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Updated: May 31, 2025
He put her down in the playpen, turned off the TV, and played La Traviata. Pavarotti's voice swelled through the house. "Listen to that, Emma!" He stroked Verdi and watched the lowering clouds. Jennifer came home full of enthusiasm and plans. "Eric is having a party!" "Hot diggety." "It will be fun! And lots of Conservancy people will be there. I really have to go. And I think it's good for Emma."
Around the gridiron we marched once, the band still clinging to "Traviata" and the fellows singing whatever pleased them, generally "Up the Street." Then we had a snake dance, a wonder of a snake dance! The band got lost in the shuffle, but later on we found him standing serene and undismayed under the shadow of the west stand spouting "Auld Lang Syne" till you couldn't see.
"That youth with languishing brown eyes, who parted his 'hyacinthine tresses' in the middle of his head; whose moustache required Ehrenberg's strongest glasses and who absolutely believed that Ristori singled him out of her vast audiences as the most appreciative of her listeners; who was eternally humming 'Ernani' and raving about 'Traviata. Your memory is treacherous as your conscience?
Yet I am told they are devoted to each other." "Not unlikely. See how the woman smiles when the Hebe speaks to her! Wonderful fascination in that face. Just the person to carry away a man like Hope." Here the conversation was broken off by an impatient outburst of the audience. In obedience to it the curtain rolled up, and the first act of "Traviata" commenced.
The singer was ending her encore from "La Traviata" when he went down the iron stairs. Elodie met him punctually, for they had agreed to avoid the dreary wait. As soon as the stage was set and the curtain up, he went on and was greeted by a round of applause. Somehow the word had been passed round the populace that formed the Olympia clientele.
"Il Trovatore" was stupendously successful; "La Traviata" made a woful failure. Verdi seems to have been fully cognizant of the causes which worked together to produce the fiasco, though he was disinclined at the time to discuss them. Immediately after the first representation he wrote to Muzio: "'La Traviata' last night a failure. Was the fault mine or the singers'? Time will tell."
"La Traviata" was produced in 1853, says the learned Grove, which I have consulted on the point, and "Aïda" not till 1871. And though Verdi was not young, for an ordinary man, in 1871, he was very young indeed for the composer of "Falstaff" and "Otello"; while in the "Traviata" period one can scarcely say he was doing more than cutting his teeth, and not his wisdom teeth.
In this respect, indeed, there is some relationship between "La Traviata" and "Der Freischutz" though this is an observation which will probably appear as far-fetched to some of my critics as Dr. Basevi's does to me. There were other reasons of a more obvious and external nature for the failure of "La Traviata" on its first production.
One finds it difficult to understand how ever the thing came to be tolerated by musicians. Of course the desire to find a counter-blast to Wagner has done much for Verdi; but while one can understand how Dr. Stanford and others hoped to sweep away "Parsifal" with "Otello" and "Falstaff," it is not so easy to see what on earth they proposed to do with "Traviata."
In the last act Violetta dies of consumption after an affecting reconciliation with her lover. The music of 'La Traviata' is in strong contrast to Verdi's previous work. The interest of Dumas's play is mainly psychological, and demands a delicacy of treatment which would have been thrown away upon the melodramatic subjects which Verdi had hitherto affected.
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