Opening night; Eight years after burning to the ground, Venice's famed opera house rises to the occasion with La Traviata.(Gran Teatro la Fenice)

Byline: Matthew Gurewitsch

If you like your opera houses frilly, none will please you better than the rhapsody in sky-blue, cream, gold, and rose known as the Gran Teatro la Fenice, in Venice. Literally the "Grand Phoenix Theater," it has gone up in flames and arisen from the ashes on more than one occasion. The latest conflagration, in 1996, was a case of arson. Horrified, the opera world rallied to restore it, and happily, the blueprints survived to rebuild the public spaces in pristine splendor.

At concerts last December, a gala crowd celebrated the opening of a mint facsimile of the Fenice on its original site. But the business of the Fenice is opera, which returns at last this month. The inaugural attraction is Verdi's La Traviata, originally commissioned by this very theater. The subject matter-the redemption of a top-price courtesan through love-was outre in its time, so much so that the tale the composer envisioned as contemporary had to be transposed from circa 1850 to the 1700s. Notwithstanding, the premiere was the fiasco of the mature Verdi's career.

That, of course, was then. These days, the person most likely to cause a ruckus with La Traviata would be a director provocateur. In the Canadian Robert Carsen, the Fenice has signed one who is both fearless and capable of genius. His brilliant Tales of Hoffmann for the Paris Opera in 2001 imposed magisterial coherence on a work that all too easily blows apart like a house of cards. His X-rated Rosenkavalier for last summer's Salzburg Festival was more controversial, with act three set in a brothel. Whatever madness may infect his Traviata, there will be method in it.

Integral to every Carsen production is the design, which ...