Richard Eyre’s respectful hit mise-en-scène of Giuseppe Verdi’s Courtesan’s Tragedy returns to Covent Garden with three top-notch casts. Ermonela Jaho, Pretty Yende, and Rachel Willis-Sørensen take turns as Violetta, the consumptive beauty who has all Paris at her feet. Giovanni Sala, Bekhzod Davronov, and Charles Castronovo appear as Alfredo, the naïf from the country for whom she leaves all that behind. Aleksei Isaev, Amartuvshin Enkhbat, and Christoph Pohl spoil everything as Alfredo’s father Germont, the embodiment of rectitudinous bourgeois condemnation. Antonello Manacorda and Giacomo Sagripanta alternate on the conductor’s podium. Perhaps you’ve heard that in 2024, the sister companies that share The Royal Opera House rebranded as the Royal Ballet and Opera. The switch seems meaningful, somehow. Balletomanes are accustomed to attending their Swan Lakes and Giselles and Sleeping Beautys over and over for the sake of handicapping and ranking their idols. Opera fans, in my experience, do less of this. But the revolving-door casting model for La Traviata, increasingly in vogue at major companies, seems designed to encourage lots of repeat business. In hard times, that might be a hard sell. But passion is passion. —Matthew Gurewitsch