Verdi's La traviata is about a high-class call girl who leaves the love of her life so as not to bring shame on his family, though you might miss the prostitutional element if you blink your eyes in this revival of Dieter Dorn's production at the Berlin Staatsoper. Set designer Joanna Piestrzyńska, adorned the stage with a giant cracked mirror with a sack draped over the top. The mind sets to work to decode these symbols. Does the mirror suggest Violetta’s vanity? The cracks being her fatal flaws? There’s a white substance piled up on the floor. Is it salt? Cocaine? None of these make sense in relation to the plot or characters, so they have to be disregarded as dressage.
Violetta was played by Ailyn Pérez and when she started singing I thought she must have been a mezzo, her voice was so extraordinarily rich. Her movement on stage, the fretting, and the to-ing and fro-ing, suggested the actions of a woman trapped by fate, with no escape other than self-sacrifice. She may have ducked out of the optional E flat at the end of “Sempre libera”, but with every other note delivered with bewitching grace she earned her ovations.
One of the most incredible elements of the book is to do with the title. The Lady of the Camellias got her name from the fact that she wore a red camellia when she was on her period, and a white one when she was not... and therefore available to customers. This titular detail is scooped out of the opera, with Pérez struggling in and out of a silvery dress to indicate the domestic or social context.