Though she was an acclaimed singer, they considered her to be too old (at 38) and overweight to credibly play a young woman dying of consumption. The audience jeered at times during the premiere, directing some of their scorn at the casting of soprano Fanny Salvini-Donatelli in the lead role of Violetta. Verdi was filled with premonitions of disaster upon his arrival in Venice on 21 February for rehearsals and he made his unhappiness clear to the singers. Verdi was distraught, for he held on to the notion that the opera could be staged in modern dress-as Stiffelio had been done-Piave was sent back to Sant'Agata to no avail: he could not persuade the composer to back down on his insistence that another soprano be secured, yet the 15 January deadline for securing one had come and gone. However, it soon became clear that a modern-dress staging of the new opera was impossible-the requirement was that it should be set in the 17th century "in the era of Richelieu"-and reports from the opening of the season confirmed the limitations of the chosen soprano, the 38-year-old Fanny Salvini-Donatelli for taking the role of Violetta. When back at Sant'Agata in late January 1853 Verdi was reminded that his contract called for him to be in Venice within a week or two and for the premiere to be held on the "first Saturday in March 1853". A subject for our own age." Although still bogged down at Sant'Agata, Piave was sanguine: "Everything will turn out fine, and we'll have a new masterpiece from this true wizard of modern harmonies". However, as Budden reveals, Verdi writes to his friend De Sanctis telling him that "for Venice I'm doing La Dame aux camélias which will probably be called La traviata. Within a short time, a synopsis was dispatched to Venice under the title of Amore e morte ( Love and Death). One subject was chosen, Piave set to work, and then Verdi threw in another idea, which may have been La traviata. As the months dragged on into October, it was agreed that Piave would come to Sant'Agata (Verdi's home near Busseto) and work with the composer. Writing to Piave, he added that "I don't want any of those everyday subjects that one can find by the hundreds." But at the same time, the composer expressed concern about censorship in Venice, something with which he was very familiar after his dealings with the censors concerning Rigoletto. However, Julian Budden notes that Verdi had probably read the Dumas novel some time before, and, after seeing the play and returning to Italy, "he was already setting up an ideal operatic cast for it in his mind", shown by his dealings with La Fenice.įrancesco Maria Piave, librettist of the operaįrancesco Maria Piave was engaged to write the new libretto and the two men tried to come up with a suitable subject, but the composer complained that his librettist "had not yet offered him an 'original' or 'provocative' idea". As a result of this, Verdi's biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz reports, the composer immediately began to compose music for what would later become La traviata. In February the couple attended a performance of Alexander Dumas fils 's The Lady of the Camellias. Verdi and Giuseppina Strepponi visited Paris from late 1851 and into March 1852. Verdi sees The Lady of the Camellias play In addition, personal affairs in his home town limited his activities that spring, but after Rigoletto 's success in Venice, an additional commission was offered by Brenna, the secretary of La Fenice. First, he had agreed with the librettist Salvadore Cammarano on a subject for what would become Il trovatore, but work on this opera could not proceed while the composer was writing Rigoletto, which premiered in Venice in March 1851. For Verdi, the years 1851 to 1853 were filled with operatic activity.
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