When Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata was premiered at the Teatro La Fenice on 6 March 1853, the Venetian audience was confronted with a clear break with tradition in terms of the work’s subject matter. For the first time, a tragic opera plot was based on a contemporary story, and with a person
from the margins of society at its heart: the Parisian courtesan Violetta Valéry.
Without the opera ever losing sight of the dynamics between the broader social environment and the characters’ own actions, not to mention their unfolding tragedies, long stretches of La traviata take on the character of a chamber play, in which psychological processes are shown in all their complexity. Verdi accomplishes this most impressively in the decisive second act duet between Violetta and Giorgio Germont, the father of her lover Alfredo: in Germont, Violetta comes up against a rigid bourgeois morality that has no place for a ‘traviata’ like her — a ‘woman who goes astray’ — and that forces her to renounce her longing for a new life.