‘It’s got everything’: why we’re still in love with this Traviata after 25 years

The director Richard Eyre doesn’t boast about his own productions but two in particular make him cry. One is Mary Poppins, the bestselling musical currently back in the West End. “I always weep at the end,” admits this giant of British theatre, former director of the National Theatre, with countless stage and screen credits to his name. “When Mary flies up over the audience I find myself looking up through a veil of tears.” The other is Verdi’s La Traviata, the impassioned tale of the beautiful, doomed Violetta, one of the most popular tear-jerker operas of all time.

Eyre’s magnificent 1994 staging opens at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on Tuesday, the 25th anniversary of the production. By the end of this latest run, a total of 34 different sopranos will have sung Violetta, the tragic “fallen woman” of the title. Her nickname, the “lady of the camellias”, is from the novel by Alexandre Dumas fils on which the opera is based. She suffers the ravages and red-cheeked pallor of consumption: the “white death” – pulmonary tuberculosis – which still had no medical identity and no cure when Verdi wrote his opera in 1853. So what makes us love this story of betrayal and heartbreak so much?

“Sex and death,” Eyre says bluntly. “A beautiful woman. A callow man. Romantic love. An interfering father. Moral choices. Sickness. Loneliness. It’s got everything.” His ROH production, with sumptuous belle époque designs by Bob Crowley, ranks as one of the company’s top blockbusters. With lavish costumes, architecturally magnificent sets and a grand champagne party, a casino scene, tumbling, dancing and big choruses, Eyre and Crowley have maximised every detail of the drama. “I’ve sent a lot of people who don’t know any opera to La Traviata,” Eyre says. “And they’ve come away amazed, transformed by the power of story and music.”

Given the popularity of La Traviata – 900 performances in various productions around the world last year alone – a music critic sees as many Traviatas in a career as a theatre critic might see Romeo and Juliet. After at least a dozen encounters with the Royal Opera’s, I haven’t tired of it. Nor has Oliver Mears, the ROH’s director of opera, who keeps a sharp eye on the quality and validity of each revival.

Longstanding productions of favourite operas are nothing new. Two Puccini favourites, La Bohème (by John Copley) and Tosca (by Franco Zeffirelli) each ran for four decades at the Royal Opera before being retired. The same composer’s Turandot, from a 1984 production by Andrei Serban, was still going strong in 2017 and will surely return (not just because of the Nessun dorma aria).

“Opera is a living, breathing art form, not a museum,” says Mears. “We can’t just place dusty artefacts on the stage, year after year. Each time I see this Traviata I ask myself, is it holding up, is it still alive? I can say, hand on heart, it absolutely is. The clarity of the staging, the exquisite designs still work their magic. And it provides a showcase for the best singing in the world.”

An evergreen revival like La Traviata is vital to the Royal Opera’s coffers. Sets and costumes already exist. The chorus and orchestra know the music. The chief expense is the soloist and conductor. “A big hitter like Traviata helps offset the costs of less familiar or more experimental work,” Mears says, citing new productions, in spring 2020, of Janácek’s Jenůfa and Gerald Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

A quarter of a century ago this Traviata production nearly didn’t happen. It was Eyre’s first operatic venture. He was invited by Georg Solti, the internationally revered conductor “who had seen my Guys and Dolls at the National”. Eyre wasn’t keen. He disliked opera. “I had an unreasonable prejudice against the art form. I thought the truth of theatre was in the spoken word – in which I’d invested my working life. I was running the National! The logic was that opera seemed to me wholly, preposterously untruthful.”

He soon changed his mind. “And as I worked on Traviata I came to realise what a ridiculous view that was, like blaming tennis for not being football, or an orange for not being a lemon. Opera has its own truths, its own glories, and of course the most extraordinary, fabulous music. To my astonishment, and his shame, Solti had never conducted the work. He told me he had always thought of Traviata as ‘not first-rate Verdi’ and he wanted to apologise to Verdi for this terrible misjudgment – quite rightly, I think.”

Eyre insisted on having a “great-looking woman with a lively, wonderful voice” for Violetta. The unknown Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu, who created the role in this production, became an overnight superstar. The BBC cleared its schedules to broadcast the opera. In addition to Eyre and Solti, the “clincher”, according to Peter Maniura, the BBC TV director at the time, was Gheorghiu. Would Eyre make such specifications about his choice of singer now? Would he get away with it? Body shaming is a highly sensitive issue in opera.

“You mean asking for a fabulous-looking woman? Well, we’re talking about someone who made her living through selling her body. Sex for cash. I’m not saying it’s an admirable thing for a society to do, but it’s what she did. Dumas’s La dame aux Camélias was based on a real woman, Marie Duplessis. She was sold to a man when she was 12 and went to Paris when she was 15, and became a grande horizontale – a courtesan. She died, like Violetta, of tuberculosis, when she 23, having been admired, and kept, by countless very rich men. She was clearly infinitely desirable.”

Eyre has not revived the show himself for some years – the task in the past decade has often fallen to former ROH staff director Andrew Sinclair – but returns frequently. “I saw Plácido [Domingo] this year. He acted the key part of Germont père absolutely brilliantly: the nuances, the complexities, the moral uncertainties, the journey the character makes throughout that extraordinary [second] act. It’s as complex as Shakespeare. Verbally and musically and psychologically, it’s one of the great scenes in all opera.”

The sopranos who have sung Violetta for this staging so far reads like a roll call of world opera, Renée Fleming and Anna Netrebko among them. One who, like Gheorghiu, became am overnight sensation was Ermonela Jaho, now in demand worldwide. All but unheard of, she jumped in for an indisposed Netrebko and had to sing with the world’s leading tenor, Jonas Kaufmann, as her lover Alfredo. “I had come on an overnight flight from New York,” Jaho says. “I was trying to catch up on sleep when the call from the ROH came saying I was on in a few hours. I hadn’t even seen the sets until I walked on stage.”

As a teenager growing up in communist Albania, Jaho decide to make singing her career specifically having seen La Traviata. “I was 14. It was the first opera I’d ever been to. I went with my brother. It was like falling in love with this passionate, volcanic music. I said to him, I’m absolutely and certainly going to die if I don’t sing La Traviata in my life.” Since that ROH debut, and now with a worldwide following, she has sung about 300 Violettas.

“I wonder how much more to sing the role,” Jaho asks herself. “You pour all your experience, all your life’s pain, into Violetta’s story. It’s universal, it’s about human feeling, it’s about connecting with one another. We need this today more than ever. I have dug deep, and sung the end, when she is so ill, with such feeling that I have not always been able to control my emotions.” Currently busy singing Desdemona in another Verdi opera, the Royal Opera’s Otello, her next Traviata is in Munich in February. Five sopranos will sing Violetta at the ROH between now and March, in 21 performances with four different casts: the Armenian Hrachuhí Bassénz, the Azerbaijani Dinara Alieva (making her Royal Opera debut), the Russian Kristina Mkhitaryan, the Polish Aleksandra Kurzak and another Russian, Vlada Borovko. Who will best convey the psychological strength and physical vulnerability of this most challenging of roles? All eyes and ears, especially, will be on 31-year old Borovko, a former ROH Jette Parker Young Artist. She sang the role for the company, stepping in at an hour’s notice, in 2016. Now she’s up there with prime billing.

And that weepy moment for Richard Eyre? “The bass drum signals Violetta’s death. Against this darkest of music her voice soars up brilliantly, passionately. It’s like witnessing the agonies of a dying bird. This piece speaks for a profound need in people for open-hearted emotion.” He blinks hard as he speaks. “ Don’t we all enjoy a good cry?”

La Traviata is at the Royal Opera House from 17 December until 23 March 2020. Tickets are available from £11 to £225.