La Traviata

Of all Verdi’s works, La Traviata is without doubt that which most openly tackles political questions. However, unlike Simon Boccanegra or Un ballo in maschera, the work is also tinged with the scent of scandal. Following the revival of Simon Stone’s version, we look back over the history of Verdi’s unquestionably subversive opera.

From its first performance in Venice in 1853 onwards, Verdi’s most celebrated opera has been tinged with the scent of scandal: the censors objected to the contemporary setting of the plot and obliged the composer to transpose it to the period of Louis XIV. Indeed, audiences could not bear to see their own reflections in the mirror Verdi held up to them: the reflection of a hypocritical society prepared to lead astray – such is the literal meaning of the word traviata – a woman and sacrifice her on the altar of bourgeois morality.

From that time on, the story of Violetta Valery, repentant courtesan, who sacrifices her love for Alfredo to preserve the honour of his family, can be interpreted in two different ways: the first compassionate, consisting in seeing Violetta’s death as her redemption; the other as sketched by Roland Barthes, who analyses the libretto from the angle of social domination, arguing that Marguerite’s (Violetta’s) sacrifice is “a means (far superior to love) of gaining recognition from the world of her masters”. It is a safe bet that the most subversive productions opt for this second interpretation.

The work was first performed in France in 1856 at the Théâtre des Italiens. That this Italian composer, who clearly appreciated French authors, having already set Victor Hugo, should have chosen a libretto inspired by La Dame aux camellias by Alexandre Dumas the younger, was a matter for self-congratulation. Verdi, it was said, took great care over the choice of his singers. During performances at Les Italiens, the critics slated a Violetta “so stalwart that audiences actually laughed when she was obliged to convey with a persistent little cough that she was to die in the last act”.

In 1886, the work transferred to the Opéra-Comique before entering the repertoire at the Palais Garnier in 1926. On this occasion, it was Fanny Heldy who gave voice to Violetta and Georges Thill to Alfredo. They were succeeded by Janine Micheau, Renée Doria, Jacqueline Brumaire, Andrée Esposito, Andrea Guiot, Katia Ricciarelli, Cecilia Gasdia (Violetta); Beniamino Gigli, Nicolai Gedda, Alain Vanzo, Alberto Cupido, Giacomo Aragall (Alfredo) and Ernest Blanc, Robert Massard, Louis Quilico, Gabriel Bacquier, Leo Nucci and Lajos Miller (Germont).

With Franco Zeffirelli’s production in 1986 a whole new genre arrived at the Paris Opera: an opulent and luxurious stage set, with a monumental staircase and Italian-style moiré drapes and floral decorations... If this production has passed into posterity, it is as much thanks to its many revivals the world over as to Zeffirelli's own film version made in 1983 starring Teresa Stratas as Violetta, Placido Domingo as Alfredo and Cornell MacNeil as Germont and conducted by James Levine. A Traviata more lavish than moving? That was the verdict of Le Monde: “It fully satisfies the eye with its opulent sets and marvellous lighting, but scarcely touches on the mystery of tormented souls.”

This “mystery of tormented souls”, did Jonathan Miller’s 1997 production at Opera Bastille touch on it more satisfactorily? Violetta has never appeared more alone or more fragile than on that immense stage. Conducted by James Conlon, Angela Gheorgiu lent her voice to Violetta and Ramon Vargas to Alfredo.

2007 saw a return to the more intimate setting of the Palais Garnier for a production conducted by Sylvain Cambreling and directed by Christoph Marthaler. Beneath Anna Biebrock’s neon lights which created a clinical effect in violent contrast with the theatre's golden hues, the director traced the spasms and starts that betray the hidden impulses of that petit bourgeois society. Opposite Jonas Kaufmann’s Alfredo and José Van Dam’s Germont, Christine Schäfer incarnated a Traviata that was fragile and moving, reminiscent of Edith Piaf. On stage, a silent dancer stripped to satisfy the desires of some, whilst others rushed in to cover her. Did she really exist? She seemed to embody the reality we might wish to silence but which persists, the sight of which is profoundly disturbing.

Seven years later, it was the turn of director Benoît Jacquot to take up Verdi’s masterpiece in order to depict, through the destiny of Violetta, “the Fall of a woman”. In his production, the stage of Opera Bastille was dominated by Manet’s Olympia, a painting that caused a scandal in 1863 because of its subject: a prostitute waiting for a client. A way, perhaps, of recapturing a whiff of the scandal that, ever since it was first performed, seems to have been the mark of La Traviata?    

Marguerite Gautier as penned by Alexandre Dumas; Violetta Valéry in Verdi’s opera. La “Traviata” has provoked much expenditure of ink and made men’s hearts waver. A romantic drama, the opera focuses on the impossible love between Alfredo and Violetta. Impossible because of the marriage of Alfredo’s younger sister to a man from a good family that one can easily imagine to be rather conservative... Of this younger sister we know nothing. What does she understand, shrouded in her white dress and her tulle veil? Writer Gwenaëlle Aubry has given birth to Blanche Duval, “colourless virgin, pale young girl”, who little by little, under pressure from fathers, brothers and husbands, takes on the characteristics of a dead woman, an object of adulation. A docile plaything adorned with camellias, the young bride will not be silenced.

I was born Blanche Duval, a colourless virgin, a pale young girl. My name has disappeared beneath layers of paint and poison. I am she for whom they sacrificed passion. Under this name, I was the chaste sister, the giovine sì bella e pura: that, at least, is what men wanted to make of me. I see them now, my father, my brother, on their return from Paris, wandering about the house, now become a mausoleum, planting the garden with daisies, violets and camellias. And the long, silent meals they drowned in wine. I didn’t understand. I was preparing for my marriage. That was what I had been brought up to do: to prepare for my marriage. To allow myself to be draped in spotless satin and tulle. To be led, a lily flower, a white heiffer, to the altar. You are fortunate, I was told, your future husband is from an excellent family. No vices, no passions. The straight and narrow way, no deviations. And sometimes I saw them, my father, my brother, at the end of the meal, lining up figures on a wine-stained corner of the white tablecloth. I would hear words like “solicitor”, “debts” and “dowry”. Go to bed, they would say to me, this is not a matter for a young lady. Don’t forget to say your prayers. I obeyed. Alone in my room, I prayed to the Virgin, the angels and all the saints. My mother, too, my mother who died young and whose name, Marie, was bound up with that litany. To all of them, finally, I added a name that evoked neither image nor perfume, nothing but flowers quickly dried by the Provencal sun and that my brother ceaselessly replanted: Violetta. Such was the order that my father, on his return from Paris, had given me: to include that name each night in my prayers. It is, he told me, that of a mysterious friend. You owe her your happiness. Never forget that. And do not ask questions. I obeyed. That name, I seemed to have heard it murmured by my brother in the garden, by the old women at the end of Mass, to have seen it floating in the closely shuttered house, over the wine-drenched dinners. A godmother, I said to myself, an unknown aunt. And sometimes, even my mother back again. My mother watching over me from another life. Blanche, as I told you, white as a goose, la giovine sì bella e pura, and eye-wateringly stupid.

The day of my wedding arrived. I was draped in tulle and satin. My eyes half-closed in the dazzling light of the June morning, I let them do as they would, whilst little by little the image of a stranger emerged, hair knotted into a strange and complicated coiffure, lips reddened with a touch of paint, neck adorned with a fine string of pearls. My brother, suddenly, entered my chamber, paler, thinner than ever. He looked at me as if he didn’t recognise me, as if seeing me for the first time: never will I forget that feverish, maddened look; and handed me a camellia of bright scarlet.

“Wear that at your bosom, I beg you, do this for me.” I once again obeyed. The day passed in a sort of daze. I felt light-headed, as if the flower, although odourless, exhaled a poison. It opened little by little in the June warmth, exposing, beneath its scarlet petals, yellow stamens, waxy as diseased flesh. Everyone, it seemed to me, had eyes only for that, could talk only of that: the scarlet stain on my white dress. My husband himself, my young, phlegmatic, shy husband, could not tear his eyes from it. And in the aisles of the church, at the banqueting table, I could still hear, beneath the vows and the hymns, the murmur of that name: Violetta. The hour of our wedding night arrived, for which no mother, no aunt, no mysterious friend had prepared me. Nor for this: my husband, my young, insipidly blond husband, changed into a wild beast, tearing my bodice, masking my face with his hands and ejaculating a name that is not mine.

I learnt quickly. Each night the same ceremony: my husband, my dull husband, placing a camellia between my breasts, a sheet over my face, and through me possessing Violetta. She died beneath that sheet, the white goose, la giovine sì bella e pura. But in her place, night after night, another was born. And she learnt. To disobey. To ask questions. To forget her prayers. To refuse. I, who had always enjoyed indecently good health, night after night, I gave weakness and the vapours as excuses to deny him my bedchamber. But I never failed to appear at mealtimes with a camellia between my breasts. My husband finally gave in:

“If you want to know who Violetta is, you must ask your brother.”

I went one better: one Sunday, in my father’s house, I left the dining table feigning a malaise. The men, the fools, thought I was with child, I could feel it in their concerned looks, tender and humiliating. I went directly to my brother’s room. The curtains were closed, the bed dishevelled, the air heavy with an odour of ether and macerated petals. I opened the windows and there, in the bright light of August, I saw, on the desk, the portrait of a woman of stunning beauty: jet black braided hair, dark eyes fringed with long lashes, lips half open to reveal milk white teeth and in her looks, an expression of ardour mixed with childlike grace. In a drawer that opened easily, letters: those letters that you all know and that I, incredulous, discovered; letters recounting the story from which my own derives, written for me by others but never told to me.

Thus it was, since you ask me, that I penetrated the secret of Violetta. And with it, that of the closely shuttered house, the relentless whispering, the shrouds of tulle and satin – with it the conspiracy of fathers, brothers and husbands.

You now know the secret of my revenge. For avenged I soon would be. Over Violetta or for Violetta I know not. I can no longer distinguish between myself and her. Between the dead object of adulation, whose corpse my brother – my terrifying, cold, crazed brother asked to be transferred from cemetery to cemetery, and my body, so fulsome, white and smooth, but from which sickness will soon erupt to the incredulity of all. Another form of transfer if you like. And one which, alliance or rivalry, unite us, Violetta and myself, within the anonymous earth of women without a name.

Methodically, I first of all took my father’s solicitor as a lover, that chalk-faced old man with his sidelong glances, his voice muffled by a life-time of whispered secrets. I had only to go and see him, all tearful, and tell him I suspected my husband of leading a double life, that I wanted to protect the child I carried from his depravity for him to offer me advice and consolation. From him I quickly learnt certain details that the letters had not revealed to me. And alongside those, the gestures and techniques, the caprices and wiles that would later be the tools of my trade.

“You are prodigiously skilled,” sighed the solicitor, dreamily. His largesse was no longer sufficient for my projects – my grand, my bellicose projects. I convinced him to introduce me to his friends: worthy provincials, noble fathers, devoted brothers, loving husbands, the dreary clientele of a debutante. They all knew my story – that story written for me by others but never told to me. In me they possessed the courtesan and la giovine sì bella e pura, the white goose and the swarthy Violetta, victim and idol. Through me they profaned the altar of their respectability, the rules and rituals that fed their desire and their hypocrisy. How prompt they were, those who had sacrificed Violetta, those who, pretending to sacrifice Violetta for my happiness, had crushed us both, her beneath the weight of their opprobrium, me beneath that of their honour, how prompt they were to bend me to their sombre fantasies. To cover me with money and jewels too. I was ready for the grand stage, the big game: I had the wherewithal to establish myself in Paris. My husband, meanwhile, had learnt to obey and ask no questions: In the beds of those worthies, I had heard enough about the tortuous paths by which his fortunes and family honour had been edified that he was ready to buy my silence with my freedom. He merely made me promise not to soil his name.

I only asked for this: to be done with Blanche, née Duval and well married. Thus was born the woman you know as Rose Du Bois. You soon learnt of her splendour and brilliance, hers was the name bruited about at your parties, your evenings at the Opera, behind your carnival masks, a name that whetted your appetite for scandal and which lovelorn men cried out into the ears of their young brides. Rose du Bois, crowned queen of the night, on a par with Violetta, Rose du Bois, her bosom adorned with cattleyas, and whose blond hair and blooming flesh had finally eclipsed her thin, dark ghost. I had everything, I had almost triumphed. Only my unashamedly good health stood between me and victory. No fevers, no languishing, no hacking cough nor inward pains with me, none of that which (admitted her former lovers) lent to Violetta’s embraces an incomparable flavour of agony. I may well have been recklessly promiscuous, for exorbitant fees, I remained untouched, intact, boringly healthy: Blanche Duval still lived in me.

This has now been rectified. The hour has come to complete my vengeance. How handsome he was, he by whom it was accomplished, the young provincial straight from a respectable family, a devoted son and brother, whose smooth features and soft skin betrayed nothing of his debauchery any more than of his illness. My brilliance dulls, I become shapeless, colourless, but carry an invisible treasure: a strong viral charge that I dispense open-handedly, transmit unstintingly to your fathers, brothers and husbands. A little patience, still: soon all that will remain of me is this consuming memory.

I want neither rose nor cattleya on my tomb: a briar, nothing else.

What do they look at, those spectators, when they come from far and wide to witness the slow mutation of a woman succumbing, body and soul, to putrefying sickness? La Traviata, that grand opera of female tragedy, based on the life of Marie Duplessis, has inspired the novelist Joy Sorman to write a short story with overtones of Alexander Dumas. Once again, bodily strangeness and otherness offer vast narrative potential.    

And yet he'd promised to marry me, sworn it even; he had said, word for word: my love, I swear it.

As if I’d asked for anything.

He knelt down solemnly, took from the breast pocket of his jacket a little domed leather box containing this ring studded with gems that sparkled on my downy finger.
He didn’t say exactly when but added that very soon, as soon as possible, in the spring certainly, we would get married in the country; he spoke of poppy fields, of barrels of well chilled Arbois wine, spit-roasted pigs, an orchestra under a pergola, and I believed him, a perfect stranger.

He wasn’t the first man to have designs on me, I was used to it by that time, I had seen perverts and sadists come and go, I thought I could spot them a mile off now, but him, why I don’t know, I trusted him, I let down my guard; perhaps I fell in love with his diffident air, fell under the charm of his awkward manner, a courteous man, delicate, with beautiful, feline eyes, wide and flecked with amber.
He came every Sunday at eleven o’clock, sometimes bringing me a flower or a bag of violet comfits which he placed at my feet without a word, merely blushing – out of pleasure? Or shame? We barely spoke – visitors pay to pass through the heavy red velvet curtain and look, that’s all – he murmured a compliment – you look radiant this morning, your rosy complexion lights up my day.

I should have been on my guard: how could the man have admired my complexion with a huge red beard devouring my face?
It started at puberty, first a light feathering over my upper lip – nothing to worry about – then a few bristly hairs on chin and cheeks – it was unattractive but it could still pass muster, we pulled them out with tweezers one by one – and towards the age of 15, the village doctor diagnosed irreversible hirsutism. Not satisfied with being a redhead, I had become a bearded lady, with a beard worthy of a Viking, thick and mossy, like a climbing plant little by little invading my face. At first, I cut it, trimmed it and shaved it each day, but seeing it grow back more luxuriant and become thick, a real bush of fire and honey-coloured hair, I gave up.

Then my father sold me to a fair. Having declared me unfit for marriage, ill-suited to having children.
This didn’t come as such a blow: I was to escape working in the fields, escape from a back-breaking life of misery and frustration on the farm as well as from my cantankerous mother and three shrewish sisters; and I hope that the bag of gold pieces my father obtained in exchange for his monstrous daughter improved the lot of my family. Above all, I was to see the big city, my owner – a paunchy man who sported a boater, venal but considerate – being the owner of thirty or so fairground stalls on the Champ de Mars in Paris, an excellent location.

I was installed in a well-appointed caravan – lace curtains, wool mattress, Afghan carpet and a small armchair -, in the section reserved for freaks, in the company of the dwarves, Hans and Frieda, Krao the monkey child and two pairs of Siamese twins from Belgium – all noble souls and pure hearts within the casket of their deformities.
I work from Thursday to Sunday, offered up to all eyes and fantasies; the rest of the week I laze around in bed or wander around Paris, my face hidden by a dark veil; the few pence I have earned throwing myself to the wolves I spend on illustrated magazines, amber to perfume my beard, kohl for my eyelids and boxes of marzipan sweets.

It took me a month or so to accustom myself to the reactions, often vehement, of the spectators: the stupefied, sometimes disgusted, cries of the children who often wriggle out of their parents’ arms to pull on my beard; women who insult me; embarrassed men who are seized with pity for me or slap their thighs on first seeing me; the condescending, scornful or sometimes kindly and tender looks, and even dogs who sniff me with interest, wagging their tails.
I realise that I am eminently exotic in their eyes, a prodigy, one of nature’s rejects that excites their imagination and their senses. Attractive and repulsive, an object of fear and delight, I have been asked by some of them for my autograph, by others to lift up my skirts, nobody remains indifferent to my sexual ambiguity, to my physical deviances.

It took me some time to become aware of the erotic charge I carried within me like a small bomb. I was desired with an inadmissible, brutal desire, by women too, who longed to bury themselves in my beard and seize my breasts.
I am the most sought after woman at the fair.
Only the celebrated Hottentot Venus overshadowed me for a while; the news of her arrival spread throughout the town and the very next day, an hour before the doors opened, a troupe of feverishly excited men had congregated. How could I compete with the woman scientists considered to be the missing link between humans and animals? My beard paled into insignificance beside her spectacular morphology: a magnificent steatopygia, hypertrophy of the hips and buttocks doubled by an extraordinary macronympha, resulting in protruberant sexual organs. The Hottentot Venus fired the imagination, aroused the impulses of even the most apathetic men, and, I who cannot bear anyone to touch my beard, I fumed as I watched people shamelessly squeezing the Venus’s buttocks; she seemed oblivious to everything, so resigned that I was seized with the desire to save her, to take her far away from here. A longing to escape I had never formulated for myself.

A month later, the black Venus had disappeared, no doubt delivered up to other ravenous eyes.

After her departure, the men turned their attention back to me. Was I expecting love? I never perceived it in the shifty-eyed, fleeting glances of the visitors queuing up like dealers at a horse-fair.
There was no lack of propositions however, some of them explicit, crude, backed up by large sums of money, others more circuitous, timid, indirect. Billets doux slipped into my beard or official requests whispered furtively into my ear; from the more churlish the smacking of lips, a wink or an obscene gesture.

I systematically refused, I rejected them, one after the other, even the wealthiest of them: I was determined to give my virginity, not to the highest bidder but to the most delicate.

For I follow in the footsteps of Saint Wilgefortis, the protector of bearded women. She had made a vow of chastity and, when her father wanted to marry her off by force, she implored God’s help and a miracle happened: the very next morning, the young woman found herself with a beard, which immediately discouraged her suitor. Saint Wilgefortis, however, paid dearly, crucified for witchcraft.

And then Rodolfo appeared on the scene, with his gracious manners, his attentions and a sudden proposal of marriage. Perhaps I was tired of that life, I timidly accepted, not really convinced, but over the days that followed, something took shape, densified; I let this new-born love flourish and within a week it had become all-important. I was going to give my maidenhead to a stranger who had not even suggested a romantic meeting outside the fairground. Of course, I ought to have found that suspicious.

The following Sunday I put on my most beautiful dress with a bodice of yellow organdie, made up my eyes, rubbed my beard with oil to make it shine then stuck it with scented rose buds – I was ready, my heart pounding, my resolve taken.
I waited for Rodolpho in vain, it was the first time in months that he had not come. Towards five o’clock in the afternoon, an old woman, gaunt and elegant, in a lilac costume, came through the curtain. She bent down towards my ear and, in an expressionless voice told me that her son Rodolpho was not coming, would never come again, ever. After which she left, without a glance, without the slightest hesitation.
Had he been toying with me or had he taken fright?
I had been very naïve; no point lamenting my plight in spite of the pain that grips my stomach, the searing iron of wounded pride, the loss of love, a miserable sentiment that makes us weep for something we barely possessed.

Was Rodolpho just another well-to-do young man, lacking in courage and audacity, drawing back at the last moment, repressing his desire for the sake of propriety, his joie de vivre to his reputation?

I will not be a victim. Sentiments should be sacrificed, not women; I did not live for love and I shall not die of it. Let my beard preserve me from all sentimentality!
Must I then marry the Elephant-man, a man with no legs, or a sword-swallower? Are freaks and fairground artists doomed to form their own little world, isolated from the properly born, from those who look at us without seeing us?

You need us, you need monsters in order to feel alive; we harlots and dwarfs, the atrophied, the amazons, we bearded women and black Venuses, we make your lives bearable, sometimes beautiful, we people your dreams, being both witch and fairy, protector and temptress.

During the nights that followed, I dreamt a lot about Rodolpho – Rodolpho in a cage, Rodolpho lashed by a whip, Rodolpho tattooed from head to toe, a Lilliputian fitting in the hollow of my hand or tucked into my long beard as if in a nest of ferns. And in the morning I combed that cursed and venerated beard with yet more care than usual, with rage even, perfuming it excessively – magnolia juice, incense sticks and blackcurrant extract, smoothing it for hours or twisting it into little plaits tied up with silken ribbons.
In the mirror I saw that russet fleece wet with tears; I would then draw myself up, assuming a haughty demeanour, a distinguished, theatrical air, before slipping through the curtain to take my place on the little platform, on my padded seat, haloed in the murky light of the oil lamp.

I am the bearded lady, from now on I’m the one watching you.