Baritone Simone Piazzola celebrates 200 performances as Giorgio Germont in ‘La Traviata’

Opera is not officially a competitive sport and record-setting should not be a primary concern for singers.

Even so, to perform a major role 200 times in the span of a dozen years or so — with the disruption of a pandemic to make the going tougher — is surely an achievement worth celebrating. That is exactly what Italian baritone Simone Piazzola will be doing May 3 as he sings the role of Giorgio Germont in the Canadian Opera Company’s current run of Verdi’s popular romantic tragedy “La Traviata.”

“My first time was in 2009 at the Verona Philharmonic Theatre, in the city where I was born,” Piazzola said. “I was very young, 23, and I had to do a great psychological study on the character to be able to bring out all the nuances. It had been my dream to be able to sing this role.

“Now it has become my workhorse, so much so that here in Toronto I have the honour of celebrating my first 200 performances in the role of Germont.”

Depending on your tolerance for depictions of women being subjected to the hypocritical demands of men, it cannot be said that Giorgio is opera’s most overtly sympathetic character.

“La Traviata,” derived from a tale by Alexandre Dumas Jr. and first staged in 1853, features that recurrent 19th-century obsession: the “fallen” woman. Such benighted characters have overstepped the rigid moral bounds of a society in which men more or less have their way with women while the women themselves are supposed to remain models of probity.

In Giuseppe Verdi and librettist Francesco Maria Piave’s operatic version, the fallen woman is Violetta. She is what was known in bygone days as a courtesan, essentially an upmarket prostitute, with a patron rich enough to allow her to host elegant salons and riotous parties.

Violetta has long abandoned any hope of true love until the rather puppyish Alfredo Germont professes his total devotion. Violetta allows her emotional fortifications to be breached and, having decamped with Alfredo to a house in the country, hopes to restart her life. Enter Papa Germont, who guilts Violetta into renouncing Alfredo by telling her that she’s ruining the family’s reputation and, specifically, Alfredo’s sister’s chance of a respectable marriage.

From here it gets really ugly with Alfredo throwing a hissy fit and a fistful of coin at Violetta in front of a fashionable Paris gathering. When a repentant Alfredo discovers that it was his father who forced Violetta to reject him, he rushes to her sick bed in time for her to die in his arms, death being the only sure redemption for a fallen woman and a popular way to end an opera.

It may all seem rather silly except, of course, that women continue to wage a battle for true equality, and more than a few fathers persist in trying to protect their daughters’ marriageability. Indeed, Piazzola concedes that becoming a father has given him a different perspective on Germont’s seemingly proud and cruel nature.

“This has helped me a lot to understand what a father must and must not be and what a father must, consequently, give to his son. Germont, in my opinion, is by no means a bad character. He is a father who tries to protect his family from a situation, according to him, unpleasant in the eyes of the people.”

As Piazzola, 36, pointed out, during Act II’s famous extended duet, Germont comes to acknowledge that Violetta is good at heart. In the next scene, he forcefully rebukes his son for his outrageous treatment of Violetta and in Act III comes remorsefully to her bedside: “A stringervi qual figlia vengo al seno” (“I have come to embrace you as a daughter”).

Germont knows he has caused harm, but he is a man torn between unforgiving social norms and what he knows to be right and true.

“The challenge is not to make this character a villain but to make the audience understand that what he does is only by virtue of a love and interest in his family,” said Piazzola. “Obviously, having the opportunity to meet Violetta, he will change his mind about her person. But unfortunately the social image she possesses will lead him to try to remove his son from her.”

The dramatic challenges presented by the role are entwined in the music, particularly in phrasing the words in a seamless “legato” rather than staccato style.

“Singing Germont may seem very simple,” said Piazzola. “In reality it is not so. It requires an iron technique and, above all, the great ability to sing on the breath and use legato in keeping with Verdi’s writing. We often forget that Verdi is, above all, bel canto.”

Piazzola has not been keeping an exact score but estimates that he’s sung Germont in at least 30 different productions and alongside a similar number of Violettas in cities around the world. And if he’s become a go-to Germont for leading opera companies, it’s not just because of a velvety voice and powerful stage presence but because he’s never tired of the role.

“In all these years that I have this role, I am always looking for new things in the character, dissecting him as much as possible, both from an interpretative and musical point of view. I hope and wish that this role can always accompany me during my career because if I have become what I am today, it is thanks to Giorgio Germont.”

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