AUDIOFEATURE to THE LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]Hi, on behalf of Bayerische Staatsballett, I would like to welcome you to this audio introduction. My name is Kristof Geiser and as your host for the next 15 minutes or so, I would like to dig a little deeper and to enhance your experience once you can watch one of our shows of the ballet entitled The Lady of the Camellias.

[00:00:21]Normally, things tend to be rather chaste in ballet, but today we are looking at a story that leads us into the so-called demi-monde and even that is already euphemistic language. It is about sex as a service, albeit the way the story is being told works with sublimation. The Lady of the Camellias is a courtesan, in today's terms, a woman who makes her living through sex work. She is called The Lady of the Camellias because by means of the color of the camellia she wears in her buttonhole, she signals whether she is available or not. White means that she is ready to serve. Red means that menstruation prevents this. Such codings, of course, point to an earlier time. The Lady of the Camellias is a figure of the 19th century. The story of The Lady of the Camellias emerges from a literary work. We find it in a novel published by the French author Alexandre Dumas in 1848.

[00:01:29]As so often, behind the literary figure, there is a person from real life.

[00:01:35]Therefore, the novel The Lady of the Camellias is partially autobiographical.

[00:01:44]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> What then is this novel about? What happens to The Lady of the Camellias?

[00:02:48]The narrative begins in the year 1847 at an auction of the possessions of the recently deceased courtesan Marguerite Gautier.

[00:02:58]Everyone had called her The Lady of the Camellias.

[00:03:03]The narrator buys a book from the estate. It bears the title Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut and it contains the handwritten name of a former owner. His name is Armand Duval.

[00:03:19]Fascinated by the fate of the recently deceased Lady of the Camellias, the narrator decides to meet Armand Duval and from him he learns how it all began.

[00:03:32]Duval, a young man from a respected family from the provinces, first encountered Marguerite Gautier at the Paris Opera House. He fell in love with her immediately.

[00:03:44]Marguerite suffered from tuberculosis and when her condition worsened, Duval devotedly took care of her. He also confessed his love to her. Marguerite, moved by his devotion, returned his feelings. Weary of her way of life, she gave up her profession in order to live together with Duval. The two moved to a country house and lived happily. Until one day Duval's father appeared. In a one-on-one conversation, he urged Marguerite to end the relationship with his son. His argument, otherwise he would not be able to marry off Armand's sister without causing a scandal. In other words, a former sex worker as a sister-in-law.

[00:04:31]Marguerite allowed herself to be persuaded and she returned to Paris where she took up her old life again and sent Armand a farewell letter. Armand sought refuge in a relationship with another woman. Her name is Olympe. When he encountered Marguerite at a ball in Paris, he humiliated her coram publico.

[00:04:54]The two came together once more briefly, but soon their paths parted again and Marguerite died of tuberculosis, impoverished and lonely at just 23 years of age.

[00:05:09]Duval learned of Marguerite's death and collapsed at her grave. Only in retrospect did it become clear to him how sincerely Marguerite had loved him and what sacrifice she had made. That is the plot of the novel. If you enjoy going to the opera, all of this probably sounds quite familiar to you. For only a few years later after the novel appeared, Giuseppe Verdi wrote to a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave an opera based on that story.

[00:05:39]The plot remained almost unchanged. Only the names were altered. Marguerite Gautier became Violetta Valéry. Armand Duval became Alfredo Germont. And the title Lady of the Camellias became La Traviata, literally the woman who has gone astray. Or in the morally 19th century language, probably the woman who has strayed from the right path.

[00:06:18]>> [music] [music] [music] >> La Traviata became a worldwide success.

[00:06:53]The opera is a cornerstone of the repertoire and the material migrated into other media. The first silent film was produced as early as in 1907.

[00:07:04]Countless further films followed, among them versions with Sarah Bernhardt, Greta Garbo and Isabelle Huppert as The Lady of the Camellias and with Rudolph Valentino or Colin Firth as her lover.

[00:07:17]In 1963, the material was also made fruitful for ballet. Frederick Ashton created the ballet Marguerite and Armand for Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn.

[00:07:29]This ballet, of roughly half an hour length, was set to piano music by Franz Liszt, which was first orchestrated by Humphrey Searle and later by Gordon Jacob. In 1978, John Neumeier then created his full-length ballet The Lady of the Camellias for the Stuttgart Ballet under the direction of Marcia Haydée. At first, Neumeier considered having the music of La Traviata arranged, that is, having the vocal lines transferred into the orchestra.

[00:08:01]But then, he encountered the vocal coach Gerhard Mackson, who was working in Stuttgart at the time. Mackson advised Neumeier to choose music by Hector Berlioz or by Frédéric Chopin for such a story ballet or to combine both. The decision fell on Chopin and Neumeier and Mackson selected pieces from Chopin's oeuvre that were particularly well suited to the dramatic situations imagined by Neumeier.

[00:08:30]In shaping the plot, Neumeier picked up a detail from the very beginning of Dumas' novel. The narrator acquires a book there. The Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut. This book, published by Antoine François Prévost in 1731, tells the story of a 17-year-old who falls in love with a girl named Manon.

[00:08:53]She is supposed to go to a convent at her family's request, but together with des Grieux, she elopes.

[00:09:00]Their adventurous flight takes them from France to America. There, Manon dies of exhaustion. Des Grieux is left behind alone and in despair.

[00:09:12]Already in Dumas' novel, a parallel is drawn between the couple Marguerite and Armand and the couple Manon and des Grieux. In his ballet The Lady of the Camellias, John Neumeier gives this literary reference a great deal of space.

[00:09:54]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Neumeier said that he was fascinated by the cinematic dimension of Dumas' novel, by the principle of layering, that one arrives at the truth from different perspectives, that these layers of truth are overlapping. He thought that it should also be possible in ballet to shift and dissolve images of memory like thoughts. The idea of integrating the literary figure of Manon into the story fascinated him.

[00:11:46]The novel tells us that Marguerite and Armand first met at the Paris Opera House. Neumeier simply developed further into the idea that the encounter took place during a ballet entitled Manon.

[00:11:59]And so, John Neumeier's ballet The Lady of the Camellias presents us with a classic situation of a play within a play.

[00:12:08]In the first act, we not only see Marguerite and Armand meeting at the Opera House, we also see the curtain rising and the stage action unfolding.

[00:12:20]Marguerite and Armand are watching it attentively. At this point, they cannot know that what they're seeing is a foreshadowing of their own fate. John Neumeier takes up the story of Manon and des Grieux a second time in the third act of his story ballet. After Armand has learned of Marguerite's death, he reads in Marguerite's diary. There, Marguerite reports on her last visit to the theater. On the playbill was no other piece than Manon.

[00:12:51]Shaken, Marguerite left the Opera House.

[00:12:54]The story of the exhausted protagonist Manon pursued her even into her dreams.

[00:13:02]Shaken, Marguerite left the Opera House.

[00:13:05]The story of the exhausted Manon pursued her even into her dreams. This experience is also being shown. The situation from the first act is being repeated. People are taking their seats in the Opera House. The curtain rises and the sad story is unfolding on stage.

[00:13:25]At the end of John Neumeier's story ballet, we see the agitated Marguerite making one final entry into her diary, and she entrusts the book to Nanina, her maid.

[00:13:40]Marguerite's illness is, for John Neumeier, as he put it, not merely a decorative historical illness from the 19th century. He emphasized that Marguerite suffers from a hopeless, incurable, terribly disfiguring disease.

[00:13:57]He also pointed out the parallels to fates from the time of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s.

[00:14:06]That Armand accepts her as she is, that he also puts himself in danger, is very important for understanding the plot.

[00:14:16]John Neumeier has also emphasized how crucial the motive of humiliation and reconciliation is for his ballet The Lady of the Camellias.

[00:14:25]In this context, he has particularly highlighted that scene in the third act in which Armand humiliates Marguerite by throwing himself at Marguerite's colleague Olympe.

[00:14:37]Marguerite defends herself actively here. Weakened as she already is, she goes to Armand and says, "Please don't do this." Mutual attraction overwhelms them.

[00:14:49]They're making love for a very last time, and after that, Marguerite leaves Armand again for good. Piave and Verdi did not include this scene from the novel in their opera La traviata. For John Neumeier, though, it was enormously important.

[00:15:07]We have reached the end of our audio introduction. I hope that my remarks have been helpful to you in understanding John Neumeier's ballet The Lady of the Camellias. Please stay with us and feel free to tune in again sometime soon. My name is Christoph [music] Kaiser, and I thank you very much indeed for listening.

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