Verdi’s La Traviata, Theater Basel. 14.11.2021

In the comments section of my text about the Grand Théâtre de Genève’s new production of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Peter brought about Maria Callas’s 1958 performance in Verdi’s La Traviata at the Royal Opera House. He made me curious, and  I spent the last three days listening to it. Although this is an opera I’m never really inclined to see, I had a free weekend and the Theater Basel was staging an eurotrash production by German director Benedikt von Peter. So Idecided to give it a chance. If there’s a work in the repertoire that seriously need a fresh perspective, this is it.  

As staged by Mr. von Peter, La Traviata is a monodrama with off stage voices. There is a single person on stage, Violetta, in her death moments reminiscing. There is nothing new in this non temporal approach – the fact that the first and the last act start with preludes based on the same opening theme has given many a director this idea (Peter Mussbach at the Lindenoper, for example), but at least in my experience, not as radical as having everyone else sing from the balcony in the dark. 

There are practical issues in that choice. First it requires a singer with lots of stamina to remain on stage during the whole opera (without interval), doing lots of unnecessary movements just to prevent the audience from falling asleep. That includes pretending to be doing things with imaginary people and objects, panting a lot to fill in the blanks, also because there are lots – I mean LOTS – of unwritten silences. This was probably the lowest-budget Traviata I have ever seen – and it also looked painfully cheap. Reading this, you might believe this was totally ineffective. That’s not true – in her training pants and drug highs, this Violetta Valéry could be a girl we read about in newspapers. “Found dead” or something like that. But the way Mr von Peter shows us that girl – never acting like a normal person, contorting herself, crawling, busy as a bee arranging the very few props available – makes her so distant from us that one is inclined to miss Zeffirelli, because his Personenregie looks more realistic, I’m afraid.

Nicole Chevalier is a singer I’ve always seen in difficult roles – the three soprano parts in Les Contes d’Hofmann, Elettra in Mozart’s Idomeneo. It never occurred to me that I would see her as a Violetta, because she does not have the voice for it. However, I can’t think of many singers who would be inclined to do everything the director asks from her here: the staging has moments many singers would find undignified (like reaching into her panties to grab money bills and throwing them at the audience), but more than that, it’s physically exhausting. For instance, she jumps and bounces a lot before she sings her big act 1 aria. From the purely vocal point of view, Ms. Chevalier’s soprano is light for the role. It lacks substance in both middle and low registers and she manages most of her high lying passages on mezza voce, which she does very well (and the trills too). Also, she has very easy high notes. When she really has to go big, then her unitalianate tonal quality is evident. The voice sounds colorless and lacks projection, unless the acuto is really congenial. In these moments, her coloratura can be smeared. That said, she is more musicianly than the average Violetta, with an almost Mozartian take on phrasing and, if her Italian were idiomatic, she could have been truly expressive rather than elegant and concerned. As I had Callas’s London 1958 performance in my mind, I can see that the light-touched approach is probably the safest one and it does work if the singer has a bright edge to her sound for the most exposed moments (as Callas had, and Ms Chevalier does not). Considering the theatre’s size, her acting abilities and the way she had things in control within her vocal possibilities, she deserves praise for this tour de force.

Her Alfredo, Arthur Espiritu is the kind of tenor who’s there for his high notes. His first octave is nasal and grainy, but everything above a high f is full and vibrant if constantly preceded by scooping and often ended with a glottal release. When he softens the tone – for expressive effects – one can see that free of manipulation his voice is naturally beautiful. Without the help of a stage presence, he worked hard to suggest dramatic engagement, what proved to be particularly helpful by the end of the opera. I had seen Noel Bouley only once as Falstaff at the Deutsche Oper Berlin some years ago and wasn’t prepared for his unsubtle, large-vibrato-ish singing this evening. Someone unaware of the plot would think Germont, père, a particularly angry person. He and the maestro did not seem to agree much in terms of beat either.

I have to praise Tito Ceccherini for his sensitive conducting of the score. There was ideal balance between woodwind and the strings, every nicety in this abused score lovingly shown to the audience in a performance free of vulgarity and sentimentality. Only in Amami, Alfredo there was a clear misfiring in building momentum, but that happens unfortunately more often than one wished. Although the house orchestra – on stage and upstage behind a semi-transparent screen this evening – is not world-class, they did a very efficient job this evening – and the chorus sang very well too.