La traviata
The pretty woman behind Verdi’s tragedy
Ared camellia in her corsage meant that Marguerite Gautier was menstruating and unavailable for sex; a white camellia meant that she was open to offers. This is the memorable image at the heart of La Dame aux camélias, Alexandre Dumas’s novel – subsequently turned into a play – inspired by his brief affair with the legendary Parisian courtesan Alphonsine Plessis, who died from tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of 23.
The story has become one of the most familiar tropes in Western culture, incarnated on stage by such great actresses as Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, in films ranging from Camille to Pretty Woman,a dozen ballets, including Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, and of course Verdi’s beloved La traviata. Beyond all such mythologising and romanticising, the truth about the girl has also been hunted down in countless biographical studies, two of them published at book length in the past five years alone.
What the historians reveal is that Alphonsine Plessis bore scant relationship to the saintly charmer depicted under various names by the likes of Dumas and Verdi. Born in grinding poverty in rural Normandy, she was the daughter of a psychotically violent and alcoholic peddler, who dragged her off at the age of 14 to Paris, presumably with an eye to exploiting her market value.
But Alphonsine was independent and intelligent: she soon ran away from her father and started working as a laundress, before graduating to a dressmaker’s. Her tough upbringing had given her steely determination, and when she realised that her charms meant that she could choose between a life of honest, unrewarded drudgery and one of comfort, glamour and wealth, she had no hesitation in choosing the latter and joining the enormous number of women in Paris ready to sell themselves for sexual favours.
She knew she was ravishingly pretty: tall and slender, with raven hair, perfect teeth and an ivory complexion. Dumas describes her as “a figurine made from Dresden china” – although that gives the wrong impression of something that could easily be broken. Alphonsine was anything but fragile: at best, she was the 19th-century equivalent of Madonna’s Material Girl: “practical, wilful, grasping and manipulative”, in the words of her biographer Julie Kavanagh.
Lovers were ruthlessly milked for money, and those who didn’t give her enough were sharply dumped. What differentiated her from thousands of others with similarly predatory attitudes was her good mind and her poised sophistication – one of her earliest admirers was Agénor de Guiche, son of the Duc de Gramont, who played Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle and educated her into refined tastes, elegant demeanour and literate conversation. Having changed her name to the posher Marie Duplessis, she could pass for a lady.
Agénor would prove to be only the first of many such titled young aristocrats, similar to Alfredo in Verdi’s opera, who were ordered home by their purse-holding parents in the name of family honour. But over the ensuing five years of her notoriety and fortune, there was always someone waiting in the queue and her stock rose steadily. Among her many “protectors” was Franz Liszt. He had the piano to consider, however, and, having decided that her demands were getting in the way of his genius, he shook her off: perhaps he ranks as the one man she truly loved and couldn’t command.
Eventually, she achieved the zenith of respectability when the besotted Comte Edouard de Perregaux, known as Ned, brought her to England and married her in Kensington register office, elevating her to the rank of Comtesse. But the marriage appears to have been a disaster, and she swiftly deserted him to take up with the less clinging and much wealthier Comte Olympe Aguado, owner of the Château Margaux vineyard.
It couldn’t, and didn’t, last; tuberculosis had taken a grip, and after a few months of frenzied partying and resorting to every quack cure that Paris could offer, she died alone and friendless, having forbidden the doggedly faithful Ned from entering her bedroom. Penniless she was
The real Alphonsine was anything but fragile: she was a 19th-century version of Madonna’s Material Girl
not, however – a four-day auction of her chattels raised a whopping 90,000 francs. Her handsome tomb in the Cimetière Montmartre is still much visited.
Verdi would have known little of all this. His source for La traviata’s libretto is the rather sanitised version of his novel that Dumas wrote for the theatre, conflating his own experience with that of Agénor, Ned and others, inventing two new fictional characters in the process – one being the heavyhanded conventional paterfamilias whose implacable morality puts paid to true love in a rustic idyll; the other being the sweet, gentle innocent Marguerite Gautier, who piously renounces and repents her shady past and decides to live for the love of one man alone – an ironic metamorphosis of the venal, promiscuous socialite that was Alphonsine Duplessis.
Dumas’s play had enjoyed enormous success on the Parisian stage in 1852, but in clerically dominated Italy its subject matter provoked the censor’s red pen. Verdi was therefore obliged to change not only names (Marguerite Gautier becomes Violetta Valéry), but also the historical period, pushing mid-19thcentury Paris back to the
Louis Quatorze era. The camellias aren’t mentioned
– Violetta only drops Alfredo a flirtatious unspecified flower. The title La traviata, incidentally, derives from the verb “traviare”, to wander from the straight and narrow: it is generally considered untranslatable.
The opera’s première in Venice in 1853 flopped, largely because Fanny Salvini-donatelli in the title role lacked the “graceful” physique necessary to make the tubercular heroine plausible. Different casts, however, soon brought it sensational success internationally, and the role of Violetta has continued to offer lyric sopranos one of the greatest challenges in the repertory ever since. All opera lovers have their favourite Violettas, but perhaps two interpretations stand out: in 1957 Maria Callas memorably played her in a sumptuous production directed by Luchino Visconti at La Scala, Milan; nearer our own time, the Romanian Ileana Cotrubas sublimely suggested the frailty and honesty that are essential to the soul of the operatic character, if not the real woman behind it.
Although nothing else by Verdi has such a psychologically and emotionally intimate portrait of a woman at its centre, La traviata is not a feminist manifesto so much as a plea for respect and tolerance. At its heart is the moment in the second scene when Germont first barges in, bristling with prejudice, and Violetta sternly reminds him “Donna son io, ed in mia casa”, “I am a lady, sir, and in my own house”. Callas’s delivery of this line is searingly unforgettable. Some critics have suggested that Verdi had in mind the abuse suffered by his own domestic partner, the former soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, but there is no solid evidence for this identification. What is indisputable is the opera’s passionate humanity – the Biblical injunction “Judge not, that ye be not judged” might well be its message. Musically, it stands in marked contrast to its more visceral and masculine predecessor Il trovatore. Although numbers such as the celebrated “Brindisi” (The Drinking Song) can seem thumpingly coarse, much else in the score is of great subtlety and beauty – notably the extended duet between Germont and Violetta that embraces a complex passage of changing feeling. Above all, this is an opera that speaks directly to the heart, transcending sentimentality to touch a universal and eternal human tragedy.