![]() ![]() Opera Manon Lescaut, 1893) tried harder to make it work, but failed because there were too many of them! Ten francs.” ’īooks recently I still find Dumas’ account tedious, self-serving and repetitive, but poet Piave’s versification of the stage version for Verdi’s opera redeems it from such comment.īy contrast, Prévost’s story is superb, yet Massenet’s librettists (for his opera Manon, 1884) were unable to add any value to the text and Puccini’s writers (for his There is something written on the first page. Of all the literary precedents for La traviata it is the Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel L’histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut which cannot be excludedįrom any discussion of Verdi’s opera, because the broad brush strokes of Prévost’s narrative find many uncanny shades on the palette of Dumas fils’ novel.Īrmand had given Prévost’s book to Marguerite, and she had read it over and over again this was the copy which the narrator of La dame aux camélias bought at the auction ofīeautifully bound, gilt-edged, entitled Manon Lescaut. Is there anything else like it in all music? Indeed the year before he died (1900) Verdi told an interviewer of his admiration for that opera and how he was impressed by Isolde’s final aria, and finest hour: Mild und leise/Dolce e calmo – and, let me add, Love in death, or liebestod, the consummation of love in or after death, as for example in Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1865). When they were collaborating on the opera, their working title was Amore e morte, Traviata, was on stage at La Fenice in Venice. We don’t know if Verdi attended the production, so we must assume he read about it in the papers for, just over a year later, his and Francesco Maria Piave’s version, La ![]() Novel opened at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in early 1852 (without the Grand Guignol disinterment scene), Verdi and Giuseppina Strepponi (whom he would marry seven years later) were residing in Paris. When the somewhat daring stage adaptation of the Dumas ‘For twenty-five days of the month the camellias were white, and for five they were red …’ The novel is a fictional account of Dumas’ short love affair with Marie Duplessis, a capriciousīelle de jour, who died of TB in February 1847, age 23.ĭuplessis is buried in Montmartre, and each time I go there - to sayĪ prayer for my friend François Truffaut - her grave always has many white and some red camellias: It was terrible to see, it is horrible to relate.’ Great white shroud covered the corpse, closely outlining some of its contours … one of the men put out his hand … and taking hold of it by one end suddenly laid bare the face of Marguerite. His lover Marguerite Gautier’s body at the Cimetière de Montmartre: There is a scene in chapter vi of the younger Alexandre Dumas’ La dame aux camélias (1848) in which Armand Duval insists on, and assists at, the disinterment of ![]()
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