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Tonality And Drama In Verdi's "La Traviata", David Bradley Easley

LSU Master's Theses

Scholars hold opposing views concerning the importance of large-scale key relations in Verdi's operas. Julian Budden states that, since Verdi often allowed transpositions of his music in performance, one must take care in assigning structural importance to Verdi's key schemes. Others, including David Lawton, place much significance on Verdi's choice of keys. Lawton describes methods by which Verdi intensifies dramatic situations through associative tonality and recurring musical themes. In La Traviata, several recurring musical themes undergo transposition, a device that Wagner scholar Robert Bailey calls expressive tonality, which is the repetition or recall of a passage transposed by semitone …