The Standard Repertoire: Rigoletto
Men behaving badly
This post is the fifth entry in an ongoing series about the operas of the standard repertoire. #1 was Eugene Onegin, #2 was La bohème, #3 was The Marriage of Figaro, #4 was Faust. You can see all my posts tagged “opera” for more.
I’ve always had a little trouble with Verdi's operas, especially his earlier works. Compared to his contemporaries, his musical language can feel a bit naive: at his most formulaic, it’s a mix of oom-pah-pah beats under complaisant Italianate melodies, with portentous minor chords from the orchestra when a bit of drama is called for. But if you’re an opera person, Verdi is impossible to avoid. He was the singular titan of Italian opera for the better part of the nineteenth century: no other Italian composer came anywhere close in fame and popularity during his lifetime. His music steadily increased in sophistication over his career, but his most popular operas are still the mid-career trio he composed back-to-back in the early 1850’s: Il trovatore (The Troubador), La traviata (The Fallen Woman) and Rigoletto.
Rigoletto, to my mind, is easily the best of the three and unequivocally a masterpiece. It’s one of the operas I would have no trouble recommending to someone new to the genre: a compelling plot, reasonably paced (by operatic standards), musically interesting, and emotionally moving. The silliness is minimal, directorial efforts to make it “relevant to today” can be fruitful, and it’s an excellent showcase for great singers.
Part of what has made it a rich text for directors is its subject matter: Rigoletto is primarily about power. About powerful people behaving badly, yes, but also about their willing enablers, and the resentment and evil that sprouts from that symbiosis. This easy hook for relevance is a bit of a double-edged sword. I always find it embarrassing when opera companies ham-fistedly advertise their product to non-converts as being about SEX and PASSION, and the number of Rigoletto productions that claim to be “for the #MeToo era” is similarly embarrassing. But there are a lot of chances for directors to do things that are truly interesting (I have fond memories of Christopher Alden’s cerebral and twisty production for the Canadian Opera Company in 2011) and the basic structure is hard to break.
Rigoletto, the opera’s title character, is one of two famous sad clowns in opera (the other being, of course, Pagliacci). He is literally a court jester, and in traditional productions, he wears a jester hat and pointy shoes. His job is to make jokes about the courtiers, the denizens of the court of the Duke of Mantua, for the amusement of the Duke. The courtiers resent the Duke but are also dependent on him, and Rigoletto’s role is to be a repository and relief valve for the tension between the Duke and his hangers-on. The Duke can enjoy Rigoletto’s abuse of his courtiers, and in turn Rigoletto is a safe target for the courtiers’ ire.
The opening scene establishes this all very economically. The Duke announces his worldview through the cheerful aria Questa o quella (this woman or that woman): women are all alike, he sings; if they’re beautiful, I deserve to have them, and monogamy is for lesser men [listen here]. To prove his point, he immediately starts flirting with the wife of one of his courtiers, in front of her husband. The husband is outraged, but there’s nothing he can do (the woman’s reaction is ambiguous. Whether she is flattered, annoyed, or frightened is left up to the director). Rigoletto loudly mocks the man, and jokingly suggests to the Duke that the troublesome husband be gotten out of the way via imprisonment or beheading. “You always take the joke too far,” says the Duke, enjoying the mockery while keeping himself at a distance from it. Meanwhile, the husband and the other courtiers plot revenge: not against the Duke, who committed the original offense, but against Rigoletto.
In the next scene, we see that Rigoletto resents his role at the court, which he finds loathsome and degrading even as he enjoys provoking the sniveling courtiers [listen here]. His only joy in life is his daughter Gilda, who is beautiful and innocent in the mold of Faust’s Marguerite. His greatest fear is that the courtiers or the Duke will find her and harm her; to avoid this outcome he keeps her sheltered from the world. When a professional assassin prospects him, offering to dispatch any man who approaches her, Rigoletto is simultaneously horrified and intrigued.
Things proceed from there: the courtiers get their revenge on Rigoletto by kidnapping his daughter and delivering her to the Duke to be raped. The scene where Rigoletto confronts them, in front of the locked door behind which he knows the Duke is violating his daughter, is one of the most powerful in all of Verdi’s work. Overtop a cascade of furious scales in the string section, he rages at the courtiers for their cruelty and venality, demanding that they open the door. But all his rage does nothing, and soon he is reduced to begging piteously for their help. That doesn’t work either. The courtiers remain silent. None of them open the door.
Listen to the scene below:
Rigoletto, like The Marriage of Figaro, is adapted from a controversial stage play. The source material is a play by Victor Hugo ironically titled Le roi s’amuse (The King Amuses Himself). Even though the play was set historically in the court of King Francis I, the censors in France read it as a veiled attack on the reigning King Louis-Philippe and banned it after only one performance. Verdi and his librettist had to do some finessing to get their adaptation past the Austrian censors (northern Italy was under the control of Austria at the time), who wanted to suppress any messages hostile to the monarchy. They cut a particularly incendiary line from the play,1 demoted the villain from King to Duke, gave all the characters Italianate names to remove any connection to the French aristocracy, and relocated the action to Mantua, which had ceased to exist as a duchy.
There are many legends surrounding the Duke’s Act III aria La donna è mobile (women are fickle), one of the most familiar melodies in all of opera. If you have ever had prolonged exposure to television commercials, chances are excellent you know the tune: it’s been used to advertise Doritos, Axe Body Spray, The Olive Garden, and The Sopranos (tv show), as well as, inevitably, numerous Italian foods. According to legend, Verdi knew he had a hit on his hands and kept the song embargoed from the cast until hours before the opera’s premiere to prevent the Venetian gondoliers from singing it before its official debut.
Listen below:
Out of context, La donna è mobile is catchy, jaunty, and cheerful; in the context of the drama, it’s ironic and sinister. The lyrics are straightforwardly misogynist, as befits the Duke: “women are fickle as a feather in the breeze, always changing their minds.” The audience knows that the Duke is the fickle one — he’s about to add another woman to his list of conquests — and Gilda, his victim, is (unwisely, absurdly) faithful to the point of being willing to die for her man. The audience reaction, in a good production, will be split between “what a great tune” and “what an asshole.” La donna è mobile appears twice in the opera: once in its straightforward, applause-getting form, and then later, as a harbinger of Rigoletto’s doom, appearing at the exact moment when he realizes his plan to get revenge has gone horribly wrong.
Shortly after the big aria comes another of Rigoletto’s most famous musical moments, at least for the opera faithful: the quartet. Four characters sing four different melodic lines, each expressing a different emotion, but harmonizing beautifully with each other. The Duke tries to seduce the latest object of his lust, Maddalena; Maddalena teases him for his insincerity; Gilda despairs at seeing the Duke (whom she loves, somehow; this is a whole other essay) flirt with another woman; Rigoletto darkly lectures his daughter that she’s now seeing the Duke’s true nature. They introduce their melodies separately at first, and then Verdi weaves them together: this is the kind of trick opera composers love to use to show off their mastery of the form, and this is one of the finest examples.
Listen below:
As I said above, a number of Rigoletto productions in the past few years have tried to brand themselves as “for the #MeToo" era.” There are certainly some resonances: it depicts a powerful and entitled man who abuses women with impunity, alongside his coterie of enablers and the social structures that ensure he gets away with it. But any feminist reading of Rigoletto is going to be unsatisfying, not just because the helpless Gilda is almost a caricature of feminine passivity and subservience, but because it’s not really interested in women at all. The real meat of Rigoletto is the triangle between the Duke, the Jester, and the courtiers: men locked in a power struggle, all of whom loathe each other, all of whom at various points prop each other up.
“Your mothers gave themselves to their lackeys,” rages Triboulet to the courtiers. “You are all bastards.”