Verdi's La traviata: Falling for the fallen women

Europe was already convulsed by questions of moral duplicity when La traviata’s Violetta took to the stage. Ahead of a new documentary about Verdi’s masterpiece, Tom Service examines why the tragic heroine caused such a stir“A whore must always be a whore,” wrote Giuseppe Verdi, a furious response to the censors in Rome who had demanded changes to his opera La traviata to make the story of the courtesan Violetta more palatable to a conservative public, and a startling statement of his ra