The Music and the Drama

     Verdi uses a number of musical techniques to illuminate the story of Violetta’s downfall. All of them bear his trademark, yet nowhere else in his music so touching.

     First, he sets the scene for the passionate love between Violetta and Alfredo by creating the demimonde in music. The shallowness and artificiality of the life of Violetta and her friends are powerfully portrayed in the feverish gaiety of the music that opens act one. The trifling waltz that follows the drinking song, played by an off-stage orchestra, accompanies the first half of the duet between Violetta and Alfredo and underlines Violetta’s frivolousness. It ends only when Alfredo interrupts it to describe the first day he saw her. The music that begins act two, scene two—the ball at Flora’s house—conveys the same shallow quality. The accusation that Verdi wrote banal music for these scenes is accurate. That’s just what he wanted to do.

     By way of contrast, Verdi shapes the love music, first sung by Alfredo in the second part of the act one duet—the music that interrupts the waltz—as a legato descending line. Its principal phrase is repeated, then the voice jumps to a high A before touching briefly on the sixth note of the scale, flatted for greater poignance, and settling downward. Alfredo’s words are: Di quell’amor ch’è palpito del’universo intero, misterioso, altero, croce e delizia al cor—This love which is the pulse of the universe itself, mysterious and noble, the torment and the delight of the heart. Violetta’s response to Alfredo’s outpouring of love restores the triviality of the demimonde, but he draws her back into the love theme, and their voices blend. He repeats croce e delizia, torment and delight; she says again and again, dimenticarmi, forget me. Gaston’s intrusion brings back the waltz as Violetta invites Alfredo to return to visit her the next day.

     The love theme reappears twice in Violetta’s double aria at the end of act one. First she sings the melody and repeats the words as she considers Alfredo’s proffered love. Then, Alfredo himself sings the same words and music from outside as he serenades her and she decides to reject him.

     In the second act, the love melody comes back in a much altered form, and we see for the first time the sad underpinnings of that descending line. At this point in the story, Violetta is preparing to leave Alfredo but has not told him. The words are simply, Amami, Alfredo, amami quant’io t’amo. “Love me, Alfredo, as much as I love you.” This time the melody appears not in the 3/8, with its waltz-like lilt, but in sober 4/4. The ornaments are gone. The melody is repeated, then comes the leap in the voice, and the flatted sixth comes at the end on the word Addio, good-bye.

     Equally important is the music Verdi associates with Violetta’s illness. Like the love music, it descends melodically, but also harmonically, ever moving to the flat side of the key. It is the first music we hear, at the beginning of the prelude to act one. The prelude then shifts to the music of Violetta’s outcry of love in act 2, Amami, Alfredo. It presents that melody twice, the second time accompanied by frivolous upward runs in the violins. Thus the prelude shows us the three dominant aspects of Violetta’s character—her illness, her shallow gaiety, and her love.