Ruth Fainlight
La Traviata in 2001
Hearing the broadcast—a live performance
from the New York Metropolitan Opera -
first in the kitchen, cooking then eating,
then in my study. It has just finished.
So much can happen, while listening to an opera.
The mind inhabits so many parallel worlds.
How angry that story always makes me.
Piange! Piange! The crucial problem:
as angels calmly view the damned soul’s torment,
art is also the contemplation of pain’s beauty.
The experience is called catharsis. (The same
response can be produced by news reports.)
I was eating, reading the paper, yet listening to Verdi
in a darkened theatre, watching the singers
from somewhere not very close to the stage—
which looks as small as a television screen—
the image distanced, as in a camera’s (or a sniper’s)
viewfinder, smaller and further away than from
the highest tier of the ‘gods’. Imagined visions
flow into the present’s urgent forms.
The tiny, vivid figures gesticulate.
The hollow vessel of the theatre
resonates with instruments and voices.
An audience in thrall—like the poor ‘traviata’
to Alfredo’s love and Germont’s power.
I was there in the theatre, also in the kitchen
and in Afghanistan, which I was reading about.
I don’t know if—before—minstrels played and sang
comparable romantic sagas there.
Under the burqas are beautiful women;
a grainy agency picture of one of the first to unveil
showed a face with the complex glamour
of a prima donna. And so many handsome fighters:
more than enough protagonists
for a repertoire of tragic operas.
I first heard Traviata—Saturday matinee
live from the Met (long may it continue)—
as a schoolgirl in Virginia, at the house
of my opera-struck aunt. Is it possible
that this announcer whose voice sounds so familiar
now, in London fifty years later, could be
the same man who introduced it then?
His description of Violetta’s flowered dress
resurrects, yet overlays, the memory
of every Violetta I have seen.
I am listening to an opera, reading an editorial
and thinking about La Dame aux Camélias:
remembering how the woman it’s based on
always wore a spray of white camellias—except
for those days of the month when she wore one of red.
Dinner is finished and I have moved to my study.
We are each in our study, both radios at full volume
in the almost empty building (it’s the weekend before
Xmas, nearly everyone has gone away already)
blaring out Act 3—resolution and death—and a friend
in an unhappy marriage has chosen this moment to call.
I can’t bring myself to say I don’t want to talk
yet surely she can hear the singing behind me
I haven’t lowered the volume, but she only remarks
that she can never understand how
anyone can listen to opera, that caterwauling,
then plunges back into her own story.
Piange, piange, dear friend. Suffering
is a stimulant. A hateful realization.
Another stratum of thought: that the sexual aspect
of our culture is still unbalanced; and the music
rises to a climactic duet and Violetta’s
ecstatic dying words: Joy, joy it’s the end.
My friend wishes me a happy new year.
I listened to her and to Violetta
with equal attention while thinking about
the many different strands of thought
a human brain can plait into the same moment—
and about that film which begins with a man
in a jester’s striped red-and-yellow costume, running
through a field of tall grass in northern Italy
in the year nineteen hundred (even though he died
in nineteen hundred and one), shouting, "Verdi is dead!"