Verdi's La traviata runs at the London Coliseum from 3 February to 13 March 2027, English National Opera's principal engagement of the new year.
Verdi and his librettist Piave wanted to set La traviata in the present day, in 1853, which had never been done at La Fenice. The management refused and insisted on costumes from around 1700, because the subject was a courtesan dying of tuberculosis and a contemporary setting made it about somebody the audience might know. It came from Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias, which came from a woman Dumas had actually lived with, and the first night in Venice on 6 March 1853 went badly enough that Verdi wrote to a friend calling it a fiasco.
It is now performed more than any other opera in the world. The reason is Violetta, who has to be a coloratura in Act One, a lyric soprano in Act Two and a dramatic one in Act Three, and who dies convincingly at the end of all that. The prelude is the whole opera in four minutes — the dying woman first, the love music second — so Verdi tells the audience the ending before a word is sung.
English National Opera gives it at the London Coliseum from Wednesday 3 February to Saturday 13 March 2027, sung in English, in the longest slot of its season’s second half. Six weeks through the emptiest stretch of the London year is when a house of 2,300 seats has room to fill them.