VERDI'S TRAGIC MASTERPIECE

Florida Grand Opera presents Verdi's towering La Traviata this season. A tragic love story that explores the suffocating constraints of polite society, the story is centered on the beautiful courtesan Violetta Valery, who sacrifices her reputation and wealth when she decides to move from Paris to the countryside with her lover Alfredo.

First performed in 1853, La Traviata can be said to be Verdi's most intimate work, drawing on social issues that were contemporary to him at the time, and is now the most performed opera in the world. This Florida Grand Opera staging stars Cecilia Violetta Lopez and Pavel Petrov as the doomed couple, making their company debut.

What is the story?

As one of the most beautiful courtesans of Paris, the alluring Violetta has many admirers but has let none of her wealthy suitors near her heart, preferring their generosity with their wallets to their baser attentions. It is in this world she meets Alfredo, a handsome yet penniless member of the bourgeois who wins her love and whisks her away to a countryside idyll in the hope of escaping her past life. Can their passion survive the reality of poverty, reputation and illness, or will everything they have fought to flee overwhelm the strongest emotion of them all?