After the fiasco of Monday’s opening night, conductor Leonard Slatkin has bowed out of the Metropolitan Opera’s “La Traviata” for what the Met’s press office described as “personal reasons.”

Tension between him and the cast climaxed with reports last week of “a screaming fight” with star Angela Gheorghiu at a dress rehearsal.

Critics unanimously slammed Slatkin’s conducting, with Out West Arts noting “looks of fear in the vocalists’ faces.”

Sniffed the Times’ Anthony Tommasini: “I have seldom heard such faulty coordination between a conductor and a cast.”

Even Slatkin conceded his lack of experience with the Verdi classic. “It seems like I am the only person [at the Met] who has never performed Traviata,” he wrote on his Web site, leonardslatkin.com. “But after a while, I concluded that since everyone else in the house knew it, I would learn a great deal from the masters.”

A replacement has yet to be announced. The next performance is Saturday.