★★★☆☆
Catching up on recent reviews, I see that one of my predecessors, clearly a sensitive soul, described the 1856 London premiere of La traviata as “hideous and abominable”. What got the poor chap steaming from all orifices was not Verdi’s sublime music, but something very unusual at that time: the sympathetic depiction of a prostitute.
So I wish he could have seen David McVicar’s classic production, now revived by Scottish Opera — and especially Tanya McCallin’s sumptuous sets and costumes. Far from being hideous and abominable, death by tuberculosis can rarely have been more elegantly framed.
True, you have to accept McVicar’s ghoulish if metaphorically apt concept of staging the whole opera on Violetta’s tombstone, surreally enlarged to form the floor for almost the