Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata is focused on the love affair between Violetta, a woman who has, as the title suggests, been "led astray" and is a courtesan, and Alfredo, a gentleman who is led to believe hat she is unfaithful (John, 1981). The course of this love affair is predictable: the couple meet, fall in love, quarrel, separate, and reunite only when Violetta lies dying of the "consumption" (i.e., tuberculosis) that is one of the consequences of her lifestyle. Along to way to an ending in which Alfredo returns to the dying woman, having learned that Violetta was not unfaithful to him, opera goers are treated to frenzied and gay parties in Violetta's salon, arias of love and passion, a duel, parental anger, and a diagnosis of a fatal condition. As Arthur Groos (1995, p. 233) commented, "the last fin de siecle was highly conscious of the pervasive 'white plague'" known today as tuberculosis. Operatic and literary heroines were often dispatched via this dread disease, which could occasionally permit a temporary remission.
In Verdi's opera, as noted by David Hamilton (53), the theme was drawn from Alexandre Dumas films' work titled La Dame aux Camelias. Consumption, as it was called, was common; no antibiotic treatment existed at the time and victims of this malady often experienced a period of unusual vigor and gaiety immediately before death. Such is the case in Act III, Scene
6 of La Traviata. In this Scene the repentant Alfredo, finally aware that Violetta was not unfaithful to him, returns to her side only to attend her death bed. As Peter Conrad (2004) commented after hearing one version of the opera that the challenge for the artist performing as Violetta is enormous.
She must transform herself from the beginning of the opera to its conclusion, moving away from a fairly shallow persona accompanied by a showy, flighty coloratura tirade into a woman more "truly impassioned, weighted by a desperate yearning...