We know the question you really want answered about the new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata that opens the 2024 Santa Fe Opera season on Friday, June 28, so we’re not going to keep you in suspense very long. It’s Santa Fe’s most popular Verdi opera — this will be its 14th appearance here, with the most recent in 2013. The runner-up, Falstaff , is far off the pace at six, while Rigoletto trails the fat knight by a nose at five, and Don Carlos and Simon Boccanegra bring up the rear with just one each.
(It’s a surprisingly slim showing for one of the greatest of all Italian composers, with more than 25 operas to his credits.) Now for the answer to your question. It’s no: You’re not going to watch some weird post-Apocalyptic reinterpretation set on the surface of Mars or anything like that.
In fact, director Louisa Muller and her design team — Christopher Oram for scenery and costumes, Marcus Doshi for lighting — have developed an approach that seems to be original, thought-provoking, and (dare we say it?) beautiful. It’s even set in an identifiably upper-class Paris. The one difference? It starts in the summer of 1939, a time of almost desperate revelry as everyone knew that war was inevitable and tried to cram in as much hedonism as possible first.
(By the time the Nazis occupied the city a year later, 75% of the population had left.) La Traviata Muller and Oram’s approach to the time and place for their production combines a deep respect for .
