Violetta’s double aria at the end of act one is one of the most celebrated scenes in opera. In the first aria, the cavatina that begins A, fors’è lui, we hear Violetta yearning for the love that Alfredo has offered her. In the second aria, the cabaletta, the famous Sempre libera, she declares that she will resist his offer of love and live for pleasure alone. This is the music of the demimonde, but this time it is infected with a troubled determination, as Violetta struggles with her conflicting sentiments. It is monumentally difficult to sing. It includes 13 high C’s and four high D-flats. Verdi marked it allegro brillante. It is fast, dazzling, and surprisingly touching.

     In act two, Germont, Alfredo’s father, ostensibly persuades Violetta to leave Alfredo because of the scandal their affair is causing. His arguments are unabashedly sentimental and mawkishly moral, and this listener, at least, believes that he is deliberately exploiting Violetta’s doubts.

     My sense is that Violetta already knows that her liaison with Alfredo is doomed. Her beauty will fade as her illness progresses; Alfredo is naïve and volatile—as he proves in the next scene; they’re running out of money; society condemns their relationship. Germont is nothing more than the breeze that collapses her house of cards.

     Despite Germont’s insincerity and Violetta’s prescience, the long scene between them is profoundly moving, one of the great scenes of all opera. At her request, he embraces her as a daughter, and the father-daughter bond between them is palpable. Verdi was marked by a profound sensitivity to children. He had lost his two to disease as a young man and had never ceased grieving. Notice how Germont comforts Violetta, repeating the word piangi—weep—just as Rigoletto consoles his daughter in Rigoletto.

     Things move so rapidly in act two that the audience may not notice that Violetta writes three letters—one to Flora accepting her invitation to the party that night, another to Duphol, asking him to take her back, and a third to Alfredo telling him she is leaving him. In the opera, all we hear of that letter is the opening phrase, but in the Dumas novel, we get the entire text:

By the time you read this, I shall already be the mistress of another man. So all is over between us. Go back to your father, my dear, and to your sister, a pure young girl who knows nothing of your troubles and who will soon help you to forget what you have been made to suffer by the fallen creature they call Marguerite Gautier [Violetta’s name in the play]. You were good enough to love her for a while, and it is to you that she owes the only happy moments in a life which, she hopes, will not last long now.

     In act two, scene two, the pace of the drama picks up. Verdi’s demimonde music turns dark as Alfredo and Duphol gamble and the tension rises. Violetta’s plea that Alfredo leave before Duphol harms him and Alfredo’s denunciation of Violetta hint at violence. Modern audiences may not understand that Alfredo’s throwing of money at Violetta is a terrible insult; it is tantamount to publicly calling her a whore.