His phrasing was wonderfully simple and yet precisely adapted to his partners’ needs. Alfredo himself was sung by Nicolai Gedda, who found in the part a particularly congenial Italian role to set alongside so many others in a repertory of almost unimaginable breadth.
Both in New York and in Vienna it was Cornell MacNeil who as Giorgio Germont had the task of persuading her to renounce her love of Alfredo, which he did with his powerful Heldenbariton voice – it was not entirely unexpected when only a year later he appeared in Vienna as Wagner’s 'Flying Dutchman'.
During the years that followed, Violetta became a role that Ileana Cotrubas was often invited to sing in Vienna and with which she was closely associated not only there but elsewhere too, including appearances at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Few young sopranos – especially in a performance captured live on the radio – have been as successful in achieving so convincing and touching a balance between the vocal agility needed in the opening act and the lyricism and expressive depth of the following acts of the opera. For the protagonist, Ileana Cotrubas, the first night also marked a huge step forward on the road to an international career. Krips himself had already conducted the opera, including a performance in the company’s temporary home at the Theater an der Wien, but none of the three principals had previously appeared in their roles in Vienna. By 1971, when a new production of Verdi’s 'La Traviata' was staged under the musical direction of Josef Krips, the house could already look back on more than 200 performances of the work since the end of the Second World War. $ Īrtistic risks facing a leading company like the Vienna State Opera are new productions of the core repertory.
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