There was a time when opera was anathema to me. To hear shrieking and warbling sopranos sing unintelligible words in tediously long pieces was near-torture when the summit of my musical pleasure was listening to chamber music. But tastes change and evolve through the years.
It was going to performances at Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House that strengthened my appreciation of what is known in Italy as ‘La Lirica.’ While I doubt that I would again attend a complete performance of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ I shall happily go to any Mozart opera umpteen times and also several nineteenth century warhorses for opera has for many years now become a staple dish of my musical dinner-table.
I am particularly glad to be living in an age where H(istorically) I(nformed) P(erformances) are standard for baroque music and where HIP tenets have influenced more recent works. Those quavering sopranos seems rarer these days thankfully
Last night’s ‘La Traviata’ at Covent Garden, conducted by Keri-Lynn Wilson and starring Kristina Mkhitaryan as Violetta was a rewarding interpretation of this radical opera. Radical because to glorify a hooker was considered immoral at the time. No approval of ‘pretty women’ in those days! Even Queen Victoria was not amused although the work’s transcription lay open on her piano. So Verdi, who wanted his opera performed in a modern setting, had to transpose the story historically to the seventeenth century. Radical because the music reaches a passionate intensity never before achieved in opera. Without ‘La Traviata’ (does this word mean a ‘fallen’ or does it signify a ‘misguided’ woman?), there would have been no Puccini or indeed any Italian operatic ‘verismo’. As soon as Verdi had seen Dumas junior’s play ‘La Dame aux Camelias’ he knew he had a potential libretto with intense dramatic emotion. Piave, his librettist was invited to the composer’s country estate near Parma to work on the text and ‘La Traviata’ was first staged at Venice’s ‘La Fenice’ in 1853. (Incidentally Dumas wrote his novella a few miles down the road from where we live in Italy).
For me, some of the opera’s most touching moments come when Verdi gets his Violetta to halt her song and speak against a soft instrumental background. This style known as ‘melodrama’ adds so much to the last heart-breaking moments of this, one of the most performed of all operas. She is after all at this stage too weak to sing because of her congenital tuberculosis.
Mkhitaryan was quite phenomenal in her title role. No slavonic waverings here. Coloratura and expression combine in her truly soprano-spinto voice which ranges from the quietest ‘sotto-voce’ plangency to the most dramatic outbursts. (I wonder if she, as a Russian, declared her opposition to the current leader of her native country in order to avoid being black-listed, like another of her professional colleages). Indeed all the principal singers were outstanding especially Liparit Avetisyan as Violetta’s screwed up lover Alfredo.
There was a time when, avoiding the city’s heavy traffic we would ride to Covent Garden on my motorbike. Our tickets then cost a mere £2 for an upper slip seat on a somewhat flimsy and vertiginous bench. Those days, together with my Honda Transalp, have long since gone. Yet my love for opera whether it themes a heroic baroque battle between eastern potentates, a sly conspiracy between rococo servants or a passionate death in a biedermeyer salon remains inviolate.
Like a fish and chips lunch in Greenwich an operatic evening at Covent Garden for me is an essential ingredient in any menu of events when staying in London.
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