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Because it is one of the most popular operas in the world —even, by many accounts, one of the three most often-performed operas in the world — Roberto Kalb, the Detroit Opera’s music director, refers to Verdi’s as “a great entryway into opera.”

The Detroit Opera’s production of La Traviata, for which Kalb also serves as conductor, opened on Saturday, Oct. 19, with performances continuing on Friday, Oct. 25 and Sunday, Oct. 27.

Kalb says the production is ideal both for opera aficionados and for newcomers: “Anyone that doesn’t know anything about opera,” he says, “should come to this opera.”

That statement is reflective of Kalb’s broader vision, which is to make opera more accessible to audiences who might feel intimidated or otherwise repelled by all the social accoutrement that frequently surround it.

“I feel that there’s a stigma with opera, where people think you have to be dressed in a tuxedo, and it’s about who looks best, and what champagne you ordered in the intermission, and blah, blah, blah,” Kalb says. “I think that defeats the point of it.”

“For me, it’s like any art form,” he continues. “If you go to a museum to look at the best works of art, it doesn’t necessarily have to be [on] a special occasion. If you read a play by Shakespeare, you can be in your apartment in shorts.”

For Kalb, thinking of opera as “something very precious takes away from the fact that these are stories that are completely human.”

In fact, he says, it’s precisely the fact that La Traviata is “really about love and class, death [and] tragedy” that makes it “very accessible.”

“I think anyone that comes to this opera is going to feel a real connection to their own life story,” he says.

La Traviata tells the tale of a French courtesan, Violetta, who falls in love with Alfredo, a young nobleman. Though she longs to leave her life behind for him, Alfredo’s high-society culture—predictably—objects.

La Traviata has been referenced countless times in popular culture, including, as Kalb notes, in a famous scene in Pretty Woman when Richard Gere’s tuxedoed character accompanies Julia Roberts’s to the opera.

“Richard Gere says [something like], ‘You either get it or you don’t get it,’—and she gets it,” Kalb says.

Kalb chuckles over the scene — it hasn’t aged terribly well; there’s something awfully arrogant about Gere’s bit of dialogue — but he adds, “I mean, there’s a real truth to it…[this opera] hits you in a very profound way.”

Kalb has something else to point out: in Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts’ character sees the opera in the original Italian, which she doesn’t understand, so she “doesn’t exactly know what’s going on in the story”—and she’s still moved to tears.

But, he adds, “if you know what’s going on in the story, then it hits you even harder.”

For its own production of La Traviata, the Detroit Opera is providing subtitles to translate everything into English, “so you can follow the story along very well,” Kalb says.

That means you can focus on the music and drama, the combination of which, Kalb says, “is unlike anything. And,” he adds, “this is unamplified music,” meaning neither the vocalists nor the orchestra are hooked up to microphones.

The result, Kalb says, can be startling in its intensity: “the vibrations of sound that you can get from somebody, directly from their tiny vocal cords all the way to basically your chest plate vibrating—there’s really nothing quite like it in the world.”

Before we sign off, Kalb takes a moment to rave about the cast: “we have one of the best casts for Traviata …anywhere in the world,” he says.

He’s particularly enthusiastic about the “wonderful young tenor” Galeano Salas, who performs as Alfredo, and Joo Won Kang, who performs as his father, Giorgio Germont, who Kalb describes as “one of the most refined, beautiful, baritone singers around.”

Emily Pogorelc “a rising star in the opera world,” stars in the role of Violetta Valéry, and Kalb says it was of vital interest “that the Detroit audience could witness somebody’s star rising.”

As for the experience itself, Kalb ends on this note: “I think that it’s important that people come in wanting to listen to beautiful music and enjoy a show…[But],” he adds, “if you want to dress up, that’s totally fine. And if you want to drink the champagne, that’s cool. I do that, too. But…you can make it anything you want.”

Learn more about Detroit Opera’s La Traviata at .��