Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata is one of the most performed operas in the world, and with good reason. So emotionally affecting is it that audiences can be left – as they are at His Majesty’s on opening night – quiet, still and utterly spellbound.

The young man beside me, coming back to earth as the final curtain falls, lets out his breath and says, “Far out!”

Probably not an expression Verdi would have known, but an apt one all the same. It is hard, too, not to draw contemporary parallels in this opera with the hedonism, exploitation and moral decay exposed in the Epstein saga.

West Australian Opera’s La Traviata. Photo © West Beach Studio

Verdi was instrumental in transforming the prevailing 19th-century bel canto style of opera – concerned largely with displays of vocal dexterity – into something more dramatically immediate, contemporary and psychologically realistic. He did so in La traviata, whose central figure was controversially a courtesan.

This West Australian Opera production opens with a motley gathering in flirtatious party mode, dressed to the nines in Charles...