Fantaisie sur La traviata (after Verdi)

Paul Agricole Génin, a French flautist active in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, published his Fantaisie sur La Traviata as op. 18, one of a series of operatic paraphrases written for his own instrument. Verdi's opera had reached Paris in 1856, and fantasias on its themes were a staple of the salon and of flute teaching for the rest of the century. Génin treats the borrowed melodies as a display sequence — theme, ornamented restatement, cadenza — in the manner French virtuosos inherited from Italian opera. The piece survives largely as a study in agility.