Soloists - VERDI: La Traviata

The search for a subject for a new opera for carnival in Venice in 1853 caused Verdi some annoyance. As always he took trouble to match a chosen subject with the resources available to him and eventually his choice fell on the work of Alexandre Dumas, La Dame aux Camelias. This was based in part on that writer's own experience with the demi-mondaine Alphonsine Duplessis, for a time his mistress, but more consistently associated with a number of well-to-do noblemen until her tragically early death of consumption in 1847 at the age of 23. Dumas created round her at first a novel and then, in 1852, a play, and it was this that offered the librettist Cesare Piave a scenario on which to base a text for Verdi. The role of Violetta, the heroine of the title in La Traviata, calls for a singer who is young, graceful and delicate in appearance, and partly through his own preoccupation with Il Trovatore Verdi had been unable to exercise in time a clause in his contract with La Fenice in Venice that would have allowed him to dispense with the services of the prima donna under contract there for the season, Fanny Salvini-Donatelli. At the same time, but now far too late for cancellation, he had nothing good to say about the company at the opera-house, thought of withdrawing and prophesied a fiasco. In the event the work was not a success, its failure attributed by some to Salvini-Donatelli, who weighed in at 130 kilograms and could hardly give a convincing dramatic performance as a girl dying of consumption. Some felt that the tenor, Ludovico Graziani, had been given no chance to show his mettle, while the baritone, Felice Varesi, who had created the roles of Rigoletto and Macbeth for Verdi, turned to the press to justify himself as a singer, after his performance as Germont, written with a tessitura that hardly suited him at this stage in his career. A year later La Traviata was mounted successfully at the Teatro S Benedetto in Venice, when the role of Violetta was taken by Maria Spezia, thirteen years younger than Salvini-Donatelli and physically better suited to the part. Her husband, the baritone Gottardo Aldighieri, was four years later to make his operatic debut as Germont. A further improvement, if such it was, for the successful second staging, was made by shifting the action back in time to the period of Louis XIV, allowing a certain elaboration of historical costume, instead of modern dress. The 1928 recording of La Traviata by the company of La Scala, conducted, as on other occasions, by Lorenzo Maoljoli, centres inevitably on the Spanish soprano Mercedes Capsir. Born in Barcelona in 1897, the daughter of two well-known singers in zarzuela, Jose Capsir and Ramona Vidal, she had studied in her native city and in Italy, making her debut at the Liceu in Barcelona in 1914 and continuing her career largely in Spain and Portugal until 1918. She made her Italian debut the following year, appearing between 1924 and 1934 at La Scala and perfor