Verdi and the city
Verdi in Rome: the winter of 1853
How Verdi spent the winter before La Traviata: two operas at once, the first night of Il trovatore in Rome and the road to Venice.
Reserve your seat for Violetta ↗Two operas at once
In the early 1850s Verdi was writing for two cities. In May 1851, after the success of Rigoletto in Venice, La Fenice offered him a new commission, which he eventually realised as La traviata. That was followed by an agreement with the Rome Opera company to present Il trovatore in the Carnival season of 1852 to 1853, specifically in January 1853. For some months the two operas overlapped.
The Paris winter
Before either opera was finished, Verdi and Giuseppina Strepponi spent the winter of 1851 and 1852 in Paris, from late 1851 into March 1852. There he agreed to write what became Les vêpres siciliennes for the Opéra. In February 1852 the couple attended a performance of the Dumas play, and Verdi immediately began to compose music for what would become La traviata. The idea that was to bring him to Venice came, in other words, from a night at a Paris theatre.
A librettist and a death
The librettist of Il trovatore, Salvadore Cammarano, died in July 1852, before the work was finished. Verdi turned to a young Neapolitan poet, Leone Emanuele Bardare, and the two met in Rome around 20 December 1852. According to Wikipedia, Verdi began work on both Il trovatore and La traviata around then. The composer was therefore in Rome at the end of 1852 and the start of 1853, with two projects in hand.
Il trovatore in Rome
The premiere of Il trovatore took place at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 19 January 1853. Wikipedia quotes a description of the opera as beginning a victorious march throughout the operatic world. It is an opera in four acts. It was a success in the city where La Traviata can now be heard in a church.
Back to La Traviata
After his visit to Rome for Il trovatore in January 1853, Verdi returned to La traviata. He worked with little hope of success, because he distrusted the singers engaged for the season, and the management insisted on a historical rather than a contemporary setting. He arrived in Venice on 21 February for rehearsals, unhappy and filled with premonitions of disaster, according to Wikipedia. The premiere was fixed for the first Saturday in March. The part of Violetta was cast with a soprano the audience thought too old to play a young woman dying of consumption.
Two premieres in 1853
Il trovatore was staged in Rome on 19 January 1853 and La traviata in Venice on 6 March 1853. The first was a success and the second a failure on the night, though revised productions in 1854 and later made it one of the most popular operas anywhere. Wikipedia calls Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata the three peaks of his middle period.
Verdi's Rome connections
Rome was not new to Verdi in 1853. Wikipedia records that his opera I due Foscari was performed in Rome in November 1844, and that he travelled to Rome before the end of 1848. The city's opera house today is the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, which opened in November 1880 as the Teatro Costanzi, the year Wikipedia gives for the completion of St Paul's Within the Walls. Tosca had its premiere in that house on 14 January 1900.
What this means for an evening
An evening of La Traviata in Rome is a performance of music Verdi finished during a winter that he spent partly in the city. The church setting is far from a Carnival-season theatre, yet the opera is the same three-act tragedy that opened in Venice in March 1853. If you want an even bigger Roman night, the opera house offers full-scale productions of its own. You are hearing the same music in a different century and a very different room.
Who this isn't for
For the practical side of an evening, use the buyer guide and the first-timer explainer instead of this chronology. This guide is for listeners who like to know where a piece sits in a life, and who would rather arrive knowing that the composer was in the same city, a winter before the world first heard Violetta.
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