Verdi’s “La Traviata” in Stralsund: love and suffering of a sex worker

She sings like her life is at stake. The audience doesn’t know that a second singer is already waiting behind the stage – in case of an emergency, should Traviata’s voice die prematurely. Because three days before the premiere, the leading actress Katharina Constanti couldn’t make a sound. How cruel after the premiere had to be postponed several times due to Corona.

The main and dress rehearsals took place without the main character of the opera, but on the evening of the premiere Katharina Constanti ventured into the merciless spotlight of the Stralsund Stadttheater. It is possible that the voice fails again after three minutes. But then it gets intense, almost unbearable. The singer makes her figure shine with all her power and delicacy, right up to Violetta’s last breath.

The Berlin guest director Sandra Leupold ensures that it remains an uncomfortable evening at the opera despite the glitz and glitter. The “Faust” award winner is a meticulous reader of scores. She radically questions performance traditions and habits of the opera business – as can be seen in her productions in Lübeck, Heidelberg, Graz or Stralsund, just not in her hometown.

Verdi wanted his opera to be set in the present

What does she do with an opera that could never be staged the way the composer wanted? First performed in Venice in 1853, the piece was expressly intended to be set in the present day. Verdi courageously focused on an outsider in society and held up a mirror to a bigoted bourgeois society.

The directors, however, defused the material by moving the action to the past. It was not until the 20th century that “La Traviata” was played, supposedly true to the original, in 19th-century settings, but by then the world of the Parisian courtesans was history. Leupold’s staging does not look again for an allegedly suitable time or social level for the plot, but places the opera itself on the dissection table.

It begins with a wild choreography on an almost empty stage, as hysterical as Verdi’s music. A mixture of children’s birthday party, carnival and Saturnalia, with choristers in the weirdest disguises (costumes: Jochen Hochfeld), who make up for the lack of a built stage set. The leader of the celebration horde is Violetta, the party queen constantly changes wigs and dresses while singing and dancing.

Violetta addresses the audience directly

Her pale admirer Alfredo doesn’t really fit into this hustle and bustle. The boy in love from a good family doesn’t want to be a customer but a lover of the sex worker. His wooing awakens a buried longing with which Violetta addresses the audience directly. During her aria at the end of the first act, she leaves the stage area, slowly coming to the orchestra pit, a first emotional highlight of the evening, enthusiastically cheered.

In the second act, Violetta transforms herself completely into the unvarnished, loving woman who renounces Alfredo in favor of someone else’s happiness – and therefore has to let herself be humiliated as brutally as possible. During the breaks, the audience finds streamers, party hats and empty champagne bottles in the foyers, traces of a festival that the extras celebrate loudly in the corridors during the third act, while inside Violetta is ailing towards death.

For the loneliness of the dying, the lighting director creates a moving final image: Violetta is imperceptibly swallowed by an opening in the black stage floor, disappears into nothingness, while the survivors stand on this side of the orchestra pit, on the audience’s side.

The Vorpommern Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Florian Csizmadia sounds drier and sharper in the 500-seat theater in Stralsund than Berlin ears are used to. That fits the brittle charm of the production. Instead of false melting, one hears the harshness and mood swings of Verdi’s music as if under a magnifying glass. In his stillness, Maciej Kozłowski is a convincing father Germont, who is being circled by his immature son Alfredo (Costa Latsos) like a satellite. A great ensemble performance, outshined by a Violetta, which makes everyone perfectly happy on this evening.

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