Traviata is the past participle of the Italian word traviare which means to lose one’s way or go astray, but the term is used to designate a courtesan—a paid female companion. A courtesan is more than a common prostitute. She is expected to provide cultured company for a man, not just sex. In that respect, she is like the geisha of old Japan.

     The heroine of Verdi’s La Traviata was a real person—Marie Duplessis, a courtesan who died at the age of 23 in 1847, only six years before the opera’s premier. She was immortalized in the novel and later the play La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, who, along with Franz Liszt, the Comte de Stackelberg, the Prince de Bidache (Napoleon III’s Minister of Foreign Affairs), and many others, had been her lover.

     Incidentally, those of you who know French will notice that Camélias is misspelled. Camellias in French is spelled caméllias. When the error was brought to the attention of Dumas, he maintained that George Sand, the novelist, spelled it that way, and he’d rather write it incorrectly with Mademoiselle Sand than correctly with other people.

     La Traviata takes place in the demimonde. In the Paris of the 1840’s, two social worlds existed side by side. In the public world, respectable men had families and carried out social obligations openly. But these same men also lived in a hidden world, the demimonde (half world), a society of wealthy men, courtesans, and artists. The men supplied the houses and clothes for the women, the women provided refined companionship and a social retreat, and the artists furnished enlightened entertainment in exchange for sumptuous food and drink. Verdi, while in Paris overseeing the production of his operas, participated in the artistic life of Paris and therefore in the demimonde . He almost certainly saw and probably met Marie Duplessis.

     At the time he composed the opera, Verdi was living with the singer Giuseppina Strepponi. He knew very well the cruelty of the mainstream world to women like Giuseppina, and Traviata, his only directly personal opera, set in the Paris of his own day, became a deeply-felt tribute to women who could never escape their past.