OperaGlass Works

We have made a film of La Traviata. We have chosen one of the repertoire’s most famous and best loved works because it has wonderful, accessible music and a simple, moving love story. We take it out of the great opera houses and bring it into a new light. This is not live capture, but a new approach to delivering opera in a different way.

We have reimagined Verdi’s opera, originally designed for a large romantic orchestra and huge chorus, as an intimate love story. There is a chorus, and dancers, and an orchestra, but we get to the bare bones of this remarkable tale. Developing the relationship between singer and camera that we discovered on The Turn of the Screw, we draw the audience into the heart of the piece. Exploring its emotional canvas in this way we still honour the wonderful, heightened, theatrical world in which Violetta and Alfredo and Germont play out their drama.

The Turn of the Screw was not shot in an Edwardian country house but we created a world of ghosts, Suffolk reed beds and decaying English schoolrooms. So, this is not naturalism; our La Traviata is not exactly set in 19th century Paris: we shot it in a wonderful location in the English countryside but it could be anywhere.

Tom Piper designed our set and Rosalind Ebbutt our costumes. Richard Hetherington is our conductor and we were joined by choreographers Etta Murfitt and Anjali Mehra. We direct and produce.