La Traviata

by Giuseppe Verdi
Houston Grand Opera;
Houston Symphony, Patrick Summers, conductor
Performers listed below.

Operas are often compared to movies. Actually, we’ve done that here on this page a number of times, and it’s a pretty good comparison. In 19th-century Europe, operas were a popular form of large-scale, mass-market entertainment. They featured compelling drama, dazzling effects, stirring music, and superstar performers - just like movies do today.

So it’s not surprising that we also see operas in today’s movies. Remember Cher attending La Boheme with Nicolas Cage in “Moonstruck?” And how about Richard Gere packing Julia Roberts off in his Learjet to see La Traviata, in “Pretty Woman?” There are plenty of other examples both in recent films, and in cinematic classics. For instance, La Traviata also plays a brief but important role in the 1945 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, “The Lost Weekend,” directed by Billy Wilder, and starring Ray Milland. In that one Milland, who won the Oscar for Best Actor, plays an alchoholic writer. Near the beginning he’s trying desperately to stay “on the wagon,” when he goes to the opera. Unfortunately, it’s Traviata, which begins with one of the great drinking scenes of all time. In the Milland character’s booze-driven imagination, the performers on stage turn into dancing bottles, and champagne glasses. Before long he’s off to retrieve his coat - and with it his flask of rye whiskey. He’s portrayed as a tragic victim of his own lifestyle - and in that he’s like like Violetta, the main character in the LA TRAVIATA.

There are other appropriate similarities between the movie and the opera. “The Lost Weekend” was noted for its “realistic” portrayal of people and emotions, in a time when movies were largely an “escapist” form of entertainment. And La Traviata was viewed the same way at its premiere in 1853. In this opera, there are no world-shaping political confrontations, no exotic settings, and no eye-catching special effects - just believable people whose own, all-too-real passions bring them to a tragic end.

This week on NPR WORLD OF OPERA, with Steve Curwood, we’ll hear Verdi’s La Traviata in a production from HOUSTON GRAND OPERA, with Patricia Racette as Violetta (you heard her last week as Margherita in Mefistofele), and Ramon Vargas as Alfredo. And, half-an-hour before curtain, be sure to join Lou Santacroce for NPR’s AT THE OPERA.



Performers:
Patricia Racette, Violetta Valery; Ramon Vargas, Alfredo Germont; Vassily Gerello, Giorgio Germont; Stephanie Novacek, Flora Bervoix; Derrick Parker, Marquis d’Obigny; Scott Hendricks, Baron Douphol; Chad Shelton, Gastone; Christopher Scott Feigum, Doctor Grenvil; Tiffany Jackson, Annina; James C. Holloway, Giuseppe


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