A Word From the Director

La Traviata, one of the most beloved operas in the repertoire, is often celebrated for its brindisi, grand parties, and soaring melodies. Yet beneath the champagne and waltzes lies a story of social friction and human fragility. In revisiting Verdi’s masterpiece, our production seeks to draw back the velvet curtain and reveal its enduring themes: class tension, forbidden love, and the paradoxical honor of the outcast.

Verdi saw humanity in people from all walks of life and was drawn to Alexandre Dumas fils’s La Dame aux camélias, itself based on Dumas’s own affair with the courtesan Marie Duplessis. Adamant that La Traviata was a modern story reflecting his own era, Verdi saw an opportunity to humanize a frequently ostracized segment of society: the courtesans. Opera houses initially resisted, preferring the comfort of historical distance. Though the opera premiered in 1853, it was not until the 1880s that Verdi’s full intention was realized, with the settings and costumes of the day finally being showcased.

At the center of our story stands Violetta Valéry. Her fierce determination to experience life in its fullness propels the drama, even as that intensity threatens to consume her. Her famous cry of “Sempre libera” (Always free) is not merely a party anthem; it is a shield – armor she wears to protect herself from the terrifying vulnerability of true intimacy. She understands that to love is to risk great pain, yet she boldly chooses to lay down that armor for Alfredo.

Alfredo’s youthful, reckless devotion, shaped by the optimism and entitlement of station, is intoxicating. Their country home becomes an intimate refuge, a different kind of shield from the outside world. Yet it is Violetta who understands the true cost of their forbidden union, and it is she who protects Alfredo from the consequences.

Into this fragile dynamic steps Giorgio Germont, a man guided by a quiet, unyielding love for his children and a deeply ingrained sense of family honor. He arrives seeing only a “fallen woman,”but he leaves having encountered a woman of profound moral courage The respect Germont develops for Violetta is genuine and hard-won, briefly bridging the chasm between their social worlds.

However, the true antagonist of La Traviata cannot be overcome by courage, sacrifice, or virtue Consumption’s relentless toll cannot be stopped, and Act III unfolds as the all-too-recognizable tragedy of time running out for someone far too young. The consequences of tuberculosis permeated every level of Verdi’s society, as the disease persists globally today, and audiences at the time would have been intimately acquainted with its harsh reality.

As you watch, I invite you to be swept away by the beauty of Verdi’s soaring melodies and the effervescent parties, but most importantly, to see the humanity in the woman at the center of it all: her courage, her sacrifice, and her fierce, fleeting embrace of life.