Verdi’s opera ‘La traviata’ directed by David McVicar and conducted by Renato Palumbo at Teatro Real Madrid in 2015. Verdi’s masterpiece is the tragic story of a high-society courtesan who renounces life itself to protect the honour of her lover, demonstrating with her self-sacrifice a nobility so lacking from the hypocritical bourgeois society that abuses and then rejects her.