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The real Traviata : the song of Marie Duplessis
\"The rags-to-riches story of a tragic young woman whose life inspired one of the most famous operas of all time, Verdi's masterpiece, La traviata, as well as one of the most scandalous and successful French novels of the nineteenth century, La dame aux camélias, by Alexandre Dumas fils. The woman at the centre of the story, Marie Duplessis, escaped from her life as an abused teenage girl in provincial Normandy, rising in an amazingly short space of time to the apex of fashionable life in nineteenth-century Paris, where she was considered the queen of the Parisian courtesans. Her life was painfully short, but by sheer willpower, intelligence, talent, and stunning looks she attained such prominence in the French capital that ministers of the government and even members of the French royal family fell under her spell\"--Dust jacket flap.
BOOK
The Real Traviata
The story of Marie Duplessis, the woman who inspired Verdi's La traviata. A rags-to-riches fairytale, from rural poverty to Parisian stardom, which ended in tragedy but gave rise to some of the most heart-wrenching and lyrical music ever composed.
eBook
Shift de nuit startlingly brave
No such accusations can be leveled at Shift de nuit's team. I took in this miniature at midnight (after allowing another company to beg off their performance when I was the only spectator to turn up) and I suspect that it was my lack of information about this show that made this a perfect little surprise. It's a solo where a woman in a dead-end life - Julie Lallier, who also translated the Patricia Ludwick play - dreams (and acts) her fantasies about being a dancer. There is a long belly-dancing sequence that is at the heart of the piece and a bittersweet, abrupt ending that wraps up this gem. The actor is unimaginably brave, staring the spectators - who are on top of her - in the eyes throughout the play and creating that blissful complicity that can only be found in little theatre done right. Rating 3 1/2
Newspaper Article
Singer embraces challenge of her 'La Traviata' role
\"I love dramas myself, so the third act (of 'La Traviata') is just amazing to me,\" [Anna Noggle] said. \"It's a challenge, but it's one of the most exhilarating roles I've played, for sure.\" In \"La Traviata,\" Violetta is a 19th-century courtesan whose world is rocked when she experiences true love after being befriended by the headstrong Alfredo. Their initially blissful relationship is cut short by Violetta after Alfredo's father, Giorgio, pleads to her for the sake of family propriety. Alfredo doesn't understand and jealousies and misunderstandings abound. Can there be a reconciliation? Violetta's most famous aria is \"Addio del passato\" (\"Farewell then forever\"). The roles have come as Noggle has made a name for herself as \"an artist to be watched.\" Credits include Queen of the Night in Mozart's \"Magic Flute\" and Mimi in \"La boheme.\" Locally she's been seen in previous National Lyric Opera visits as Gilda in \"Rigoletto\" and Liu in \"Turandot.\"
Newspaper Article
Tart with a bad cough Theatre Camille Terrorism The Laramie Project
Spectators who think they have a firm idea of Dumas's Marguerite Gautier are in for a shock with the Lyric Hammersmith production of Camille. The first surprise comes from Neil Bartlett's decision to base his adaptation of La Dame aux camelias not on Dumas's money- spinning play but on the semi-autobiographical novel of 1848, written immediately after the death of Marie Duplessis, his mistress and the model for Marguerite. As Bartlett rightly says, the heroine of the novel is a very different creature from the ethereally idealised demi-mondaine of the play and of Verdi's opera La traviata. Once under the sway of Elliot Cowan's sepulchrally doomed Armand she quietens down, but then bounces back for a shrilly lachrymose recital of Marguerite's deathbed letters. As most of the surrounding company are presenting the same kind of grossly judgmental caricatures, it would be unfair to hold Miss [Daniela Nardini] responsible for the mangling of Marguerite. It must be what the director, David McVicar, wanted. In which case his production is on shaky ground in its aim of exposing the enslavement of women to the caprice of male fantasy.
Newspaper Article
Women on top ; A controversial new book by feminist writer Susan Griffin argues that far from being the playthings of men, courtesans were the world's first truly liberated women
In essence, says [Susan Griffin], it all comes down to control. Unlike prostitutes, courtesans did not live in brothels, or walk the streets and were not controlled by pimps. Unlike mistresses, courtesans were free to pick and choose as many lovers as they wished. They were not kept hidden away but proudly displayed at balls, and parties. To qualify as a courtesan, a young woman had not only to be outstandingly beautiful, but also witty, charming and graceful. Persuading him to bankroll her, Chanel set up a hat shop in Paris and then, with the financial support of a second lover, the dress shop that was later to evolve into the legendary House of Chanel. 'I was able to start a high-fashion shop,' Chanel happily admitted, 'because two gentlemen were outbidding each other for my hot little body.' What qualities did [Marie Duplessis], [Venard] and Chanel possess that they could rise so far, so fast from such unpromising beginnings? Griffin says the greatest courtesans all had perfect timing, cheekiness, brilliance, gaiety, grace, charm and courage. It was in 19th-century Paris, after the Revolution, that courtesans achieved their greatest influence and power. It provided the perfect environment for a smart, ambitious young woman brave enough to defy all social conventions. 'Slightly rebellious and risqu, Paris offered an alternate society where a certain sophistication, including carnal knowledge that was banned from proper society, was allowed to thrive.' French art and literature, she points out, is filled with the images of courtesans from that time, in the paintings of Manet, Degas, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec; in the poems of Baudelaire; and in the novels of Balzac, [Alexandre Dumas], Zola, Flaubert and Colette.
Newspaper Article
Arts: La Traviata at the Waterfront
It still happens today. A young writer, a journalist maybe, gains access to the homes and clubs of the rich, and begins an affair with an older and richer man's lover - of either sex. For Alexandre Dumas fils, aged 20 at the time, the Paris of the 1850s brought him in contact with Marguertie Gautier, a contact which led to his famous novel and play, La Dame Aux Camelias, describing his inability to keep the woman, he disguised underthe name of Marie Alphonsine Duplessis, in the style in which she had been accustomed to, as mistress to the compliant Compte de Perregaux. She later died of consumption. Or syphilis.
Newspaper Article
From here . . .to there
Tall and handsome, by 19, [Alexandre Dumas] the younger had acquired his first mistress and Victor Hugo cautioned his own son against him. Life for Alexandre Dumas became a round of gambling, drinking, womanising, running up bills and avoiding boredom. On a September day in 1844, having arrived back in Paris from visiting his father, he and a friend dined together and decided to seek some much-needed entertainment at the Theatre des Varietes. There, in her usual box, sat the most notorious courtesan of all, Marie Duplessis. She was incredibly beautiful, genuinely likeable, extravagant and already consumptive - although illness did not keep her at home. Dumas had seen her before but this time, through his supper companion who knew Marie's neighbour, a meeting was arranged.
Newspaper Article
Capital and crime in belle epoque BOOK REVIEW
Since, in crime fiction, the mystery is in the fictional present, and its resolution in the fictional past, the reader must travel backward, like Peter the Great through a hedge. \"[Stone]'s Fall,\" a long novel by [Iain Pears], the British writer best known for \"An Instance of the Fingerpost,\" gives the reader the expected more-than-500 pages and also what is not expected at all: a female character who might have stepped out of Balzac, along with a view of the belle epoque that is neither anachronistic nor censorious. There is much about the London Stock Exchange and early industrial organization, a run on the Bank of England and a plot to start World War I five years early. But it is Elizabeth who incorporates, in her person, the true relations of capital in the 19th century. The great courtesans make an epoch in financial history for this reason. Once all property can be turned into money, it can also be turned into sex (a much more powerful passion even than avarice). The collision of finance capitalism and sex throws up not just [Marie Duplessis] and Cora Pearl (the lover of Prince Napoleon), but Balzac's Josepha (in \"La Cousine Bette\") and Esther (in \"Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes\") and Zola's Nana.
Newspaper Article