Diaghilev Festival: Traviata

Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on Alexandre Dumas-fils’s play La Dame aux Camélias

The opera was written in 1853. This version will be first performed in Perm in 2016

A co-production by Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre, Unlimited Performing Arts (Denmark), Landestheater Linz (Austria) and Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg (Luxembourg)

A blockbuster operatic melodrama from the most “calm and collected” stage director of our time – a disciple of experimental theatre, the outstanding American director Robert Wilson. His strange, abstract, surreal pictures engender gasps of adulation. The fact that Wilson is to stage an emotional opera from Verdi is already intriguing.  The source of the plot of La Traviata is a novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, which he subsequently adapted for the stage.  A courtesan appearing on stage as the main heroine, who sacrifices her love for a young aristocrat for the sake of his happiness and career, was perceived by the Minister of Police as undermining public morals. The matter was complicated by the fact that the inspiration behind the character of the courtesan was a real person – a demi-monde lady, known in the salons of Paris, and Dumas fils’ mistress. As a result, the play was banned from the stage in France for a long time. Verdi provoked no less public outcry subsequently and was responsible for putting a heroine with such questionable social status on opera stage for the first time.