On Duplessis' death of tuberculosis as the great romantic story of the mid-19th century
"I think it was something that appealed to artists because there was something at that point rather romantic about tuberculosis, and it wasn't known quite how it was transmitted. And so ... the consumptive heroine was almost like an archetype in literature. ...
"People now think of her as an older woman because performance history has always made her this sort of older woman with a young boy, and that's the way I think it's played now. But she was a kid, she was just 23. She just had her birthday ... when she died."
On the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils
"He was very much in the shadow of his much more famous father, Alexandre Dumas, who was the author of The Three Musketeers, but he wrote this novel ... in eight days, and it was done in response to her death. And he wrote the novel, which was published in 1848, called La Dame aux Camlias (The Lady of the Camellias).
"There was then sort of a revolution in Paris, and so the novel sort of didn't make much of an impact, but he wrote a play based on the same subject. But he then spent three years trying to get it staged because it was thought to be just too shocking because French theater was very sort of embalmed in the past. And what he was trying to do was put a living courtesan who people still remembered — I mean, she'd only just died a couple of years ago — onto the stage. And this was so revolutionary that it couldn't be staged. But then finally he managed to get it on in 1852, and it was a sort of overnight, huge success."
Deceptive Cadence
'Becoming Traviata': A Look At Opera From Behind The Curtain