“When I was a little girl, my mama used to lock me in the attic when I was bad, which was pretty often. And I would- I would pretend I was a princess… trapped in a tower by a wicked queen. And then suddenly this knight… on a white horse with these colors flying would come charging up and draw his sword. And I would wave. And he would climb up the tower and rescue me. But never in all the time… that I had this dream did the knight say to me, “Come on, baby, I’ll put you up in a great condo.”
Vivian, in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman
La Traviata, or the ‘Fallen Woman’, is the type of opera that cannot fail. The structure, the music, the dramatic theme are so well developed that it ranks as an opera that is nearly ‘bulletproof’. A select class of these keep opera in the main stream of even American life, and much of the music is lying barely below the surface in the commercial music of our day. In appreciating this opera in performance, the majority of critical attention follows the soprano heroine. Beside the music written for her role, which is a coveted display of lyric grace for the singer, the arc of the character Violetta is just similar enough to the current understanding of Disney heroine princesses that modern audiences find a version of themselves across the century wide gap since her creation.
Alexander Dumas, fils (the son), is part of a tradition of French romance that includes Victor Hugo, whose creations still live in other operas and even on the broadway stage. These stories are of the ‘ugly duckling’ variety, where post revolutionary people like you and me find that they possess inner nobility, once the monopoly of actual nobility. Tales from the revolutions of post enlightenment hold power over people of our time because we all believe in our inner uniqueness. In the middle of the nineteenth century the middle class was emerging as the dominant economic and political force it would remain, and this meant not only new opportunities, but new voices. Universal literacy was near, and the stories of hitherto invisible people would now be openly considered, buoyed by avid readers following the work of the new novelists producing the ‘romance’, or stories of character. One of these newly public characters was the woman in the world.
Women in the bourgeois social setting of the growing cities, manufacturing centers that pulled apart old social relations, found themselves acting as separate agents. They were no longer, like everyone else, including children in many cases, sheltered in a home that was self sufficient. They were now part of the specializing economy that drew people increasingly to the cities. The new social reality made the life of women public, and brought them into conflict with the problems of trying to make their way as moral agents in an increasingly amoral world. The progression of tales told of these characters moves through stories like Moll Flanders, Manon Lescaut, La Dame aux Camilias, and in our times, the movie Pretty Woman. As in the film’s character Vivian, these characters are all whores. The word may still have the power to shock, and in the time of Daniel Defoe and the publication of Moll Flanders (1722), the story of a woman traveling through life with a succession of men, birthing children and giving them away or selling them, was certainly a grotesque that fascinated by repulsion. In Manon Lescaut (1731, revised 1753), Abbé Prévost depicts a higher quality of life for the woman, whose accustomed lifestyle and feminine qualities require her lover to squander a fortune, and to cheat and steal to keep her. By turns through the invention of human rights most visible in the constitutional revolutions of 1848, these literary characters evolved toward a self established ethical integrity that tended to reflect more on the obligation of men and their misdeeds, vindicating the life of the whore as some sort of robin hood. In the Dumas’ novel La Dame aux Camilias, published in 1848, our heroine Marguerite attends the play adaptation of Manon Lescaut, which establishes a self reflective arc. The whore mourns the whore. By the time we reach the twentieth century, art is imitating art again with the encapsulation of the opera ‘La Traviata’, an adaptation of La Dame…, within the movie Pretty Woman as the young prostitute is introduced to the opera by her rich client. She sees herself there.
This situation remarkably mirrors the fascination of Giuseppe Verdi, who in 1852 saw the play of Dumas’ book, La Dame aux Camilias, and immediately set to work producing an opera with Francesco Maria Piave as his librettist. Verdi was living out of wedlock at the time with Giuseppina Strepponi, by that time a Parisian voice teacher and former soprano star of the operatic world. Verdi, since the death of his first wife and children an agnostic, was living the reasonable life of the modern, or what we might call a bohemian existence like those of many celebrities in our own time who are not bound by social convention. The connection, the vision of the woman on a pedestal yet trapped by her celebrity, was vivid for the composer and by extension for us as his creation premiered in March of 1853 in Venice. It is still exercising its mirror like capacity for us. We encounter a woman who through the application of her charms has acquired wealth and notoriety, living at a feverish social pace of enforced gaiety and high fashion. She is insistently free, an independent woman. She proclaims (sempre libera!), or that she is a ‘self made’ woman, a recognizable stance in our world of self invention. There is, however, a lurking doubt, a shadow of finality and the totality of judgement that accompanies death foreshadowed in the first act. She is crossing the moral threshold into knowledge of her own mortality.
The structure of Dumas’ novel, and not the play, is that of a flashback. We encounter former acquaintances of the ‘Traviata’ in question as they reflect on an estate sale. All of the accumulated riches of the prostitute’s career are about to be auctioned off, and the discussion in the novel is one of discovery — who was this wealthy woman? She had perhaps one love in her life, an adoring follower of a man who arrives months after her death with her final letter in hand. He is too late to comfort her, to reunite their hearts. In fact, the distraught state of loss in this young man leads him to request the body of Marguerite to be exhumed, so that he may confront the finality of their eternal separation. There is a punctuation in the exhumation scene, the revelation of decayed flesh, a used thing that reminds us of the word ‘whore’. Death is the theme, perhaps life and death, but death is the overall meditation by which we take note of the subject’s life. This does not sound like much of a role for the real life ‘self made’ heroines, the creatures of the stage like Sarah Bernhardt, or Strepponi, who would make the play and later the opera indelible. Therefore, some structural modifications take place in the treatment for the theater. Perhaps the mode of presentation is best understood from an outburst given by one of the postmortem voices, that of the narrator in the original novel:
“People would think it childish enough if they saw me lament like this over a dead woman such as she; no one will ever know what I made that woman suffer, how cruel I have been to her! how good, how resigned she was! I thought it was I who had to forgive her, and to-day I feel unworthy of the forgiveness which she grants me. Oh, I would give ten years of my life to weep at her feet for an hour!”
This is the dramatic turn of irony that makes our tragedy a play, moving it from the reflective mind of the reader and onto the boards of the stage. We will spend our time following the fall of the fallen, weeping at her feet, looking up onto the stage. What is the substance of the tragic here? We come to see that the life wrenched from her present, the riches and comfort she enjoys, have come at a cost to her soul. The lady, Violetta, wants to know love in a non trivial sense (La Traviata). Duly, Verdi’s addition of the deathbed scene where in the opera at least, the prostitute extends redemption to the lover who callously rejected her act of sacrifice (the third act — see the opera!), lets us see into the loyalty and virtue which the lady had bravely mustered at last. We can marvel at the evolution of the Italian operatic form that Verdi effects, abandoning classic style and inventing through-composed scenes in order to mirror the inward nature of the drama, as well as what was happening in the literature of his day. Content here dictated form, and the result is enduring.
Why do we care? At the bottom, the drama could not work if there was no struggle. We see that the struggle then was not the struggle required to wrench a comfortable existence from the cold world of individualism as in Moll Flanders, but the struggle to again be true to someone else. Violetta is trying to regain the homeliness of the lost world. The novel leaves us in a truly tragic place, while the opera works to redeem the lovers, and the audience by extension. This may be a violation of classical or Greek standards, where tragedy must stand as the truly cathartic devastation whereby we grapple with life. For the audiences of this day, that one and ours, the cathartic situation is unbearable. The opera La Traviata then is a truly modern conception, where pity reigns, and horror is banished, as opposed to the classical notion of Tragedy.
What about this gravedigging? Is it not that in our world we have seen the grisly face of buried deeds, namely in the #MeToo movement where aspiring females, attempting to wrest their own pinnacle of comfort and safety from the predation of appreciative males, sometimes fail to achieve Violetta-like supremacy? What happens when Robin Hood is arrested? What of our would-be heroines? Do they heroically turn to love and home at last, or do they mourn themselves as they face inevitability? Like our heroine Violetta, the music of the party in the next room eventually fades and the revelers go on to pursue other parties. The more common way of all flesh is especially around us today as the grey morning dawns and the lover has missed the deathbed reunion. Piangi.
Excerpt from La Dame aux Camilias, Alexander Dumas, fils:
As for me, all I can say is that I regretted having come.
When the coffin was uncovered the inspector said to the grave-digger: “Open it.” They obeyed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
The coffin was of oak, and they began to unscrew the lid. The humidity of the earth had rusted the screws, and it was not without some difficulty that the coffin was opened. A painful odour arose in spite of the aromatic plants with which it was covered.
“O my God, my God!” murmured Armand, and turned paler than before.
Even the grave-digger drew back.
A great white shroud covered the corpse, closely outlining some of its contours. This shroud was almost completely eaten away at one end, and left one of the feet visible.
I was nearly fainting, and at the moment of writing these lines I see the whole scene over again in all its imposing reality.
“Quick,” said the inspector. Thereupon one of the men put out his hand, began to unsew the shroud, and taking hold of it by one end suddenly laid bare the face of Marguerite.
It was terrible to see, it is horrible to relate. The eyes were nothing but two holes, the lips had disappeared, vanished, and the white teeth were tightly set. The black hair, long and dry, was pressed tightly about the forehead, and half veiled the green hollows of the cheeks; and yet I recognised in this face the joyous white and rose face that I had seen so often.
Armand, unable to turn away his eyes, had put the handkerchief to his mouth and bit it.
For my part, it was as if a circle of iron tightened about my head, a veil covered my eyes, a rumbling filled my ears, and all I could do was to unstop a smelling bottle which I happened to have with me, and to draw in long breaths of it.
Through this bewilderment I heard the inspector say to Duval, “Do you identify?”
Names and terms in this piece are gathered in the Glossary.
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