La traviata

The one who has gone off the right path — that is Violetta Valéry, who as a noble courtesan in Paris lives between pomp and misery. Everything is just games and appearances, including love, until Alfredo Germont awakens true feelings in her. Happiness, however, is a rare guest and only of short duration: Violetta, suffering from tuberculosis, is first humiliated and passes away after a final flare-up of her life forces.

Only once did Giuseppe Verdi turn to a contemporary subject, the “Lady of the Camellias” by Parisian author Alexandre Dumas the Younger. As a novel and as a play, Dumas has written this event based on true events. Verdi invented music with great intensity, which leaves plenty of room for the expression of emotions: joy and exuberance, lament and despair. The listener and viewer are immediately drawn into the action in order to take a direct part in Violetta's fate. As the last work in the so-called “Popular Trilogy,” the Traviata, premiered in 1853 and shown for the first time in 1860 at Haus Unter den Linden, quickly became a successful opera on an international scale. The production by Dieter Dorn makes Violetta appear as a woman who is doomed to death from the start, but rebels against her fate. In the end, it simply disappeared, as if dissolved into nothingness.