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Verdi’s Broken Mirror Bregenz
Seebühne
07/22/2026 - & July 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, August 1, 2, 4*, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 2026
Giuseppe Verdi: La traviata
Marjukka Tepponen*/Stacey Alleaume/Julia Muzychenko (Violetta Valery), Julien Behr*/Long Long/Jose Simerilla Romero (Alfredo Germont), Vladimir Stoyanov*/Audun Iversen/Kostas Smoriginas (Giorgio Germont), Angela Simkin*/Rinat Shaham (Flora Bervoix), Francisco Brito*/Taylan Reinhard (Gastone), Michael C. Havlicek*/Kevin Greenlaw (Baron Douphol), Stanislav Vorobyov*/Ivo Stanchev (Docteur Grenvil), Janne Sihvo*/Pete Thanapat (Marquis d’Obigny), Melissa Zgouridi*/Claire Barnett-Jones (Annina), Aaron Godfrey‑Mayes*/Raphaël Jardin (Giuseppe)
Bregenzer Festspielchor, Benjamin Lack (chorus master), Prazský filharmonický sbor, Lukas Kozubik (chorus master), Wiener Symphoniker, Kirill Karabits*/Pietro Rizzo (conductor)
Damiano Michieletto (stage director), Paolo Fantin (stage designer), Carla Teti (costume designer), Alessandro Carletti (lighting designer), Roland Horvath (video), Thomas Wilhelm (choreography), Alwin Bösch, Clemens Wannemacher (sound)
(© Daniel Ammann/Bregenzer Festspiele)
There are opera productions that one watches, and there are those that one experiences. La traviata at the Bregenz Festival belonged emphatically to the latter category. On the immense floating stage of Lake Constance, Verdi’s intimate tragedy was refracted through a visual language of extraordinary scale: shattered mirrors, water, projections, mechanical transformations and a world of Roaring Twenties glamour. The result was an evening in which opera became simultaneously theatre, spectacle and visual metaphor.
The Bregenz Festival has long cultivated the art of transforming the Seebühne into something approaching a cinematic landscape, and Damiano Michieletto’s La traviata exploited its possibilities with particular imagination. Relocating the action to the 1920s, Michieletto placed Violetta within a society of champagne, extravagant parties, celebrity and conspicuous consumption—a world in which appearances were everything and private suffering remained concealed behind the façade of perpetual pleasure.
At the centre of Paolo Fantin’s monumental design stood an enormous shattered mirror. It was an arresting piece of stage architecture, but its significance extended far beyond spectacle. The mirror reflected the glamorous society surrounding Violetta while simultaneously suggesting the fracture within her own identity. She was adored as an image, a social celebrity, a desirable object of fascination; the vulnerable woman behind that image remained largely invisible.
The ingenuity of the design lay in its capacity for transformation. Sections of the shattered mirror descended gradually, becoming elevated platforms apparently suspended in mid‑air, before closing once again to form a gigantic projection surface. Video imagery was integrated into the action, including the doctor’s examination of Violetta and scenes from her private existence. At its best, this technology did not merely illustrate the drama but externalised states of mind.
The platform extending over the lake added yet another dimension. Water became both scenery and choreography as dancers generated ripples and splashes across its surface. One of the evening’s most poetic images came when Violetta stepped into the water, lifting the hem of her long dress. The gesture evoked, at least to my eyes, the biblical story of the Queen of Sheba entering Solomon’s palace and mistaking its transparent floor for water. Whether deliberate or coincidental, the image possessed a strange, almost dreamlike beauty.
The production was not without its drawbacks. The vast distance separating the singers from much of the audience inevitably diminished the intimacy of the acting, while the visual apparatus occasionally threatened to become an end in itself. A particularly questionable use of the enormous projection screen was the decision to show the doctor examining Violetta’s X‑rays and, at other moments, close‑ups of orchestral musicians. Surely the faces of Violetta, Alfredo and Germont—the three protagonists whose psychological destinies constitute the opera—would have been infinitely more compelling.
Yet the visual magnificence was matched by a vocal cast of considerable distinction.
Marjukka Tepponen gave a Violetta of genuine emotional substance. Her soprano possessed a pleasing combination of warmth, luminosity and flexibility, allowing her to negotiate the contrasting demands of the role without reducing Violetta to a succession of vocal set pieces. The exuberant social butterfly of the opening act gradually yielded to a woman whose emotional defences were being dismantled by love and sacrifice. Tepponen’s portrayal was particularly effective because she resisted the temptation to sentimentalise Violetta. Her vulnerability emerged organically from the character rather than being imposed upon the music.
The vocal writing of the first act demands brilliance, agility and considerable control, but the real test is whether the soprano can make the increasingly inward music of the second and third acts feel like a genuine psychological progression. Tepponen achieved this with admirable conviction. Her singing acquired a darker, more vulnerable colouring as the opera proceeded, culminating in an affecting “Addio del passato.” Rather than turning the aria into a gratuitous display of pathos, she allowed Verdi’s melancholy to speak through finely controlled phrasing and an appropriately fragile vocal line.
Julien Behr proved an attractive and vocally assured Alfredo. His bright, youthful tenor was well suited to the character’s romantic idealism, and he brought a welcome lyricism to the love music. His Alfredo was less convincing in his initial awkwardness than in the later manifestations of passion and jealousy, but his vocal presence remained compelling. The tenor’s increasing intensity in the second act effectively charted Alfredo’s transformation from an ardent lover into a man capable of humiliating the woman he professed to adore.
That transformation reached its nadir at Flora’s party, where Alfredo publicly disgraced Violetta. The scene is among Verdi’s most savage dramatic reversals: romantic idealism suddenly gives way to cruelty, and the public world from which Violetta had supposedly escaped reasserts its power with devastating force. Bregenz’s abbreviated running time necessitated some cuts, including portions of the gambling sequence, but the essential brutality of the confrontation remained intact.
As Giorgio Germont, Vladimir Stoyanov supplied something considerably more interesting than the stereotypical operatic father. His substantial, warm baritone and firm diction endowed Germont with authority, but there was little caricature in the portrayal. Instead, Stoyanov suggested a man whose moral convictions were inseparable from the social conventions of his class. In “Pura siccome un angelo,” the character’s paternal concern was already compromised by an inability to imagine happiness outside the boundaries imposed by bourgeois respectability.
This made Germont’s confrontation with Violetta all the more disturbing. He was not simply the villain responsible for destroying the lovers’ happiness; he was the embodiment of the social order that rendered their happiness unacceptable. Michieletto’s production was at its most intelligent precisely here, refusing to divide Verdi’s characters into convenient categories of innocence and guilt. Violetta, Alfredo and Germont were all prisoners, in different ways, of a society governed by appearances.
The supporting cast maintained a high level of professionalism. Angela Simkin brought the necessary glamour and social confidence to Flora, while Melissa Zgouridi’s Annina supplied the discreet devotion that provides such an important counterweight to the superficiality of Violetta’s social circle. Stanislav Vorobyov lent sonority and authority to Dr. Grenvil.
Kirill Karabits conducted the Vienna Symphony Orchestra with a firm grasp of the opera’s dramatic architecture. The peculiar acoustical circumstances of the Seebühne impose challenges quite unlike those encountered in an opera house: the orchestra is physically separated from the singers, the stage is immense, and electronic amplification is indispensable. Karabits nonetheless maintained a convincing balance between momentum and lyricism, allowing the score to breathe while avoiding excessive indulgence in its more familiar sentimental moments.
The Vienna Symphony Orchestra responded with playing of refinement and colour. The sound inevitably differed from that of a conventional theatre, and amplification could occasionally diminish the fine gradations of orchestral texture. Yet the musical substance remained persuasive, and Karabits ensured that the orchestra was not reduced to a mere accompaniment for the visual spectacle.
The performance’s compressed format—approximately two hours without an interval—was both an advantage and a limitation. Dramatically, the uninterrupted trajectory gave the evening an almost cinematic propulsion. There was no opportunity for the emotional temperature to dissipate. Yet the absence of an interval and the necessary cuts inevitably deprived the opera of some of the breathing space that contributes to its psychological architecture. La traviata is a work in which seemingly incidental moments often deepen our understanding of the characters, and the Bregenz format could not accommodate all of them.
Still, Michieletto’s fundamental conception proved remarkably coherent. The production followed Violetta’s trajectory from dazzling social prominence to isolation and death, and the visual language darkened accordingly. The brilliant mirror gradually became a landscape of fragmentation and decay. By the final act, the glittering world of the opening had effectively imploded.
The culminating tableau was Michieletto’s most powerful inspiration. As Violetta approached death, the immense fragments of the shattered mirror slowly contracted towards their broken centre. From within it, an enormous black sphere emerged and descended inexorably upon her. The image could be read as disease, mortality or the physical manifestation of the fatal stain that had been present from the beginning. Whatever interpretation one preferred, its theatrical force was undeniable.
And yet the very extravagance that made the production so memorable occasionally constituted its principal danger. La traviata does not require a gigantic mirror, a lake, dancers, projections or spectacular stage machinery to break the heart. Its most devastating moments are often those in which nothing happens at all: a voice suspended above a simple orchestral phrase, a silence between two lovers, Violetta alone with her memories in “Addio del passato.” The greater the machinery surrounding such moments, the greater the danger that Verdi’s extraordinary economy of emotional expression will be obscured.
For the most part, however, Michieletto understood this paradox. His production used the Seebühne’s enormous resources not merely to decorate Verdi’s opera but to interrogate its central preoccupation: the destructive power of appearances. Violetta was a woman who had spent her life being looked at, desired and judged. The mirror consequently became both her kingdom and her prison.
The Bregenz Traviata was therefore considerably more than an operatic spectacle on a lake. Its occasional excesses notwithstanding, the production demonstrated that monumental stagecraft can coexist with psychological insight when it is subordinated to a coherent dramatic idea. Tepponen’s affecting Violetta provided the human centre, Behr and Stoyanov gave the central triangle vocal and dramatic credibility, and Karabits ensured that Verdi’s score retained its authority beneath the technological splendour.
Ultimately, the image that remained was not the gigantic mirror itself but what it revealed: a world of glittering surfaces gradually breaking apart. Violetta’s tragedy was that she could never entirely escape the image others had created of her. In Michieletto’s hands, the shattered mirror became the perfect emblem of that predicament—magnificent from a distance, fractured upon closer inspection, and finally reduced to nothing before the inexorable presence of death. At its best, this was precisely what a Bregenz spectacular ought to be: not spectacle for its own sake, but spectacle placed in the service of Verdi’s enduring humanity.
Wade Ghribi
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