"La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi" Top 5 Page for this destination Opera House Tip by Nemorino

My immediate reason for going to Hannover in October 2011 was to see Benedikt von Peter’s highly unusual staging of the opera La traviata by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901).

As I have pointed out on my Braunschweig page, La traviata is now one of the world's most popular operas, but when it first came out in 1853 it shocked opera goers (and the original cast of singers!) because of its highly controversial contemporary topic. It wasn't about Greek gods or Roman emperors, as everyone expected, but about a French courtesan (sort of an up-market prostitute) who had really lived and in fact had just died six years earlier of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-three.

I have seen La traviata many times in numerous different stagings. My favorite is still the classic Axel Corti staging at the Frankfurt Opera, in which Violetta dies not in her bed but on the floor of the second class waiting room in the railroad station in Orléans while she is trying to flee from the Nazis.

In the Hannover staging by Benedikt von Peter, the orchestra is up on the stage and the action takes place on a roof covering the orchestra pit. Only one character is ever visible, namely Violetta Valéry herself, played and sung by the American soprano Nicole Chevalier. All the others sing from the first balcony of the auditorium.

In the first scene Violetta has invited lots of people to her party, but no one turns up. Alfredo’s fervent declaration of love, sung from the darkness, is evidently just in her imagination.

This works because Nicole Chevalier is a brilliant singer and actress who succeeds in filling the stage for two and a half hours (without an intermission) with her portrayal of a lonely and desperate woman.

The only scenes which for me didn’t work so well were the ones where Violetta is not even present, like the confrontation between Alfredo and his father, who were both singing in the darkness from different sides of the auditorium.

When she dies at the end she is still alone. She is convinced that Alfredo is by her side, but that is also just her imagination.

The applause at the end of the performance was long and enthusiastic.

If you wish, you can click here to see the trailer for this production, with explanations in German by the stage director Benedikt von Peter.

Address: Opernplatz 1, 30159 Hannover
Directions: Location of the opera house on Google Maps
Phone: 0511 - 9999 1111
Website: http://www.oper-hannover.de/oper/