La traviata was, at its 1853 premiere, an innovative opera: for the first time, a serious story—centered on themes of death, social rejection, and impossible love—was set not in antiquity but in the present day. Verdi discovered the play La Dame aux Camélias—based on Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel of the same name—in Paris a year earlier and immediately decided to compose music for a story undermined by a hypocritical society. Inspired by Dumas' real-life relationship with the courtesan Marie Duplessis, La traviata has, over the decades, become the most popular and frequently performed opera in history.
Verdi encountered the story that would ultimately become La traviata in 1852 when he attended a theatrical performance of La Dame aux Camélias in Paris. This play was an adaptation of a novel published in 1848 by Alexandre Dumas fils—born of an extramarital relationship between Alexandre Dumas, the renowned author of The Three Musketeers, and a seamstress—and was based on an autobiographical episode. In 1844, Dumas had begun a relationship with an elegant courtesan, Marie Duplessis, marked by fervent passion, significant financial exchange, a breakup after a year, and an air of moral condemnation in Parisian bourgeois circles, as puritanical as they were hypocritical. For Dumas, his encounter with Marie was a profoundly significant episode in his life. When he learned of her death in 1847—still young and from tuberculosis—he decided to capture her tragedy in a novel that enjoyed immense success throughout the 19th century and much of the 20th.
Verdi found in this story everything he needed for an opera: a protagonist with a heroic spirit who is ultimately defeated by natural and social forces beyond her control, and a melodrama with a sentimental appearance that appealed to the public of his time. That protagonist is, in La traviata—which translates as "The Fallen Woman" or "The Lost One"—Violetta Valéry, a lavish courtesan who receives the attention and demands of wealthy men in Paris. However, at a party in her home, she meets a young, naïve, and romantic man, Alfredo Germont, who confesses his admiration for her, a secret he has kept for over a year. Violetta eventually feels a genuine attraction to Alfredo: for the first time, a man speaks to her of love—not of sex in exchange for money—an emotion she has never experienced.
"Based on the popular novel La Dame aux Camélias, La traviata is a tragedy of the soul: the search for true love and the impossibility of keeping it."
After struggling between a life of pleasures, but devoid of emotions, and the unique experience of true love, Violetta chooses the latter and begins a new life with Alfredo. However, social pressure conspires to prevent her from being happy: Giorgio Germont, Alfredo's father, urges her to end the relationship—everyone knows that Violetta is a prostitute and tarnishes the family name—and she decides to sacrifice her happiness to avoid harming the man she loves. After a misunderstanding, Alfredo and Violetta break up in public in a cruel scene of spite. In the end, alone, poor, and ill—since from the outset we know she suffers from incurable tuberculosis—Violetta dies, not without having reconciled with Alfredo first.
The theme of La traviata is, therefore, a tragedy of the soul: the destructive loss of one of the most important emotional treasures a person can have—the love that is returned, which leads to fulfillment—and the unbearable pain that occurs when this love is gone forever, with nothing to replace it. Verdi surely felt especially identified with the story—he had been in an extramarital relationship with Giuseppina Strepponi since 1842, criticized by his neighbors—and his empathy with Violetta is absolute. At its premiere in Venice in 1853, La traviata was considered an avant-garde opera—it was the first serious work set in the present day—and one of the paradoxes of this triumphant story lies in the fact that the night of its debut, it was a spectacular failure. But as the nights passed, Verdi's inspired music began to become familiar to the audience, and since then—unlike the flower Violetta gives Alfredo in the first act—neither the melodies, nor the emotions, nor the power of the poignant finale have ever withered.