A glittering high society romance. A sordid tale of a prostitute born in the gutter and dying alone and painfully. A bel canto charmer, packed with glorious tunes. A scathing attack on Victorian sexual hypocrisy. Verdi's La Traviata is all of these things: find in it what you will.
Richard Eyre's production for the Royal Opera is a hardy old soldier. It's well travelled around the globe and hasn't had much time to rest in its seventeen years (it's old enough to get a driving licence). It wears its age well, and there's something in the production for everyone. If you came to La Traviata for a dose of Parisian glamour, you got it in the party scenes: the costumes are bel époque rather than early Victorian and Bob Crowley's sets are lavishly eye-catching but not over-complicated. If you came looking for the contrast between the glitz of the parties and the squalor of Violetta's deathbed, you saw it in the spartan room and the pillows bloodstained from her coughing.
Most of all, if you came for the singing, you were in for a treat: La Traviata demands three great singers, and the Royal Opera provided them. Piotr Beczala sang Alfredo with warmth, lyricism, tenderness and no apparent effort - the notes seem to flow out of him on their own. Simon Keenlyside was equally lyrical: his voice has power and remarkable timbre to depict the stentorian father figure. But the evening belonged, as it should, to Ailyn Pérez as Violetta, who gave an extraordinary performance. The late Joan Sutherland, arguably Covent Garden's greatest Violetta, said that everything was based on technique. Pérez displayed complete mastery of her voice, with technical confidence at a level which freed her to do amazing things. She sang the high powered coloratura passages with aplomb, but what really amazed me was her ability to hit a high note in the softest pianissimo without a hint of a wobble, even after a fast glissando. La Traviata's third act is a difficult one to bring off: it's virtually impossible to convince an audience that you're dying of tuberculosis while singing loudly enough to fill a two thousand seat opera house. Pérez came as close as you can get, keeping her voice very quiet but with crystal clear articulation for most of the act, with the occasional outbursts of "excitement and foolish gaiety" that were documented in tuberculosis sufferers as long ago as 250 AD (as explained in Christopher Wintle's programme note). It's sobering to note that this is supposedly the "B" cast - I find it hard to imagine that the "A" cast can have been that much better.