Willy Decker's La Traviata

The stark iconoclastic production of Verdi’s La Traviata by Willy Decker, inaugurated this season at the Met, is inevitably a shock to the audience long seeped in the version set in Dumas’ 19th-century Paris. But approached with an open mind, it does free the opera from the burden of the spectacle and foregrounds the music and the stage action effectively reminiscent of some of Wieland Wagner’s productions of the Ring. Decker in an interview explains (not very convincingly) that the circular wall and the clock in the set design, alluding to the cycle of passing of time, were suggested by the overture playing the theme of Violetta’s death scene. But through the three Acts there are some inspired conceits that are worthy of note. The surging figures at the party, all in black, in Act I, overpowering in their choreographed movements across the stage, registered vividly the social isolation of Violetta, alone in red. The random placement of five sofas covered with homely floral chintz (with the matching robes of Alfredo and Violetta) captured the casual rustic life style without a country house set; and Violetta’s stripping the covers during her interaction with Germont was terribly expressive of her condition of being robbed bare of her happy life and made the "Addio" duet very touching. In the scene of the masked ball, the clock was ingeniously turned into a roulette table; Flora, who hosted the party, wearing a black suit, was lost in the crowd In the final Act, the Carnival, heard outside the window traditionally, rushed onto the stage obtrusively; but the tapes left strewn on the floor looked like streaks of consumptive blood. The death scene without a bed made the final scene less affective than usual. The figure of Dr. Granvil, appearing hauntingly through the three acts made sense emblematically only if we accepted the director’s reinterpretation of Violetta as a victim of inexorable time. It rather turned La Traviata in Paris Nordic.