Fanny Salvini-Donatelli - The Traviata "fiasco"

The Traviata "fiasco"

Verdi himself described the 1853 premiere of La traviata as a "fiasco". Salvatini-Donatelli was 38 years old at the time and quite stout. Her physical unsuitability for playing a beautiful young woman wasting away from tuberculosis is often cited as one of the reasons for the opera's initial failure. In the third act when the doctor announced that Violetta's illness had worsened and she had only hours to live, the first-night audience is said to have burst out laughing, with one member of the public shouting: "I see no consumption, only dropsy!" Verdi himself had expressed serious doubts about Salvatini-Donatelli's suitability for the role two months before the premiere and sent his librettist, Francesco Piave, to La Fenice's manager to convey his view that Violetta required a singer "with an elegant figure who is young and sings passionately". His request for a casting change was unsuccessful.

Whatever the audience may have thought of Fanny Salvini-Donatelli's physical appearance, they were appreciative of her singing. Contemporary accounts show that her first act aria, "Sempre libera", received great applause. The critic in La Gazzetta di Venezia wrote the following day: "Salvini-Donatelli sang those coloratura passages, of which the maestro wrote so many, with an indescribable skill and perfection. She captivated the theatre." The "failure" of the opening night performance was only relative. In addition to the applause for Salvatini-Donatelli's aria, the orchestral Prelude was so well received that the audience began to shout for Verdi, who had to take curtain calls even before the curtain went up on the first act. Things only started derailing in the second act, especially the singing of the baritone (Felice Varesi) and the tenor (Lodovico Graziani). La traviata also did quite well at the box office. It ran for ten performances at La Fenice that season, with an average evening profit more than double that of Verdi's other two operas in the repertory there, Ernani and Il Corsaro. In any case, a year later it was mounted again at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice to an indisputably triumphant reception. On that occasion, the role of Violetta was taken by Maria Spezia who was thirteen years younger and considerably slimmer than Salvini-Donatelli. The first night problems do not appear to have dissuaded Salvini-Donatelli from essaying the role again. She sang it at least three more times: in 1856 in Constantinople, when Luigi Arditi brought the opera to Turkey for the first time; in 1857 at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna (the second revised version with the title Violetta); and in 1858, when she sang it in London at the Drury Lane Theatre.