In this cinema-inspired and highly poetic staging, Pier Luigi Pizzi brings us Verdi’s great drama to the salons and bedrooms of 1940s Paris. Norah Amsellem, in her magnificent performance as Violetta, is accompanied by José Bros as Alfredo and the great Renato Bruson in the role of Germont, under the masterly baton of Jesús López Cobos.

La traviata is the third and last opera in the 'popular trilogy’ (together with Rigoletto and Il trovatore), which marked the start of Giuseppe Verdi’s artistic maturity, and is with good reason one of his most beloved works. It is based on a famous novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux Camélias, telling the sad story of Marie Duplessis, the celebrated Parisian courtesan who died of that quintessentially Romantic disease, tuberculosis. La Traviata was the first opera to tell the unhappy story of a woman brought down by the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality, with an unprecedented level of realism. Violetta Valéry discovers true love with the young Alfredo Germont, but is forced to give him up at the request of his father, Giorgio Germont.

Verdi drew upon his own relationship with Giuseppina Strepponi, his future wife and loyal supporter, in this work. Its debut, on March 6, 1853 at La Fenice in Venice, was a failure, largely due to presenting scenes from ordinary life rather than stories about aristocrats and rulers. In this production, which opened the 2003-2004 opera season to great acclaim, Pier Luigi Pizzi set the work in Nazi-occupied Paris, where the characters are living from day to day in a permanent state of war, heightening their passion, the only thing they can hold onto.