As one favourite story from popular opera history has it, Verdi's serene response to the failure of the 1853 world première of the work in Venice was simply, "Is it my fault or the performers'? Only time will tell." And time, in all its wisdom, has indeed decided: with well over one thousand performances at the Met alone, La Traviata is in most years the most frequently performed opera worldwide. The role of the lost woman Violetta and the diverse demands it entails has been shouldered in New York's citadel of the opera world by a great many divas, even from the very first performance of Traviata there in 1883, with their names ranging from Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi to Joan Sutherland, Ileana Cotrubaș and Diana Damrau. Joining this roster of a multitude of legends now through the Met broadcasts will be the talented Nadine Sierra, known and admired as Gilda and Idomeneo's Ilia. Portraying the other two protagonists in this performance conducted by Daniele Callegari, the younger and elder Germonts, will be, respectively, the Philadelphia-born tenor Stephen Costello, whose career, like Sierra's, took off after he won the Richard Tucker Award, and Luca Salsi, who drew great attention for singing the title role of Macbeth in a series of 2021 productions.

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