Verdi - La Traviata / Bonfadelli, Piper, Bruson, Ricci, Peebo, Leveroni, Domingo, Busseto
"I want new, magnificent, beautiful, varied and bold, extremely bold subjects, with new forms and yet lending themselves to be set to music… At the moment I am in Venice working on the Dame aux camélias, which I may call Traviata; a subject of our time. No one else would have done this because of its morals, the time and a thousand other ridiculous scruples – I am enjoying myself immensely." This quotation from one of Verdi’s letters from 1853 brings to mind a fact which is rarely rememberedtoday in view of the familiarity with his arguably most famous opera, namely that the subject of Traviata was quite new and disturbing, as the characters of the opera were not princes, heroes or magical beings of the distant past but persons of doubtful morals from everyday-life of the present.