Todd-AO Traviata

Callas had come and gone, leaving the field to her great rival, Renata Tebaldi. As Mimi in Boheme, Tebaldi had already caused an emotional demonstration by partisans who tied up Manhattan traffic around the Met long after midnight. Last week in a brand-new production of Verdi's La Traviata, the Met's first in 21 years, Tebaldi's performance was memorable.

Visually, no part of the production was entirely satisfactory. In his first opera sets Designer Oliver (My Fair Lady) Smith seemed to be desperately attempting to fill the vast, open spaces of the Met's stage with Todd-AO-sized vistas of a kind rarely viewed by a courtesan in Verdi's mid-19th century Paris. Under Tyrone Guthrie's posturing direction, Violetta entertained her first-act guests in a towering, vine-entwined conservatory, while in the third act the chorus moved confusingly up and down a curving marble staircase. Costume Designer Rolf Gerard provided the principal ladies with frothy, subtle-hued dresses scarcely calculated to deliver a message even to the most lickerish-eyed boulevardier. As for Soprano Tebaldi, although she had attempted to follow the heroic Callas diet example ("I lose 25 pound in three year!"), she still bore scant resemblance to a fragile and tuberculous Violetta. But the singing made up for all the production's visual defects. From the richly ornamented outpouring of awakening emotion in the first act to the flexible, bitter-sweet lyricism of the last, Tebaldi superbly defined Violetta's stirrings and renunciation; moreover, she avoided flawing the role with more than the necessary touches of sentimentality and melodrama. Baritone Leonard Warren was splendid as a resonant-voiced Germont. As Alfredo, Tenor Giuseppe Cam-pora had neither enough power nor presence to hold the stage, but to appear with Tebaldi in last week's production would not have been easy for any singer. The Met crowd was clearly there to render personal homage to Tebaldi, and at the end, there were 15 curtain calls, a shower of bouquets from the balcony--and some rousingly snarled traffic.

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