Maria Bayankina’s debut in the opera La traviata

One of the most famous and popular operas in the history of music, La traviata is based on Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel La Dame aux camélias, in turn itself based on a semi-autobiographical novel. The novel is also a romance – the author was sympathetic to the charms of the opera’s prototype heroine, the renowned Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis – as indeed were many others at the time, among them the composer Franz Liszt. Like Violetta herself, she died from consumption at a very young age, just nineteen days after her twenty-second birthday.

On 7 February Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers soloist Maria Bayankina will be performing the role of Mlle Violetta Valéry, in whose short life the themes of forbidden love and inevitable death are inextricably woven together.