Thank you so much to Ben Lawrence for talking with me about my time as Violetta Valery in La traviata at the Royal Opera House.
She tells me she has a love of literature (the Brontës are an obsession), and I wonder whether that is why she has such a close, intellectually driven understanding of the text which brings out Violetta’s struggle with the divine.
“For a courtesan, she talks a heck of a lot about God,” says Oropesa. “When she leaves her past life behind she talks about God’s forgiveness, about repentance. You know, ‘God forgives me because that is what God does.’
“And when she doesn’t get better, she gets angry, because she feels the trust she put in Him has been betrayed. He has let her die young.”
