La traviata

In the organizer's words:

With his setting of "Lady of the Camellias" Verdi brought two of the great themes of the 19th century to the opera stage in a shockingly direct way: prostitution and consumption. In his production, Götz Friedrich emphasized the hopelessness of Violetta Valéry's attempt to escape her fate ... Conductor: Ivan Repušić / Dominic Limburg; Production: Götz Friedrich; With Aida Garifullina / Mané Galoyan, Pene Pati / Pavol Breslik, Thomas Lehman / Markus Brück, Arianna Manganello and others.
At a party to which Violetta Valery, luxuriously kept by Baron Douphol, has been invited after her apparent recovery from a serious illness, she meets Alfredo Germont and a love for which there is no place in her world. She turns her back on her old life and moves to the country with Alfredo. When Alfredo's father demands that she give up her son so as not to jeopardize her younger sister's wedding with her bad reputation, she gives in in despair and writes Alfredo a farewell letter. At a ball given by her friend Flora, a scandal breaks out: Violetta wants Alfredo to believe that she loves Baron Douphol. In his jealousy, Alfredo throws the money he won at the game at her feet as a "reward for her labors of love." A month later, as the carnival rages in Paris, Violetta is dying. Alfredo returns - his father has told him the truth about Violetta's reason for separation. Violetta forgives, releases Alfredo and dies.

The material for Verdi's only opera set in the bourgeois world of Paris around 1847 was the highly regarded novel La dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas the Younger, who made the fate of Marie Duplessis, a noble courtesan who died of tuberculosis on February 3, 1847, at the age of 23, the subject of a critical study of the Parisian demimonde. Whereas in Dumas's play the main characters act in a dense web of relationships, Verdi and his librettist Francesco Maria Piave dispensed with anything not directly related to the conflict between Violetta, Alfredo and their father Giorgio Germont. The drama, shifted entirely to internal movements, focuses on the three stages that Violetta Valery goes through: love, abandonment and death.

Götz Friedrich has given the tragedy the atmosphere of a requiem by telling the story of Violetta's suffering as a flashback. Already during the prelude, Violetta is seen lying on her white deathbed on the barren stage, which resembles a monumental tomb. At the beginning of her party, she rises from the bed, which is quickly transformed into a salon couch, puts on a ball gown - and the pleasure-seeking Parisian demimonde prances in through the suddenly opening doors. The story is told without sentimentality, without any hint of trivial directness. The inner picture of the drama is consistently unrolled and the mood of doom and death of the work is brought to bear. This content has been machine translated.