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Images of Paris in 19th Century Italian Opera Tuesday, February 26 Professor Mazullo will speak about Paris as a dynamic presence in Giacomo Puccini's "La Boheme" (1896) and Giuseppe Verdi's "La Traviata" (1853). Music historian Carl Dahlhaus writes in his influential book "Nineteenth-Century Music" that "In opera, nineteenth-century Paris was a milieu fully as unusual, and therefore as picturesque, as China and Japan." While Puccini's experiments in exoticising the Orient (in Madama Butterfly and Turandot) and the American West (in La Fanciulla del West) were yet to come when he composed his fourth opera in 1896, still the setting in Paris's Latin Quarter gave him the opportunity to fill his score with "local color" -- all but a requirement in a late-19-century music culture overflowing with nationalist tendencies. Verdi, at mid-century, gave the French capital an even more tangible role in his most popular opera. In her first-act aria, Violetta, the courtesan around whom the story unfolds, describes herself as "A poor, lonely woman/ Abandoned in this teeming desert/They call Paris!" A master of musical dramaturgy, Verdi lets the pull of Paris in Violetta's mind alter the formal structure of this aria, giving subtle musical representation to her internal struggle, as she chooses between the intimacy of love in the country and the decadent pleasures of life in the city.
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