Verdi’s now-popular opera was a fiasco in Venice in 1853, attributable perhaps to the prima donna being noticeably obese, despite apparently wasting with tuberculosis. Soon, however, Verdi’s scandalous love story was on stage contemporaneously at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Piave’s libretto depicts Violetta and Alfredo Germont, the Marguerite and Armand of The Lady with the Camelias by Alexandre Dumas (son of the author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers). The bestseller was based on the short life of the courtesan Marie Duplessis, mistress of a duke, a viscount and a baron – in Paris the ‘oldest profession’, prostitution, was the only way many women could survive, as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables depicts. Featuring some of Verdi’s best-loved tunes, such as the ‘Brindisi’ and Violetta’s Sempre libera, La Traviata is enduringly popular. Violetta has been sung by international operatic sopranos such as Patti and Melba, and recently Gheorghiu. Some, like Joan Sutherland, have preferred to stay off-stage and make an opera recording. Domingo and Pavarotti have sung the role of Alfredo. Written by Michael Steen, author of the acclaimed The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, ‘Short Guides to Great Operas’ are concise, entertaining and easy to read. They are packed with useful information and informed opinion, helping to make you a truly knowledgeable opera-goer, and so maximising your enjoyment of a great musical experience. Other ‘Short Guides to Great Operas’ that you may enjoy include Rigoletto, Carmen and La Bohème.

Race, politics, and opera production during apartheid South Africa intersect in this historiographic work on the Eoan Group, a “coloured” cultural organization that performed opera in the Cape. The La Traviata Affair charts Eoan’s opera activities from the group’s inception in 1933 until the cessation of their productions by 1980. It explores larger questions of complicity, compromise, and compliance; of assimilation, appropriation, and race; and of “European art music” in situations of “non-European” dispossession and disenfranchisement. Performing under the auspices of apartheid, the group’s unquestioned acceptance of and commitment to the art of opera could not redeem it from the entanglements that came with the political compromises it made. Uncovering a rich trove of primary source materials, Hilde Roos presents here for the first time the story of one of the premier cultural agencies of apartheid South Africa.

How did Paris and its musical landscape influence Verdi's La traviata? In this book, Emilio Sala re-examines La traviata in the cultural context of the French capital in the mid-nineteenth century. Verdi arrived in Paris in 1847 and stayed for almost two years: there, he began his relationship with Giuseppina Strepponi and assiduously attended performances at the popular theatres, whose plays made frequent use of incidental music to intensify emotion and render certain dramatic moments memorable to the audience. It is in one of these popular theatres that Verdi probably witnessed one of the first performances of Dumas fils' La Dame aux camélias, which became hugely successful in 1852. Making use of primary source material, including unpublished musical works, journal articles and rare documents and images, Sala's close examination of the incidental music of La Dame aux camélias - and its musical context - offers an invaluable interpretation of La traviata's modernity.

"La Traviata" is a tragic love story in which Violeta, a lady from the high society of Paris falls in love with an aristrocrat Alfredo, but break up because of the gap between the two's social rankings. Violeta dies at last. Through the famous arias of "Libiamo ne'lieti calci (Brindisi)", "E strano" and "Di provenza il mar", we will learn more about "La Traviata" by Verdi, the master of Italian operas. 오페라 [라 트라비아타]는 파리 사교계의 여인, 비올레타가 귀족 청년 알프레도와 사랑에 빠지지만 두 사람 사이의 신분의 격차 때문에 그와 헤어진 채 병으로 죽는다는 비극적인 사랑이야기입니다. 우리에게 잘 알려진 '축배의 노래'를 비롯하여, '아 이상해', '프로벤자, 내 고향으로' 등의 유명한 아리아를 통해 이탈리아 오페라의 거장, 베르디의 [라 트라비아타]에 대해 알아보겠습니다.