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This is blasphemy for the cognoscenti. But truth must prevail: the overflowing emotions, the loud melodrama and the sweet music of Italian opera makes for a deeply satisfying experience for a person who has grown up on the melodramatic romantic tragedies of Hindi cinema, where the hero and the heroine have to sing sad songs and say all those heart-breaking dialogues before they can fall dead in the arms of the beloved.

We have seen the cultivated people turn their snooty noses if popular Hindi cinema was ever mentioned in their presence. They would complain of how the hero and the heroine break into a song at the drop of a hat, and how they speak reams of dialogue when silence would have been the most decent way of expressing deep feelings.

Of course, they are not much aware that this stuff of keeping your feelings under your hat and under the stiff upper lip is a British upper class conceit and that elsewhere in Europe, especially in Italy, France and Spain, men and women talk much and cry much over everything under the sun that makes them emotionally tipsy, and that they are not a whit apologetic about it. It is unfair to blame these brown sahibs and brown memsahibs because they have not travelled much and read much outside of England and English.

It was Giuseppe Verdi’s 1853 opera, La Traviata, which was performed in Kolkata, New Delhi and Mumbai last week that led to this Newtonian discovery. And to keep it a secret seemed an injustice.

La Traviata is based on Alexandre Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias.It is about a courtesan, Violetta Valery, who falls in love with a young man from a higher middle class family, Alfredo Germont. His father, Giorgio Germont, goes to Violetta and tells her to leave Alfredo because their relationship affects the marriage prospects his daughter in respectable circles.

Violetta is willing to make the sacrifice and tells the father: “So, for the wretched woman/ Who’s fallen once,/ The hope of rising is forever gone! /Though God should show his mercy,/ Man will never forgive her. / Say to your daughter, pure as she is fair, /That there’s a victim of misfortune/ Whose one ray of happiness/ Before she dies / Is a sacrifice made for her.”

Violetta is dying anyway because of tuberculosis, but the pangs of separation are not easy. At the end, Alfredo returns defiantly, as she is about to die. And before she breathes her last, a penitent Germont returns and begs her forgiveness. She dies in the arms of Alfredo with the word, ‘Joy” on her lips.

The music is soft and mellifluous and the libretto lays out in vivid detail the emotional hyperbole of the tangled and tragic romantic affair. The viewers were greatly helped by the fact that the English translation of the libretto in Italian was at hand.

Now translate that into a Hindi or Urdu film lyric, most Indians will love to hum the song and cry over it. It makes for a legible and credible scene in a Hindi film. It would not be a bad idea if La Traviata is adapted into a Hindi musical. It could become a hit like Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah did in 1971 at the very time when Asha Bonsle’s hippie hymn, Dum maro dum from Dev Anand’s Hare Rama Hare Krishna was a chart-buster.

It will be difficult for the hoity-toity to relish the emotional experience because it looks and sounds so maudlin. But pick up a story from Dumas, hand it over to Verdi to be adapted as an opera, and present it to them. Even then they will confine themselves to words of high praise in hushed voices. Poor souls! It seems that even when they see an opera, they overlook the emotion and melodrama and linger on the inessentials of the performance and the opera glasses they hold so delicately in their hands. There is a need to get them out of their cultural monasteries and nunneries.

Email: r_parsa@dnaindia.net