'La Traviata' at the Real: the scandal is a classic

It's striking that twenty years have passed since Willy Decker shook up the international scene with his radical and transgressive La traviata at the Salzburg Festival. It's also striking how effortlessly the "scandal" has become a classic in Western theaters. Decker's La traviata —and Verdi 's…—has toured both large and small houses. And it reappears at the Teatro Real as the triumphant epilogue to the season. This is due both to the proliferation of performances over a month—from June 24 to July 23—and to the assurances of the musical creators . Starting with maestro Henrik Nánási , whose affinity for the Verdi repertoire guarantees the "execution" of the event and serves as a reference in the pit for the three casts recruited by the Teatro Real on the threshold of summer. Nadine Serra, Xavier Anduaga , and Luca Salsi headline the first performance starting Tuesday, while Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez is the star of three highly anticipated performances in July.

Willy Decker didn't conduct La traviata . He desecrated it. He exhumed it . He took it out of the display case of the Verdi Museum and placed it, naked, on the stage as if decorum, convention, and the tulle of camellias were obstacles to understanding what the hell Verdi was talking about when he adapted The Lady of the Camellias Decker's Violetta neither lives in Paris nor dies on a velvet couch : she does so on an existential ice rink where love, death and time are not mentioned in the conditional, but in the imperative.

No one who has seen that production—the one in Salzburg, 2005, with Netrebko in a state of grace and Villazón still in one piece—has ever perceived La Traviata with the same gaze. Decker deconstructs the logic of the serial to transform it into a metaphysical drama . There is no furniture, no velvet, no bourgeois society to redeem the courtesan. Only a white stage, a gigantic clock—a phallic symbol, a symbol of time running out, a symbol of fatality—and a Doctor Grenvil who lurks like the Grim Reaper.

Decker doesn't reinterpret. She reveals . And in doing so, she exposes the viscera of melodrama. No more handkerchiefs. No more sacrificial heroines. Her Violetta doesn't expire among camellias. She collapses like a corpse that has lived too long. Her red gown—more an expression of blood than desire—is not a wardrobe: it's a stigma, a shroud that covers up her hell.

And therein lies the miracle. That an 1853 opera , manipulated, exploited, and domesticated for a century and a half, recovers, in the hands of a minimalist German, an expressive violence that not even the most daring film directors dare to touch. The gigantic clock that occupies the final act—the end of everything—is not a mere stage device. It is the main character. It spins like the needle of illness in Violetta's lungs. Like society spins around the still-breathing corpse . Like the hypocrisy of a world that celebrates its beauty and is shocked by its freedom.

Verdi knew it, Decker knew it. That La traviata isn't about love, but about its impossibility. Not about redemption, but about damnation. And that if Violetta dies, it's not from tuberculosis : it's because she no longer has a place in a world that discards and banished her as soon as she's no longer useful.

The audacity of the production lies not in its modernity, but in its nakedness, in its rejection of stage makeup , in its refusal to disguise the brutality of the plot with 19th-century lace. Decker strips away the tinsel to leave the characters as what they are: ghosts. Alfredo is a childish coward. Germont Sr., a polite executioner. And Violetta, the only human being in the story. The only one who loves without calculation. The only one who sacrifices herself without asking for recompense. That's why her death doesn't move you. It stings. You don't cry for her . You cry for yourself . For Alfredo's cowardice, for Germont's cruelty, for the audience's passivity. Because in Netrebko 's fixed gaze—she was the first—in that final walk across the white void, we recognize our own fragility. That of having let so many Violettas die in the name of decorum, of family, of decency.

And it is there that Willy Decker plots his greatest sacrilege . Not to the opera , but to the audience. He denies it solace. He robs it of its climax. There is no aria to save, no reunion to console, no grave with flowers. Only silence remains. Time. The clock. And a red robe that no longer envelops a body, but an idea . That love, when it is real, has no place. Not in opera, nor in life.