Giuseppe Verdi
Traviata

Try to be born a farmer's son, in the agrarian Emilia, in the agrarian 1800s.

And then try to write "Traviata" if you can.

"Fantasy on the Farm."

Here he is, Verdi.

And his usual, rustic, and magnificent art of never letting you understand where good stands and where evil is. Who is "the villain"? Do you really think it's Rigoletto? Then why does he sing, "Only for me the infamy you asked, oh God... That she might ascend as far as I have fallen." Who is right, him or all the other courtiers?

And what if Jago was just a "Rigoletto 2.0"? Someone who doesn't even need to be hunchbacked to be evil. There are reasons to be evil, if you look for them...

And in this story set in Paris around the mid-1800s, whose side would you be on?

1. With Violetta Valery, a kept woman who "flits from joy to joy" and hops from protector to protector;
2. With Alfredo Germont, a daddy's boy who perfectly embodies the German expression "stupid as a tenor";
3. With papa Germont, a reactionary bourgeois moving through the spaces of the opera leaving us phrases that today would sound like "Cut that hair so you don't look like a nobody", "open up since this is a smoke den", "look, I don't find money behind a brick...";
4. Don't know/No answer

And there, try to navigate the maze of reasons. Everyone's. Ours.

Are you sure you want to get involved in such a mess? Wouldn't a nice American movie be better tonight?... One of those without too many hassles. In which, in the first scene, you're told right away who the director is and who the villain is. You say no?... Then you need to forget quite a few things before you begin.

Violetta Valery is a whore who dies of Tuberculosis, you know. And before moving on to the "horizontal" state of existence, there's a high chance she was a real bombshell. So enough with singers the size of a dentist's waiting room sofa! Get them out of your mind. Delete them, blessed boy! Miss Valery is something else. Instead, do us a favor, put in... Who do you like? Shakira, you say? Good! Put in Shakira. Sidney Rome? - Do you really like Sidney Rome? - Fine! Look... Put in Sidney Rome too. But Violetta isn't what the "best" record labels want to sell us! Violetta, if you imagine her, should get you hard. Otherwise, something's wrong.

Either in Violetta or in you.

Oh... Before being accused of chauvinism...

Women, thinking of co-protagonist Germont Alfredo, are at liberty to imagine something alternative to Sidney Rome or Shakira.

But not to get hard.

That would be frankly incorrect.

Then you need to forget all the times you've heard the damn "Brindisi" from Traviata.

Since it’s really important you forget, I’m putting it in the sample as well. So, first, listen to it, remember it, then we’re sure you understand it's that one you need to forget.

Otherwise, you might mistake and forget, I don’t know, the Dance of the Seven Veils from Strauss’s Salome. And Strauss hasn’t done anything bad to us, except for certain adaptations by Franco Battiato. So please, come on... Remove that ringtone from your head, that phone hold at the INPS, that birthday from aunt Adalgisa, the cake cutting at Ettore’s wedding, that damn media event that every January 1st provokes in us the first "New Year’s confusion". There.

When you've done it, let us know.

Done? Good. Now forget all the times you said classical music is "relaxing". Because you’ve said it too, this nonsense, come on... Don’t say no. I suspect you’re one of those. Admit you stumbled upon this page by accident. Or admit you are here because this page – due to the aforementioned "whore" – is still the 4,988th result of your certain afternoon wander on Google.

It would be a nice admission on your part.

But you won’t do it.

It doesn’t matter. What is important is that you move all this aside if you want to understand something. All the dust that has fallen on it and that no one bothers to remove, once and for good.

Then, we can talk about Traviata.

And it doesn’t matter if we have to do it with a feather duster in hand.

The plot, you say? It’s easy to say.

Alfredo falls in love with a lady (Violetta) who, to be precise, parades around seeking someone to maintain her (here is the real meaning of "always free I must frolic from joy to joy"). At first, upon learning about this, she makes fun of him, then retraces her steps. When the curtain rises on the next scene, it's clear that Alfredo’s courtship has won, and the two have retreated for some time to a country estate (the famous "closed"). When everything seems to be going well, his father arrives, inviting her to leave his son, because otherwise his other daughter, due to the scandal, will be abandoned by the respected young man she is with. She (Violetta) reluctantly promises him and, "without giving plausible reasons" (take that cultured quote), dumps him with a letter (which is like today’s text message). He doesn’t take it very sportingly (probably because he doesn’t understand the female universe and his pronounced sensitivity clashes with his gross male chauvinism); but then the father appears - a slightly more reactionary Cossiga - and in one way or another he embroils him. Thus ends the first act, in a way for the listener to stretch their legs and get up to take a glass of Cedrata.

The second opens with a grand party at the home of another famous whore of Ile-de-France: Flora. The guests dance, gossip, criticize the catering service, spit the olive pits into flower pots. The atmosphere is festive, despite some very rapid chromatic movements of the double basses seeming to threaten the worst. Violetta appears with her new partner and "sponsor", Baron Douphol, who - judging by the lines reserved for him by the librettist - must have been as delightful as a urethral tampon. Alfredo is consumed with jealousy. He doesn’t understand how the woman he loves could have forgotten him and joined this dandy, who is also addicted to gambling. With swaggering manner, our hero challenges him to cards, not knowing that the baron is a national of discolored briscola (a very fashionable game in the 1800s, practiced with a deck of Neapolitan cards and a machete). Despite all this, Alfredo has a series of lucky breaks unmatched even by Inter in the last 3 seasons (but without their referee assistance), thus ridiculing the baron in front of the entire audience, who sings "Bravo indeed! Luck is all for Alfredo!".

The chromaticism of the orchestra’s string section becomes increasingly evident, letting us know that something horrifying is about to happen. When everyone is resigned to a replay of a "Blu Notte" episode by Lucarelli, instead a waiter appears announcing dinner is ready. General stampede. While everyone rushes to the appetizer table, Violetta and Alfredo remain alone. He, to cut it short, asks her: "So you love him?". And she, obviously lying to keep the promise made to his father: "Well then, I love him!". To this statement, our protagonist makes his coup de theatre: despite the buffet dinner just starting, he gathers all the guests in the hall ("Now all to me!"), and in a pappalardian rage, he shames the woman he loves in front of everyone by throwing money at her. The guests are horrified and sing a chorus full of reproach at Alfredo, which, since everyone sings with their mouths full, he mistakes for a chorus of approval. Almost immediately understanding the nature of his error, Alfredo is full of remorse ("Ah, heaven, what have I done... I feel horror!"), especially when she, despite public humiliation, comes out with a melody that would bend anyone's knees ("Alfredo, Alfredo... Of this heart, you cannot understand all the love"). The scene closes with the unanimous guests, father included, who rail against Alfredo.

The last act is a descent towards death. Violetta, now consumed by illness, is in the house that was the scene of the first act festival. Waiting for Alfredo, informed of her sacrifice, to return to her, or at least to add her among his Facebook contacts.

When he arrives, accompanied by his father, it’s already too late. And they only have time to intone "Paris, oh dear, we will leave...", without much conviction from either, before the doctor says "She is gone!" and father and son indulge in a bourgeois "O my dolor!".

At the premiere in 1853, La Traviata made an unprecedented flop. And it couldn’t have been otherwise.

"In Venice, I'm doing "La Dame aux Camelias" which perhaps will be titled Traviata. A subject of the time. Another perhaps wouldn't have done it due to the costumes, the times, and a thousand other clumsy scruples. I'm doing it with all the pleasure.": this is how Peppino wrote to his friend Cesare de Sanctis in January of that same year.

Verdi wanted the opera to be performed in modern clothes, to make involuntary symbiosis between the people acting on stage and those seated in the audience even more glaring, and who spoke with the same words as the protagonists. Throw in their faces what they were, in short. Keeping them tied to the chair and eyes forced open. A Kubrick from 150 years ago.

A chorus that seemed to say "Libiam ne' lieti calici che la bellezza infiora".

And what instead, to each of them, said "however much you think you are absolved, you are forever involved".

A hunchback, a gypsy, a whore, a negro, a drunkard.

Reading it today, Peppino’s list of works, we only miss a Romanian.