La Traviata

The Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center

New York

(212) 362-6000

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The risks that the Metro­politan Opera took in its “daring” new production of La Traviata have paid off, said Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times. No doubt some opera buffs will dismiss German director Willy Decker’s stripped-down, modern staging of Verdi’s beloved tragedy as “just another high-concept Eurotrash outrage.” But given the disdain audiences have shown for other efforts by the Met to update the classics, “there was surprisingly little booing when Decker and his production team took curtain calls” on opening night. Even a prickly New York audience could see that Decker had created an uncommonly fresh take on this story of a fallen woman while staying true to the composer’s vision.

It helps that his lead “grabs our attention from the moment she makes her entrance,” said Mike Silverman in the Associated Press. As the courtesan Violetta, who falls “giddily in love” with a bourgeois suitor only to be tossed aside while withering away from consumption, the Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya effects a compelling transformation “from playful lover to figure of grief.” Her voice is sometimes “worrisomely thin” in the upper register, but her overall performance is “stunning.” With his “sweet, modest-size voice,” Matthew Polenzani, who plays her gentleman lover, is overpowered by her presence. But since “any Traviata rises or falls on the strength” of its Violetta, that might not be entirely inappropriate.

The new staging makes the soprano’s role more crucial still, said Zachary Woolfe in The New York Observer. Poplavskaya is onstage almost every moment, and the set consists of “little more than a curved, neutral-colored back wall” and an oversize clock that acts as a “perpetual reminder” that Violetta’s time is running out. If Decker is occasionally heavy-handed with his symbolism, at least he’s freed La Traviata from the stuffy and busy stagings that the Met favored in the past. “It’s been a long time since a Met production of an opera was really capable of changing your perception of the work.” This one reminds us that Verdi’s drama is still capable of teaching us new things about “the double binds faced by women” and “our fascination with spectacles of suffering.”