How opera works - Béziat, Dessay & Sivadier on Verdi's La traviata

Just watched Philippe Béziat's documentary on the 2011 Dessay/Sivadier Aix-production of Verdi's La traviata - it's the right film for new audiences who want to know what opera really is about and how it works, for people in "legitimate" theater who do not appreciate/respect opera singers as stage actors, for acolytes of cultural studies who hold forth that textually reasonably faithful probings of classics is nostalgia without critical thinking and - last but not least - for everyone in performing arts who shares the secret we guard so jealously from everyone else, that rehearsals are the most fun, the best part of the show ... or as Thomas Bernhard put it in his play Heldenplatz (1988) "Wer einmal Blut geleckt hat im Theater / der kann ohne Theater nicht mehr existieren" - Natalie Dessay is doing just that, every time we see her work on her Traviata in this excellent documentary of a work in progress.