular metrical accent in music caused typically
by stressing the weak beat.

Supernumerary - A “super”; a performer with a non-singing role: “Spear-carrier.”

Tempo - Time, or speed. The ranges are Largo for very slow to Presto for very fast.
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Tenor - Highest natural male voice.

Tessitura - The general range of a melody or voice part; but specifically, the part of
the register in which most of the tones of a melody or voice part lie.

Tonality - The organization of all the tones and harmonies of a piece of music in
relation to a tonic (the first tone of its scale).

Tone Poem - An orchestral piece with a program; a script.

Tonic - The keynote of the key in which a piece is written. C is the tonic of C
major.

Trill - Two adjacent notes rapidly and repeatedly alternated.

Tutti - All together.

Twelve tone - The 12 chromatic tones of the octave placed in a chosen fixed order
and constituting with some permitted permutations and derivations the melodic
and harmonic material of a serial musical piece. Each note of the chromatic scale is
used as part of the melody before any other note gets repeated.

Verismo - Literally “truth”; the artistic use of contemporary everyday material in

preference to the heroic or legendary in opera. A movement from the late 19th century:
Carmen.

Vibrato - A “vibration”; a slightly tremulous effect imparted to vocal or instrumental

tone for added warmth and expressiveness by slight and rapid variations in pitch.
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