The season’s opening night at Washington National Opera is always filled with excitement, but there were several elements that caused the atmosphere around Saturday evening’s La traviata to be especially electrifying. The audience brought with them both a heightened eagerness for escape into music and timeless art and an energy that threatened to erupt at all times.
Many familiar Washington faces filled the Opera House that evening and more than a few political luminari. There was Nina Totenberg, NPR’s Supreme Court reporter and veteran of the political wars in Washington, who, when asked how she was doing by a friend, tilted her head sideways and pressed her lips together. After the tortuous week of Kavanaugh hearings, she and we have had, it was as if she was channeling Steve McQueen’s character escaping Devil’s Island, “I’m still here!”
That very sentiment of desperate defiance might very well have been the through-line subtext for the central character in this stunning new production of La traviata.
When the audience rose to their feet for the traditional opening night singing of the “Star Spangled Banner,” was I the only one who felt a special irony? At its end, a rumble went through the audience and a few detectably nervous titters.
The blood-red curtain that filled the proscenium, featuring a bold graphic design of eyes that stared down on us, first read as modern classic chic. (The sweep of the heavily-lined eyes with mascara reminded me a little of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.) But when the music started and the curtain lifted, the eyes remained on the scrim for some time, and those became the eyes of a woman staring at us— eyes of both a victim and an accuser.
This is how Artistic Director Francesca Zambello framed her production of the timeless tragic love-story-turned-opera, Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata, based on the 1848 novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux Camélias. The eyes confront us to look again at the story. It’s an old one but speaks to us today: an attractive woman may become a play thing for entitled men, but she can have no claims and must be thrust aside and (in this story) left to die alone.
Into only a few bars of the overture, we are transported not, as usual, into the drawing room of Paris’ most dazzling courtesan, Violetta Valéry, but rather fast forwarding to the end of her life, in a tubercular ward.
In making the story a flashback of her life during Violetta’s last days, Zambello has supported her interpretation by mining Verdi’s own musical cues, for the two themes played in this prelude are both tragic, the first from the last bedside scene of the dying Violetta, and the second, this courtesan’s equally dramatic parting from her lover Alfredo.
Zambello’s staging was stark and spared no details of the horror and isolation of this disease. One of the three beds was emptied of a corpse during the course of the overture. In addition to the victims of what was then called consumption, the only people on stage were the nuns, unsung heroic women who cared for the dying, Violetta’s faithful companion, and a solitary good doctor.
Violetta’s story unfolds as a memory infused by drugged delirium. As she climbs out of her hospital bed, the ward dissolves, and the entire chorus enters, filling the space with candlelight and physically transporting us to a sumptuous soiree.
The layers of design are built before our eyes with a saturated palette, but more macabre than bright. Set design by Peter J. Davison features black scrolling on the walls. Tony Award Winning designer Jess Goldstein used burgundy, purples and burnt umber in the rustling satin ball gowns. Everything points to Fall, a season of last gasps of brilliance and dying.
We are never allowed to forget that death has already claimed Violetta. It gives special poignancy to our heroine’s reckless defiance and determination to grab at life while she can. Violetta and Alfredo have just met, and while he launches into “Libiamo, libiamo, ne’ lieti calici,” a toast to love, she clambers onto a long dining table. He climbs up at the far end, and they half dance, half stagger toward each other.
By the end of this scene, our heroine has collapsed, the doctor who is present is all too ready to drug her up and get her back on her feet for more carousing, and Alfredo’s loving ministrations seem in this production just another pull on her feverish life. Parker Esse’s choreography creates something nightmarish, like a vampire orgy, as the party guests’ arms snake out and coil around her as if to pull her down and engulf her. Are they feeding off her, or is she like some painting by Edward Munch, needing their life blood?
[adsanity_rotating align=”aligncenter” time=”10″ group_id=”1455″ /]
It’s no wonder that with all this, neither the singing nor we the audience settled down in the first act. The final duet of the lovers seemed slightly off-kilter, and I was distracted by Alfredo flipping in and out upstage through what seemed like revolving doors. When the act ended, the audience erupted in agitated talk – and that talk didn’t stop throughout an inordinately long scene change. Had the opera struck some nerve or had it made the spectators angry? Was the usually staid Washington society at last going to riot?
In Act II, the singing settled beautifully, and a more traditional La traviata presented itself, complete with a magazine-cover perfect Tuscan Country set.
The three leads were all making their WNO debuts. As Violetta, Venera Gimadieva’s voice blossomed with greater warmth in this act, and her performance in totality proved she possessed an impressive range and coloration. I was spellbound by her farewell aria. Of equal worth to modern audiences, and unlike the opera’s original corpulent soprano in 1853, Gimadieva did not strain all credulity. This beautiful Violetta found exquisite moments physically embodying both the character’s pathos and wild desperation and by the end dissolving into a will o’the wisp.
Joshua Guerrero as Alfredo Germont seemed in Act I to be a modern young man who had walked into a party in the wrong century. While the other elegantly-attired men carried themselves with that erect, high-centered reserve, he pushed forward into space, more like an angry young activist. In Act II, Guerrero settled and sang two arias beautifully – first in the melodious, reflective “De miei bollenti spiriti” about his maturing love and then delivering the much more passionate and agitated aria when he realizes his folly in allowing himself to be a kept man by the woman who is sacrificing everything for him.
Lucas Meachem sang Georgio Germont, Alfredo’s father, with impressive ringing tones. From his first entrance, he seemed to clearly carve out his intentions and relationship with Violetta. Their scene was both a dramatic and musical highlight of the evening. I might have liked his performance more to have “broken the vertical” physically but perhaps this was the direction for his upper-class ramrod and aloof superiority.
In this production, the two men and certainly all the other characters are more shadows in Violetta’s memory than substantive beings in their own right. Violetta is the center of the production, and her torturous and feverish journey seems to wind solo into death.
Conductor Renato Palumbo, a skilled veteran of Italian opera, guided the orchestra and chorus most elegantly and surely. He provided the sweep of Verdi’s emotional music from the breathless fever to the lush, romantic lines.
I caught up with eight-year old twins Walter and Penn, whom I’d met entering the building. Already season veterans at the Kennedy Center, they were eager to be entertained. “Well?” I asked. Both enthusiastically responded, “ We really loved the music.”
La traviata continues through October 21 with an opportunity to see three casts, including one performance with the Domingo-Cafritz singers-in-training and three with a graduate of the same program, one of my favorites, Jacqueline Echols as Violetta.
La Traviata. Composed by Giuseppe Verdi. Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. Based on Alexandre Dumas’ play La Dame aux Camélias. Stage Direction by Francesca Zambello. Conducted by Renato Palumbo. Set Design by Peter J. Davison. Lighting Design by Mark McCullough. Costumes Design by Jess Goldstein. With Venera Gimadieva, Joshua Guerrero, Lucas Meachem, Deborah Nansteel, Alexandria Shiner, Arnold Livingstone Geis, Michael Hewitt, Samuel Weiser, Timothy J. Bruno, Aurelio Dominguez, Rob McGinness, Spencer Adamson, and the Washington National Opera Chorus, Dancers and Orchestra. Produced by Washington National Opera. Presented in the Kennedy Center Opera House. Reviewed by Susan Galbraith.
You must be logged in to post a comment.