La Traviata, ENO, London Coliseum

The design of this production is unlikely to win the art form many new recruits, but the music-making is impressive, says Rupert Christiansen.

By Rupert Christiansen 03 February 2013 • 11:36am

Corinne Winters as Violetta in ENO's 'La Traviata'

Not for the first time, English National Opera finds itself financially red-faced – the victim of tumbling box-office receipts and Arts Council cuts.

What the organisation needs at this juncture is a more cautiously managed attitude to those sacred cows – experiment, risk and novelty – and a bias towards the presentation of colourful, entertaining and inventive productions of familiar repertory which will attract and delight large audiences year in, year out: Nicholas Hytner’s The Magic Flute and Deborah Warner’s Eugene Onegin could serve as models.

This new staging of La Traviata scarcely fits the bill. Imported from Graz and directed by the German leftist Peter Konwitschny, it embodies the sort of austere middle-European intellectualism that most of the ordinary public (as opposed to a coterie of metropolitan opera buffs) finds baffling and repellent.

The stage is filled with virtually nothing except a series of theatrically red curtains, repeatedly drawn and undrawn until the dead Violetta walks off into a dark void. The costuming is modern, but the general effect is stylized and non-naturalistic, in the Brechtian manner. The score has been cut (the second verse of Addio del passato and the dances at Flora’s party are among the passages which vanish), allowing the opera to run straight through in 110 minutes uninterrupted.

The net result is something raw, lean and punchy, staged with considerable theatrical flair. Aside from the unscripted introduction of Germont’s pubescent daughter (or someone he has paid to impersonate her?) and a revolver which Violetta suicidally pulls out of her handbag, there are few ostentatiously tricksy additions to the narrative or its imagery. The problem is rather that Konwitschny has stripped so much away that there’s nothing much left.

In this contextless frame, we never know who Violetta is, or why she is so vulnerable. By presenting her as simply a contemporary girl-about-town, all sense of her moral dignity and piety is lost, as is the scandal of middle-class Alfredo associating with someone diseased of low birth, whose free-wheeling attitude to sex has made her a pariah. Also, the elimination of two intervals removes the dramatically crucial dimension of time passing.

So although Konwitschny’s vision is sharp-edged and clean-lined, it seems bleak, narrow and jejune compared to Verdi’s.

Close your eyes, however, and his music is grandly honoured. American soprano Corinne Winters gives Violetta her all, singing with dauntless brilliance, attack and gusto, while Ben Johnson brings clarion-toned Italianate elegance to his nerdy, bookish Alfredo. Both of them are terrific. With Anthony Michaels-Moore an impressively stentorian Germont and Michael Hofstetter a highly sympathetic conductor, this is a gripping and impressive Traviata, but not a moving or beautiful one.