April 22, 2019
New Insights on an Old Favorite: Verdi’s La traviata
The plot of this much beloved opera revolves around the high-class courtesan Violetta, the quintessential "tart with a heart" who falls for Mr. Right but can’t decide whether she really wants to settle down. In this 30 minute episode of the pod cast series Aria Code, host folk musician Rhiannon Giddens and her guests, soprano Diana Damrau, dramaturg Cori Ellison, and author and former escort Brooke Magnanti, discuss and reflect on Violetta’s spectacular aria in the Act I finale and its deep inner conflicts around love and freedom.
The Host
Rhiannon Giddens is a 2017 Macarthur Genius Award winner and the co-founder of the Grammy Award-winning string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, in which she also plays banjo and fiddle. In her solo and collaborative work, she masterfully blends American musical genres like gospel, jazz, blues and country.
The Guests
Diana Damrau is one of the leading sopranos of our time. She has performed at all the world's major opera companies, specializing in lyric and coloratura roles. She's singing the role of Violetta at the Metropolitan Opera this spring. Cori Ellison is the company dramaturg for Santa Fe Opera and has also worked with the Glynebourne Festival Opera, New York City Opera and the Juilliard School. Brooke Magnanti is a writer who earned her doctorate in forensic pathology, but you might know her as Belle de Jour. Her book, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, documented her year working as an escort and inspired a TV series and several follow-up books.
About Aria Code
Aria Code is a podcast that pulls back the curtain on some of the most famous arias in opera history, with insight from the biggest voices of our time. Each episode dives into one aria and explores how and why these brief musical moments have imprinted themselves in our collective consciousness, why they touch us at such a human level well over a century after they were written, and what it takes to stand on the stage and sing them. Each episode ends with the aria, uninterrupted and in full, recorded from the Met Opera stage.
The Aria Code Team
Aria Code is produced by WQXR in partnership with the Metropolitan Opera. The team includes Merrin Lazyan, Brendan Francis Newnam, Matt Boynton, Ricardo Quiñones, Ania Grzesik, Khrista Rypl and Matt Abramovitz. Original music by Hannis Brown.
