"A new production from the prolific pen of Maestro Verdi is a thing to which we are pretty well accustomed, and it happens that the new production in question, La Traviata, is the weakest, as it is the last, of his numerous progeny. It has pretty tunes, for every Italian has more or less the gift of melody; but even the tunes are trite and common, bespeaking an exhausted invention, while there are no vestiges of the constructed skill, none of the masterly pieces of concerted music, which we find in the Trovatore or in Rigoletto."[48]
A section of the English press made a dead set against the opera, but the test of time has given the lie to detractors. Despite the heroine's damaged reputation, the music has proved sufficiently good, lasting, and attractive to keep the opera on the English boards, not to mention Continental theatres, for full forty years. The "highly immoral" story did not prove destructive to England's youth and age. The British character survived it!
When La Traviata was ready to be played before the British public, there was a great outburst of moral indignation. Mr. Lumley gives his version of the affair: "Permission was in vain demanded of the Lord Chamberlain to allow adaptations of the drama to appear upon the English stage. That this prohibition should have been enforced on a stage where George Barnwell, and more especially Jane Shore (the heroine of which old tragedy is also a sympathetic Traviata, who dies a miserable death), are upheld as 'fine old legitimate' plays, and were once produced on the chief assemblage of the youth of the age at Christmastide, did not appear very consistent or even logical; and the Traviata appeared. And a considerable surprise (in spite of all previous minor 'grumblings') fell upon the public when it found its favourite opera morally crushed to the earth by the mighty thunder of the press. The 'foul and hideous horrors' of the Traviata were held up as proper objects for 'deep and unmitigated censure' in the leading journal. One clap of thunder followed on the other. In a long letter I published an elaborate defence of my opera against the accusation of its blatant 'immorality.' This letter appeared duly in the columns of The Times, as an appendix to a still more crushing denunciation. Minor journals flashed their own smaller lightnings in sympathetic response to this storm from the 'Thunderer.' But the public was not to be lectured out of its treat. It would not consider its morality endangered. It still flocked to Verdi's opera, and the fascinating Piccolomini."[49]
The Times easily disposed of Verdi's share in the work. "The book," the criticism runs, "is of far more consequence than the music, which, except so far as it affords a vehicle for the utterance of the dialogue, is of no value whatever, and, moreover, because it is essentially as a dramatic vocalist that the brilliant success of Mlle. Piccolomini was achieved.... For the present, it will be sufficient to treat La Traviata as a play set to music. To Dumas fils, who invented the situations, and Mlle. Piccolomini, who delineated the emotions of the principal character, belong the honours of a triumph with which the composer has as little to do as possible."[50]
The Athenæum lost no time in "going for" Verdi over La Traviata. The first process was an examination of the "arranged score of Signor Verdi's setting of the Dame aux Camelias," whereupon the critic was in a position to say: "It seems written in the composer's later manner, grouping with his Rigoletto and Trovatore, without being equal to the latter opera; to demand from its heroine a less extensive soprano voice than Signor Verdi usually demands; to contain in the finale to its second act a good specimen of those pompous slow movements in which the newer Italian maestro has wrought out a pattern indicated by Donizetti; also throughout an unusual proportion of music in triple, or waltz tempo.... The masquerade music is fade and trivial.... There is some of Signor Verdi's effective instrumentation in the opening of the final terzetto. All these good points summed up, the new opera, as a whole, is poor and pale—consumptive music, which can only be relished in the absence of some healthier novelty."[51]
Subsequently, when the Lord Chamberlain of the period came down upon La Traviata on account of its questionable story, we read: "Neither Signor Verdi's music (which is Signor Verdi's poorest) nor Mlle. Piccolomini's singing (which every one concedes is on a very small scale) have made the fame and the furore of the opera, and the lady.... The music of La Traviata is trashy; the young Italian lady cannot do justice to the music, such as it is. Hence it follows that the opera and the lady can only establish themselves in proportion as Londoners rejoice in a prurient story prettily acted ... granted that La Traviata at her Majesty's Theatre has been the poorest music, poorly sung, which has been allowed to pass for the sake of its 'dear improper story,'" etc.[52]
Whatever the story, whatever the music of La Traviata it still lives as an opera, and is among the best of its class. This is due again, we believe, to the quality of the music, not to the nature of the story, for surely Londoners did not, forty years back,—nor would they now—betake themselves with their wives and daughters to the theatre to enjoy a lustful, itching story. The Traviata contains much of that warm, emotional, melodic profuseness which the public likes, and which it demands, when it throws off its working garb to take a little pleasure, sadly as, we are told, it takes this. The popular nature of the music, its freedom from technical and theatrical perplexity, which the public at large is glad to be without, its ever-changing colour, variety and expression—all this contributes to the vitality of La Traviata. Has it been, too, the sensuous nature of the story which has led so many nervous débutantes, highly attuned in temperament, to select the rôle to win an artistic fame in, perhaps, the highest, as it is the most difficult of all art pursuits? We believe not.
Poor Traviata! Troubles did not end with Mr. Chorley, for three years after that gentleman's decease we read:—
"How many Traviatas of how many countries have died on the lyric stage since the lugubrious and equivocal three-act opera was produced at Venice in March 1853?... It would be a curious calculation to count the number of prime donne who have taken to this disagreeable part.... A nice discussion as to the degree of sauciness or of bashfulness with which the vocalists who enact the Traviata should invest the consumptive lady, who coughs pianissimo and sings fortissimo in her death-scene."[53]
Les Vêpres Siciliennes was produced at the Grand Opéra, Paris, on the 13th June 1855; so that this composition, with the Trovatore and La Traviata, must have been occupying Verdi's mind at one and the same period. This was Verdi's first work written expressly for the French stage, and it was the more strange, therefore, to find him, an Italian composer, choosing as a subject the massacre of the French by the Sicilians; yet Verdi could scarcely refuse Scribe's story of the wholesale slaughter of 1282.