Opera Review: La Traviata, Musica a Palazzo, Venice

Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, which tells the tragic story of a fallen woman based on La dame aux Camélias (1848) by Alexandre Dumas, fils, had its very first performance in Venice in March 1853. So it seemed fitting that on my visit to one of the world’s most beautiful cities, the Secret Victorianist should take in a sumptuous and unusual production of this opera classic.

Inside the Palazzo Barbarigo Minotto

Away from the bright lights of Venice’s opera house – La Fenice – which seats a thousand and was home, in an earlier incarnation, to the La Traviata premiere, the Musico a Palazzo has made a name for itself by staging famous operas in the intimate setting of the Palazzo Barbarigo Minotto, a fifteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal.

Each act of Verdi’s opera was performed in a different room of the piano nobile of palace, with the building’s beautiful furniture and decorations, including frescoes by Gianbattista Tiepolo, providing an incredible backdrop for the tragedy.

The audience takes its seats for Act Two

The opera’s cast was cut down so that there were only three singing roles, adding to the sense of closeness between the audience and the performers. It was fascinating to see the singers up close rather than from a distant balcony, or when sat far back in an auditorium, and it was equally revealing to have a clear view of the musicians (a string trio and pianist), who are usually hidden in an orchestra pit.

What was particularly interesting for me, as a Victorianist, was how closely the experience seemed to replicate that of a nineteenth-century musical salon. I felt more of a guest in the palazzo than in any other historic house I have visited, in Venice or elsewhere. There is no ‘please don’t sit’ or ‘do not touch’. You’re part of the performance along with a small group of people – local and from all over the world – gathered here on this one night.

The cast for the performance the Secret Victorianist attended

Drinks, served at the first intermission and included in the entrance price, add to this feeling. There’s no mad rush to the bar and people seemed quite happy to mingle and talk about the performance.

What’s lost, of course, is much of the story of the opera being performed, and some of the music. This isn’t the kind of production that is going to provide you with English surtitles, and the cuts to the cast make the plot loose to say the least. It’s better to think of it as a dramatic concert in a stunning building – a chance for opera fanatics to immerse themselves in Violetta and Alfredo’s world, and for those new to the art form to appreciate an Italian passion in these glorious Venetian surroundings.

'Violetta's bedroom' in Act Three

If you’re looking for a romantic evening in Venice, or just to enjoy some beautiful music in a unique way, I’d really recommend it.

Membership to the Musica a Palazzo (necessary to attend a performance) is €75 and you can see the calendar of performances here.

Do you know of any New York City productions with a nineteenth-century twist you think the Secret Victorianist should see? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Review: Life's Little Ironies, Thomas Hardy (1894, revised 1927)

This collection of short stories is in some ways a marked contrast from the last I reviewed (by Dumas). Hardy’s tales are quiet, understated and unmistakably English – yet overall, perhaps, even more haunting. Here heads don’t roll but tragedies are just part of everyday life, shared with a sigh between strangers in a carrier’s cart. A woman falls in love with a man she will never meet, a son destroys his mother’s last chance of happiness, two brothers watch and do nothing as their drunken father drowns in front of them.

William Strang's 1893 portrait of Thomas Hardy

For general readers: This collection is Hardy in a nutshell – sensitive to place and people, and able to convey both with a wonderful brevity. I found it best to take Life’s Little Ironies in small doses and the volume is open to charges of gloominess. But there is humour here too, be this the farcical predicament of a cheat who has all three of his lovers hiding in his cart at once, or the darker humour suggested by the collection’s title. Hardy’s stories are memorable. They read like secular parables, with unclear morals – instantly familiar, but far from comfortable. There’s true realism here too. Hardy’s characters are like us, despite their deep affinity with a way of life which has all but passed away. They have sex, they fantasise over photographs, they get carried away dancing at parties and then they marry the wrong people and regret it.

For students: I’d recommend this volume to students of creative writing as much as those working on nineteenth-century literature. Hardy brims with material which makes good stories – you have the feeling he’d be great at workshop exercises – and he uses a range of narrative techniques in the volume, including a framing device similar to that of Dickens’s use of Mrs Lirriper. For those working on canonical Hardy, ‘An Imaginative Woman’ (1893) is probably the best individual story to read for comparison with heroines such as Sue Bridehead (in Jude the Obscure (1895)) and Eustacia Vye (in The Return of the Native (1878)). The heroine of this story also recalls Henrik Ibsen’s Nora (from A Doll’s House (1879)) and Hedda Gabler (1890). Meanwhile both this and other stories in the volume touch on Hardy's interest in heredity and cousinship discussed in an earlier blog post.

Which lesser known work of nineteenth-century should I review next? Let me know below or on Twitter (@SVictorianist) and don't forget to LIKE the Secret Victorianist on Facebook.

Review: One Thousand and One Ghosts, Alexandre Dumas (1849)

This small collection of short stories, linked by their retelling at a dinner party gathered under gruesome circumstances, is an eerie read. Dumas’s novella is about points of crossover – between life and death, science and superstition, the body and the soul, reality and fiction. Heads roll but continue talking, a vampire pierces his victim at night, criminals return to hang the hangman. Dumas begins (and ends) matter-of-fact-ly - the narrator is none other than the writer himself. What is terrifying is the commonness of these tales, despite their strangeness.

The guillotine

For the general reader: This isn’t gripping from page one, but the relatively slow opening is soon succeeded by an array of memorable and haunting stories once the scene is set. The intrusion of murder into the everyday is sudden and startling, and the initial, almost detective story opening, is replaced by a world in which nothing is certain and there are more questions than answers. Little is wrapped up, and while the guests may pose questions about the nature of existence, they certainly come to no conclusions. I found this gory enough to still be effective in a somewhat desensitised age. Highly recommended (if not for bedtime reading!).

For students: As well as (obviously) appealing to anyone with an interest in the Gothic, the novella is also an interesting example of literary responses to the French revolution, with its preoccupations with the guillotine, political intrigue and the lingering effects of national violence. Its viscerality (an eight year old drowning in the trough of blood at the Place de la Révolution, a worker being dragged into quicklime by the bodies of kings excavated from their graves) is in stark contrast to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which also deals with the threat of execution. The narrative technique employed for the dinner party stories reminded me of Wells’s (later) The Time Machine (1895), where occasional returns to the ‘real’ setting suddenly catapult the reader back to the ‘present’ in the same way. It could also be interesting to consider how the narration is gendered. The final story (and only one narrated by a female character, the pale and listless Hedwige) is very distinct from the others in style, with Hedwige’s ordeal recalling those of many virgins in Gothic fiction, and her slower pacing reminiscent of Ann Radcliffe’s style of suspense.

Which lesser-known work of nineteenth-century literature should The Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know here, on Twitter (@SVictorianist) or on Facebook!