Rigoletto
Rigoletto is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the 1832 play Le roi s'amuse by Victor Hugo. Despite serious initial problems with the Austrian censors who had control over northern Italian theatres at the time, the opera had a triumphant premiere at La Fenice in Venice on 11 March 1851.
The work, Verdi's sixteenth in the genre, is widely considered to be the first of the operatic masterpieces of Verdi's middle-to-late career. Its tragic story revolves around the licentious Duke of Mantua, his hunch-backed court jester Rigoletto, and Rigoletto's daughter Gilda. The opera's original title, La maledizione, refers to a curse placed on both the Duke and Rigoletto by the Count Monterone, whose daughter the Duke has seduced with Rigoletto's encouragement. The curse comes to fruition when Gilda falls in love with the Duke and sacrifices her life to save him from the assassin hired by her father.
Composition history
of Venice commissioned Verdi in 1850 to compose a new opera. He was prominent enough by this time to enjoy some freedom in choosing texts to set to music. He initially asked Francesco Maria Piave to examine the play Kean by Alexandre Dumas, père, but soon came to believe that they needed to find a more energetic subject.That came in the form of Victor Hugo's controversial five-act play Le roi s'amuse. Verdi later explained that "The subject is grand, immense, and there is a character that is one of the greatest creations that the theatre can boast of, in any country and in all history." However, Hugo's depiction of a venal, cynical, womanizing king was considered unacceptably scandalous. The play had been banned in France following its premiere nearly twenty years earlier ; now it was to come before the Austrian Board of Censors
From the beginning, both composer and librettist knew this step would not be easy. As Verdi wrote in a letter to Piave: "Use four legs, run through the town and find me an influential person who can obtain the permission for making Le Roi s'amuse." Guglielmo Brenna, secretary of La Fenice, promised the duo that they would not have problems with the censors. He was wrong, and rumours began to spread in early summer that the production would be forbidden. In August, Verdi and Piave retired to Busseto, Verdi's hometown, to prepare a defensive scheme as they continued work on the opera. Despite their best efforts, including frantic correspondence with La Fenice, the Austrian censor De Gorzkowski emphatically denied consent to the production of "La Maledizione" in a December 1850 letter, calling the opera "a repugnant immorality and obscene triviality."
Piave set to work revising the libretto, eventually pulling from it another opera, Il Duca di Vendome, in which the sovereign was a duke and both the hunchback and the curse disappeared. Verdi was completely against this proposed solution, preferring to negotiate directly with the censors over each and every point of the work. Brenna, La Fenice's sympathetic secretary, mediated the dispute by showing the Austrians some letters and articles depicting the bad character, but great value, of the artist. By January 1851 the parties had settled on a compromise: the action of the opera would be moved, and some of the characters would be renamed. In the new version, the Duke would preside over Mantua and belong to the Gonzaga family. The scene in which he retired to Gilda's bedroom would be deleted, and his visit to the Taverna would no longer be intentional, but the result of a trick. The hunchbacked jester was renamed Rigoletto from a parody of a comedy by Jules-Édouard Alboize de Pujol: Rigoletti, ou Le dernier des fous of 1835. By 14 January, the opera's definitive title had become Rigoletto.
Verdi finally completed the composition on 5 February 1851, a little more than a month before the premiere. Piave had already arranged for the sets to be designed while Verdi was still working on the final stages of act 3. The singers were given some of their music to learn on 7 February. However, Verdi kept at least a third of the score at Busseto. He brought it with him when he arrived in Venice for the rehearsals on 19 February, and would continue refining the orchestration throughout the rehearsal period. For the première, La Fenice had cast Felice Varesi as Rigoletto, the tenor Raffaele Mirate as the Duke, and Teresa Brambilla as Gilda. Due to a high risk of unauthorised copying, Verdi demanded extreme secrecy from all his singers and musicians, particularly Mirate: the "Duke" had the use of his score for only a few evenings before the première, and was made to swear that he would not sing or even whistle the tune of "La donna è mobile" except during rehearsal.
Performance history
19th-century productions
Rigoletto premiered on 11 March 1851 in a sold-out La Fenice as the first part of a double bill with Giacomo Panizza's ballet Faust. Gaetano Mares conducted, and the sets were designed and executed by Giuseppe Bertoja and Francesco Bagnara. The opening night was a complete triumph, especially the scena drammatica and the Duke's cynical aria, "La donna è mobile", which was sung in the streets the next morning. Many years later, Giulia Cora Varesi, the daughter of Felice Varesi, described her father's performance at the premiere. Varesi was very uncomfortable with the false hump he had to wear; he was so uncertain that, even though he was quite an experienced singer, he had a panic attack when it was his turn to enter the stage. Verdi immediately realised he was paralysed and roughly pushed him on the stage, so he appeared with a clumsy tumble. The audience, thinking it was an intentional gag, was very amused.Rigoletto was a great box-office success for La Fenice and Verdi's first major Italian triumph since the 1847 premiere of Macbeth in Florence. It initially had a run of 13 performances and was revived in Venice the following year, and again in 1854. Despite a rather disastrous production in Bergamo shortly after its initial run at La Fenice, the opera soon entered the repertory of Italian theatres. By 1852, it had premiered in all the major cities of Italy, although sometimes under different titles due to the vagaries of censorship. From 1852, it also began to be performed in major cities worldwide, reaching as far afield as Alexandria and Constantinople in 1854 and both Montevideo and Havana in 1855. The UK premiere took place on 14 May 1853 at what is now the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London with Giovanni Matteo Mario as the Duke of Mantua and Giorgio Ronconi as Rigoletto, conducted by Michael Costa. In the US, the opera was first seen on 19 February 1855 at New York's Academy of Music in a performance by the Max Maretzek Italian Opera Company.
20th century and beyond
Several modern productions have radically changed the original setting. These include Jonathan Miller's 1982 production for the English National Opera, which is set amongst the Mafia in New York City's Little Italy during the 1950s; Doris Dörrie's 2005 production for the Bavarian State Opera, where the Court of Mantua became The Planet of the Apes; director Linda Brovsky's production for Seattle Opera, placing the story in Mussolini's fascist Italy, in 2004 ; and Michael Mayer's 2013 production for the Metropolitan Opera, which is set in a casino in 1960s Las Vegas. Different characters portray different archetypes from the Rat Pack era, with the Duke becoming a Frank Sinatra-type character and Rigoletto becoming Don Rickles. In March 2014, Lindy Hume, artistic director of Australia's Opera Queensland staged the opera set in the party-going world of disgraced former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.Roles
Synopsis
Act 1
Scene 1: Mantua. A magnificent hall in the ducal palace. Doors at the back open into other rooms, splendidly lit up. A crowd of lords and ladies in grand costumes are seen walking about in the rear rooms; page boys come and go. The festivities are at their height. Music is heard from offstage. The Duke and Borsa enter from a door in the back.At a ball in his palace, the Duke sings of a life of pleasure with as many women as possible, and mentions that he particularly enjoys cuckolding his courtiers: "Questa o quella". He mentions to Borsa that he has seen an unknown beauty in church and desires to possess her, but he also wishes to seduce the Countess of Ceprano. Rigoletto, the Duke's hunchbacked court jester, mocks the husbands of the ladies to whom the Duke is paying attention, including the Count Ceprano. He humorously advises the Duke to get rid of Count Ceprano by prison, exile, or death. The Duke laughs indulgently, but Ceprano is not amused. Marullo, one of the guests at the ball, informs the courtiers that Rigoletto has a "lover", which astonishes them. The courtiers, at Ceprano's suggestion, resolve to take vengeance on Rigoletto for making fun of them. The festivities are interrupted by the arrival of the elderly Count Monterone, whose daughter the Duke had seduced. Rigoletto provokes him further by making fun of his helplessness to avenge his daughter's honor. Monterone confronts the Duke, and is immediately arrested by the Duke's guards. Before being led off to prison, Monterone curses both the Duke for the attack on his daughter and Rigoletto for having mocked his righteous anger. The curse terrifies Rigoletto, who believes the popular superstition that an old man's curse has real power.
Scene 2: The end of a dead-end street. On the left, a house of discreet appearance with one small courtyard surrounded by walls. In the yard there is one tall tree and a marble seat; in the wall, a door that leads to the street; above the wall, a terrace supported by arches. The second floor door opens on to the said terrace, which can also be reached by a staircase in front. To the right of the street is the very high wall of the garden and a side of the Ceprano palace. It is night.
Preoccupied with the old man's curse, Rigoletto approaches the house where he is concealing his daughter from the world and is accosted by the assassin Sparafucile, who walks up to him and offers his services. Rigoletto declines for the moment, but leaves open the possibility of hiring Sparafucile later, should the need arise. Sparafucile wanders off, after repeating his own name a few times. Rigoletto contemplates the similarities between the two of them: "Pari siamo!" ; Sparafucile kills men with his sword, and Rigoletto uses "a tongue of malice" to stab his victims. Rigoletto opens a door in the wall and embraces his daughter Gilda. They greet each other warmly: "Figlia!" "Mio padre!". Rigoletto has been concealing his daughter from the Duke and the rest of the city, and she does not know her father's occupation. Since he has forbidden her to appear in public, she has been nowhere except to church and does not even know her own father's name.
When Rigoletto has gone, the Duke appears and overhears Gilda confess to her nurse Giovanna that she feels guilty for not having told her father about a young man she had met at the church. She says that she fell in love with him, but that she would love him even more if he were a student and poor. As she declares her love, the Duke enters, overjoyed. Gilda, alarmed, calls for Giovanna, unaware that the Duke had given her money to go away. Pretending to be a student, the Duke convinces Gilda of his love: "È il sol dell'anima". When she asks for his name, he hesitantly calls himself Gualtier Maldè. Hearing sounds and fearing that her father has returned, Gilda sends the Duke away after they quickly trade vows of love: "Addio, addio". Alone, Gilda meditates on her love for the Duke, whom she believes is a student: "Gualtier Maldè!... Caro nome che il mio cor".
Later, Rigoletto returns: "Riedo!... perché?", while the hostile courtiers outside the walled garden get ready to abduct the helpless girl. They tell Rigoletto that they are actually abducting the Countess Ceprano. He sees that they are masked and asks for a mask for himself; while they are tying the mask onto his face, they also blindfold him. Blindfolded and deceived, he holds the ladder steady while they climb up to Gilda's room: Chorus: "Zitti, zitti". With her father's unknowing assistance Gilda is carried away by the courtiers. Left alone, Rigoletto removes his mask and blindfold, and realizes that it was in fact Gilda who was carried away. He collapses in despair, remembering the old man's curse.