To live and die in waltz time. This is what Violetta Valéry does, the Verdian heroine whom censorship wanted to dress in the costumes of Richelieu’s time, but who forcefully reclaims, note for note, word for word her eternal contemporaneity. Perhaps precisely because it is about a real person and not a historical figure, but a woman who died very young just six years before the premiere of La Traviata (1853). Alphonsine Plessis, under the stage name Marie Duplessis, became one of the most admired and refined Parisian courtesans, who entered myth, thanks in part to Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel La dame aux camelias (which renamed her Marguerite). The heroine is a prostitute, a woman of the world, a woman known to contemporary social chronicles.

The scandal of the traviata who does not need to be redeemed, because the only condemnation points to “the implacable man,” cannot be eluded by pushing it away in time: under the veneer of highly researched lexicon and syntax, Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto is concrete and ruthless, with its insistence so frequently on a “vulgar” subject such as money; nevertheless Verdi’s recourse to waltz time – and to the polka its relative – represents a contemporary worldliness, with all the connotations of a dance deemed sinful and sensual, of popular origin, yet ready to disguise feelings and show finesse with its elusive motion.