Highs and lows

This year’s Christmas offering at the Royal Opera is yet a further revival of Richard Eyre’s production of La Traviata, which began the season and is being revived again early in 2012. The main reason I went again to an opera for which I usually feel distaste was to see and hear Simon Keenlyside in the role of Germont père, hoping that he might make me see the opera in a different light. And, with a few gestures and in magnificent vocal form, that is exactly what he did.

Normally I object strongly to Violetta’s giving in to the old bully, and then asking him to bless her, when if there is any blessing to be done it should be the other way round. He has just morally and psychologically blackmailed her into renouncing Alfredo, and she has allowed herself to succumb to his ruthlessness. That is, of course, in the text, but the miracle in this particular revival was that Germont was the more emotionally fragile of the two, so one felt in the end that Violetta was taking pity on him.