The Met vet is set

Before the first plaintive strains of music are heard in Verdi’s La Traviata, a gentleman with long white hair and beard to match takes his seat next to a giant clock at the side of the Metropolitan Opera stage.

He will remain in view through much of the opera, a mostly silent presence looming over Violetta as she enacts her tragic story.

“You could call him fate, you could call him the inevitable, basically sort of a timekeeper, constantly showing up,” said James Courtney, the veteran bass-baritone who plays the character Doctor Grenvil. In the original libretto the doctor is a minor character, but he has been given a vastly expanded role by director Willy Decker, whose starkly modern production created a sensation at its première in Salzburg, Austria, in 2005. That production is getting its last revival at the Met and will be broadcast live in HD to movie theatres worldwide on Saturday.

Courtney said the doctor’s somewhat enigmatic character makes it “interesting, because it isn’t so clear-cut, and that’s fun. … Since you’re not singing anything, you have to do it through your presentation of yourself onstage.

“A lot of people ended up asking me, ‘What are you doing out there?’ So it sort of became a running joke backstage that I’m Doctor Death.”

Courtney does sing the few lines assigned to Grenvil in the final scene, when he examines the dying Violetta. Earlier, his role in the ensembles is sung by a character known simply as A Guest.

Courtney is a “comprimario,” a singer who specializes in supporting roles, often with just a few solo lines.