Verdi's La traviata, the most performed opera in the world, opens English National Opera's new year at the London Coliseum.
Verdi’s La traviata, the most performed opera in the world, returns to the London Coliseum in Covent Garden on Wednesday 3 February 2027. It opens English National Opera’s principal engagement of the new year.
The opera came from Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias, which drew on a woman Dumas had lived with. Verdi and his librettist Piave wanted to set it in their own present day, 1853, which had never been done at La Fenice.
The management refused and insisted on costumes from around 1700, because the heroine was a courtesan dying of tuberculosis. A contemporary setting made her somebody the audience might know. The first night in Venice, on 6 March 1853, was in Verdi’s own words a fiasco.
The opera rests on Violetta, who must be a coloratura in Act One, a lyric soprano in Act Two and a dramatic soprano in Act Three. The prelude plays the dying woman’s music first and the love music second, so Verdi tells the audience the ending before a word is sung.
English National Opera sings it in English, in a house of 2,300 seats. The run continues to Saturday 13 March.