La Traviata

Violetta Valéry knows: Her time is running out. She is sick; she is going to die. She throws herself into life one last time and wants to love—for the first and last time. She puts all her eggs in one basket for Alfredo. But in his world, there is no place for a woman like her. Before she dies, she gives her own story a title, thereby shaping the image that will remain of her: La traviata, the one who has strayed from the path. Giuseppe Verdi had a soft spot for outsiders, to whom he dedicated his three greatest successes—the so-called “trilogia popolare”: In *Rigoletto*, he makes a court jester the title character; in *Il trovatore*, he places the wandering singer Manrico at the center. In his third classic of popular theater , *La traviata*, he goes a step further and draws inspiration from a real woman: the famous Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis, who died young of tuberculosis. Gradually, 19th-century authors turned her life into a story: Alexandre Dumas incorporated her into his novel *The Lady of the Camellias*. Verdi distanced the story even further from Duplessis’s biography and romanticized her into a tragic icon. But who is the woman in *La traviata* beyond the kitsch, clichés, and romanticized victim narrative? Who lies behind the image that others created of her? Director Victoria Stevens sets out on a quest for clues in an opera evening that dazzlingly unfolds across different time periods and interpretive layers, revealing what the opera conceals about its protagonist.