La traviata

Abstract The cast at the premiere included Fanny Salvini Donatelli (Violetta), Ludovico Graziani (Alfredo), and Felice Varesi (Giorgio Germont). By April 1852 Verdi had agreed to write a new opera for the Carnival 1853 season at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, with Francesco Maria Piave as librettist. But even as late as October no subject had been decided upon: the unusually tight schedule was due in part to Verdi’s continuing work on fl trovatore, the premiere of which in Rome eventually took place less than two months before that of La traviata. By the beginning of November, however, Verdi and Piave had elected to base their opera on Dumas jils’ play, which had first been performed in Paris earlier that year. The working title of the opera, later changed at the insistence of the Venetian censors, was Amore e morte (‘Love and Death’). As Verdi wrote to his friend Cesare De Sanctis on I January 1853, it was ‘a subject of the times. Others would not have done it because of the conventions, the epoch and for a thousand other stupid scruples’. The composer even proposed that, contrary to custom, the opera should be performed in modern costume; but again the Venetian authorities would not agree, and the period was put back to the beginning of the eighteenth century.