...hopefully my last Traviata post for a while?

So when I signed up for Met on Demand I of course had to look at the La Traviatas. (what with youtube and met on demand and being able to transfer video to my phone I feel like I'm living in the future! I can watch operas five minutes at a time at home -- which is not ideal, of course, but really the only way I am going to actually do it right now.) Having had ALL THE FEELINGS about the 2005 Salzburg Netrebko/Villazon/Hampson Traviata, what struck me the most was how different the Met Yoncheva/Fabiano/Hampson (2017) was, though it is the same staging and even shares one of the singers. This Met production has a very different interpretation (and there have been a number of changes made to the choreography to support that interpretation), one that pretty much guts all the relationships in the opera -- which I found interesting, and worth watching, but substantially less utterly compelling than the Salzburg, which uses the staging and choreography and interpretation to highlight and sharpen those relationships.

Yoncheva has a very different take on Violetta (and death) than Netrebko. Netrebko's Violetta's arc was about coming to terms with her death, with accepting it. Yoncheva's Violetta is not doing any accepting whatsoever. ( ...and so forth )

But in general, the Met choices make a lot of the lines that are so tremendous to me in the Salzburg performance much less powerful -- when Netrebko sings "Grenvil, vedete? Fra le braccia io spiro di quanti cari ho al mondo!" it's the pinnacle of her arc in accepting death: the last step for her was giving away hope, giving away her hope of love: but the answer is that she has those who are dear to her, if only for that instant, and even Death must acknowledge that. And of course I have All The Feelings about Germont's Salzburg journey to "A stringervi qual figlia vengo al seno, o generosa!" The much flatter 2017 arcs and relationships take a lot of that meaning away.

Though one of the things I adore about the Decker staging in both versions is how at the end everyone gets back from Violetta something of what they gave her. Alfredo, who gave Violetta love, gets the camellia(/portrait of her). Annina, who gave her comfort and help at the end, gets an embrace of comfort. 2005!Germont, who overcame himself to hold out his hands to her, gets her hand briefly, a tiny moment of grace in a wasteland. 2017!Germont gets nothing.

Also, in Department of Random and Shallow: I notice that Violetta got to wear a bra at the Met, heh. Also also, why is the camellia pink in this production??

...aaaaand I wrote pretty much this entire post, not to mention all the earlier word-vomiting I have done over the past several weeks about different Traviatas and Germont and how he's not truly a bad guy, before the clue hit that of course I feel especially intense emotions about this opera and about Germont in particular, because my dad (who isn't a bad guy) basically did the same thing with me regarding my college boyfriend, for a reason that was even less good than Germont's. (But the same fundamental idea of "I can't handle this person you are dating for reasons that stem from my own issues and worldview." Which is why it totally baffles me when people say that Traviata isn't an opera for modern times!) I never got the Total Parent Validation ending (my dad still thinks he was right), but then again I also wasn't dying of consumption, in retrospect we weren't a good match in other ways... Anyway, I am about the least self-aware person ever, I guess. (Although a more generous way of reading that is to say that perhaps i've matured a bit in that I don't think about these things any more! :) )

(Next up: Macbeth (and aliens) and Don Carlo)