‘Poor Mariette Duplessis is dead… the first woman I ever loved, and now she’s in goodness knows which cemetery, abandoned to the maggots of the sepulchre! It’s as she said to me fifteen months ago: “I won’t live: I’m a strange girl and I won’t be able to keep living a life I don’t know how to lead and that I don’t know how to bear either”.’
Thus spoke Franz Liszt of Marie d’Agoult, the unforgettable ghost of the woman who would become the Dame aux Camellias in Alexandre Dumas Fils’ play La Dame Aux Cameìlias. However it was Giuseppe Verdi who would give her immortality in his remarkable masterpiece La Traviata, one of the opera repertoire’s most striking portraits of a woman at once cruel and sublime.
The Paris Opera production of La Traviata screens at Palace Byron Bay Cinema at 1pm on Sunday August 10 and 11am Wednesday August 13.
