On June 4 and 5, the premiere of the opera La traviata by Giuseppe Verdi will take place at the Novosibirsk State Opera and Ballet Theatre. A new production of Verdi's masterpiece on the Grand Stage of the theatre will be presented by stage director Sergey Novikov, with Mikhail Tatarnikov as music director and conductor.
La traviata is one of the most popular and performed operas in the world. The soulful musical drama captivates the listener not only with its touching story, sensuality, psychology, intimate and lyrical atmosphere, but also with one of the most fascinating female images in world culture: the image of Violetta Valéry, a woman of extraordinary intelligence and inner strength, bright, free and loving life. Stage director Sergey Novikov turns to La traviata for the first time in his creative activity. Novikov's works are distinguished by close attention to the historical context and the literary source; he seeks to identify the actual meanings of a musical composition through working with the artist on the psychological portrait of the character and the motives of his actions. The stage director builds his author's concept of La traviata, trying to bring the characters as close as possible to the figures of the novel La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils.
Sergey Novikov: “It is the novel La Dame aux camélias that is very attractive in its system of images. First of all, of course, it's Marguerite Gautier (Violetta Valéry in the opera). There is a paradox: it would seem that this is the story of a kept woman, but the image of the main character touches precisely with its inner purity. Marguerite/Violetta is a unique girl, we would now say a “child prodigy”. At the age of sixteen, a village girl who knows neither manners nor literacy, who cannot write, much less play the piano, decides to go to Paris. At first, she works as a laundress, but in just two years ‒ from the age of sixteen to eighteen ‒ she turns into a brilliant lady who not only seems well-educated and well-mannered, but also becomes a trendsetter, a theatre connoisseur, without whom no premiere is complete, and a welcome guest at all events of the social life of the capital. At the same time, as Dumas says, there were no quarrels, no ruins, no vulgar conversations around her, “everything around her radiated an atmosphere of dignity and inner purity.” Despite the sensual life she leads, she remains absolutely sincere, direct in her judgments, naive in some ways, preserving her inner child. She is terminally ill, but she continues to live without burdening anyone. She decides for the first and last time to surrender to the feeling of true selfless love.
But fate brings her back to her place, making the inevitable tragic outcome closer.”
Designer Sergey Novikov is working on the set design of the production. He will have to embody the directorial idea of his namesake and bring into the atmosphere of a secular whirlwind of entertainment, in which the action of the performance develops, the feeling of a rapidly fading young, passionate, vibrant life.
• La traviata appeared in the repertoire of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre already in the first season. The premiere of the performance took place on November 3, 1945, production conductor – Isidor Zak, production stage director ‒ Naum Frid, set designer ‒ Makariy Domrachev. Subsequently, La traviata practically did not leave the Novosibirsk theatre, the opera was staged in 1948, 1952, 1981, 1994, 1999 and 2014.
• The previous scenic version of the opera La traviata was presented on the Grand Stage in April 2014 by stage director Rēzija Kalniņa and conductor Ainars Rubikis.
• Stage director Sergey Gennadievich Novikov is one of the most sought-after production directors on the Russian opera stage today, and in 2026 he became the best stage director according to the Onegin National Opera Award. As a production stage director, Sergey Novikov collaborates with many opera houses (the Bolshoi Theatre of Russia, the Helikon Opera Theatre in Moscow, the Mariinsky Theatre, the Moscow Academic Musical Theatre named after K. Stanislavsky and V. Nemirovich-Danchenko, the Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet Theatre, the St. Petersburg Mikhailovsky Theatre, the Nizhny Novgorod Opera and Ballet Theatre, and others). NOVAT's repertoire includes P. Tchaikovsky's opera The Oprichnik staged by S. Novikov.
• Sergey Sergeevich Novikov, as a production set designer and costume designer, has performed more than 70 productions in theatres in Russia, Kazakhstan and Europe. Since 2010, he has been the chief designer of the Omsk State Musical Theatre, where he has realized more than twenty productions. Sergey Novikov participated in the Prague Quadriennale (2011), where he designed the performance The Love for Three Oranges.
Since 2020, he has been supervising the set design at the St. Petersburg Digital Opera Festival, and since 2022, he has been the festival's art director.
In 2014, he made his debut at the Mariinsky Theatre, acting as one of the production designers of Anna Matison's performance The Golden Cockerel. Working in tandem with stage director S. Novikov, the designer created sets and costumes for such Mariinsky Theatre productions as Ariadne auf Naxos (2024) and Norma (2025).