Staging the same 'Traviata' twenty years later

MadridUntil July 23, and over eighteen performances, the Teatro Real in Madrid has scheduled the production of La Traviata which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2005 with stage direction by Willy Decker. Twenty years after those first performances, starring Anna Netrebko, Rolando Villazón, and Thomas Hampson, the show maintains its solidity thanks to a dramaturgy that contemporizes the story of the Lady of the Camellias, without betraying the essence of the work but reinforcing and highlighting certain aspects that traditional interpretations do not.

For several decades now, operatic staging has been immersed in Byzantine discussions about the freedoms that stage directors take when staging one opera or another. The Liceu hosts some performances of Rusalka directed by Christoph Loy which have raised a storm due to the fact that the German playwright does not set the original action in the context of the supposed fairy tale on which Dvorák's opera is based. To summarize, perhaps it should be remembered that opera is (musical) theater, and that for more than a century now, (text-based) theater itself has also been undergoing a major shake-up, with readings that allow us to explore the interlineation of the works on which many of the shows that have been and continue to be referential are based.

Roland Barthes already said it in his famous and brief essay on the death of the author: when a creator considers a text finished, it no longer belongs to the author, but to whoever reads it. Therefore, a theatrical text (and this includes opera) can be read any way one wishes and, therefore, performed according to a dramaturgical conception that will emphasize one aspect or another that the original may not make explicit, but that the stage director or playwright will want to reveal. Like it or not, this is the reality, and counterarguments that label certain stagers as opportunists, provocateurs, or hired assassins out to screw the audience are unacceptable. As with everything, there are proposals that are more or less convincing, more or less misguided, but I don't think the intellectual honesty of a playwright who has thought and rethought how to present an opera to his contemporaries should be questioned.

Back to this Traviata Already a classic of 21st-century opera staging, Willy Decker's feminist accent allows us to forget the rather showy, cardboard-stone productions that lack dramatic depth and that approach Verdi's opera as if we were in a musty, mothball-scented museum. Verdi's opera is the sordid tale of a prostitute who has the misfortune of falling into disgrace, which exposes a hypocritical society as sick as, or sicker than, the protagonist, though not from tuberculosis (the disease Violetta suffers from and which will take her to the grave), but from contempt and sexism.

This is how Decker places the stage action in a kind of circle, just as the vale music that accompanies the famous "toast" in the first act is circular. As circular as the time that besieges Violetta, constantly threatened by an immense clock that marks the progressive end of her life, and also by the presence of Dr. Grenvil—a traditionally secondary character but who here takes on a central role—who personifies an angel announcing Violetta's imminent death.

However, the emphasis is on machismo, pointed out by Decker as a social scourge. Violetta lives in a "macho world" (to use the words of Terenci Moix) that will be lethal for the protagonist, regardless of her profession. The German playwright does not judge Violetta, but rather leaves us as spectators free because we judge not the "macho world" but the "macho world" of the protagonist.traviata", but the society that surrounds it. A society that could be ours, the one that delights in the music from the audience, unaware that Giuseppe Verdi's masterpiece is the soundtrack to a reality that is not as beautiful as the score.

This is, I think, the meaning of operatic staging today: works from the past can and should be read critically, which can be feminist, postcolonial, or whatever. I don't think that canceling works from the past because they speak of the mistreatment of women or because they shamelessly display a Eurocentric perspective is the solution. What is, however, is the recourse to staging that serves a rereading that allows us to emphasize the denunciation of everything that is unjust and reprehensible. Twenty years after the premiere in Salzburg, Willy Decker's creation about La Traviata invites you to open your eyes, to break the look as Luis Buñuel did at the beginning of the disturbing An Andalusian dog But, shocked by what happens on stage, we know how to read our reality, which has nothing theatrical or operatic about it.