Agenda Venezia

Sin and Redemption

 

In the month of April, the Fenice Theatre will have an ample selection of operas. Sin and redemption, or rather, redemption first and then sin: for the days preceding the Easter festivities, the Theatre proposes a concert by the Stagione Sinfonica; Pascal Rophé will direct L’Ascension, four symphonic meditations by Olivier Messiaen, plus Joseph Haydn’s Seven last words of our Saviour on the cross, and Johannes Brahms’ Symphony n. 2 in Re major, Opus 73. But from the 19th until the 29th of April, we can see once again Robert Carsen’s controversial version of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, which in November 2003 was inaugurated by the reconstructed theatre. This version causes a sensation due to the frankness with which is depicted a contemporary Traviata: the description of the life she led, the places she frequented, with a lot of sexy-kitsch ballet and male strip-tease… What did Verdi mean when he defined opera as “an epoch-theme”; why have we seen the importance of representing it with the singers dressed in contemporary clothing? Verdi wanted his public to feel close to the personages and to their emotions, without the reassuring protective barrier of a setting in the past. A first-hand experience, intense and hateful, of the hypocrisy of their society caused disdain in the younger Dumas and in Verdi. The very structure of La Traviata is inextricably linked to that hypocrisy. In spite of the fact that social conventions have changed, bourgeois society’s hypocrisy and its duplicity of judgement have not changed at all. Thus, Verdi made prostitution (and the impossibility of prostitution being accepted by bourgeois society) the pivot of the opera’s action.