VERDI’S RIGOLETTO
A SHORT GUIDE TO A GREAT OPERA
The opera and its composer
Who’s who and what’s what
The interval: talking points
Act by act
THE OPERA AND ITS COMPOSER
Debauchery, seduction and rape by a king. Regicide, kidnap, murder. It is not surprising that the police and censors in Venice gave Verdi a hard time over his proposed opera for their 1850/51 carnival season. The libretto, by Francesco Maria Piave,1 was based on Le Roi s’Amuse, a play by the towering French literary figure, Victor Hugo (1802–1885), who we know particularly for Les Misérables and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The play had been banned in France after the first night.
Even in the 1920s, the audience at New York’s Met found the rape sufficiently shocking that some women turned their backs to the stage when Gilda, deflowered, emerged from the royal bedroom.
Towards the middle of 1850, Verdi had contracted with La Fenice to produce a new show for the carnival season in the New Year. For some time, he had been pondering the operatic potential of Hugo’s play, which is set in the luxurious dissipation of the French court of King François 1er, consummate lecher and debauchee, contemporary of the English King Henry VIII.
The proposed libretto proved unacceptable to the authorities, who regretted that Verdi had chosen to base his opera on a play which displayed ‘repulsive immorality and obscene triviality.’ True to character, Verdi ‘passed the buck’ and threw the blame onto Piave.
Delegations from Venice, and emasculated libretti, went backwards and forwards to Verdi’s farm, where he was trying to work, as well as to deal with business aspects and recover from a stomach upset. He was also in the middle of a domestic crisis, expelling his parents, with whom he was having a row about his mistress, and arguing even over rights to the produce of the chicken-yard.
The Venetian censors had not allowed for the dour, determined composer who, although desperate, dug in. Verdi had a sure sense of what would be a success: his market was the audience, and he knew that they had to be entertained and that he could make this a winner. There was a stand-off until less than three weeks before the opera was due to be performed: at one time, it looked as if Venice would have no opera at all from Verdi. With intense pressure exerted by the composer and the theatre authorities, the censors’ arms were twisted, with the result that we have an opera which must have been about as politically incorrect as was possible at the time. It is politically incorrect today, but in a rather different way, featuring as it does a disabled comedian, and generalising about women being fickle (mobile). It is surprising what can be done under cover of a good tune.
In the negotiations, the opera had been relocated from the Louvre in Paris to the ducal court in Mantua.2 What the New York ladies would have done if the opera had shown the King breaking into the bedroom after Gilda had (unfortunately) chosen that room in which to take refuge, we do not know. Verdi had agreed to cut that bit. But when somebody later suggested adding another scene, he refused, and wondered whether they would like him to show the Duke and Gilda together in the bedroom.
The première at La Fenice on 11 March 1851 was a great success and the opera played for thirteen nights. Working from a complete sketch which he had prepared, the revised opera had been completed on 5 February, leaving the instrumentation to be done during the rehearsals. But in the rush, Verdi had made no compromise on quality. Even in late January, he had set about rewriting the Act 2 duet Sì, vendetta – now one of the very popular tunes – because he was unhappy with it.
Rigoletto has been compared in Verdi’s output to Beethoven’s revolutionary Eroica symphony, because both made a clean break with the past. In Verdi’s opera, ‘the barriers between formal melody and recitative are down as never before’; ‘There is no formal precedent for it in the whole of Italian opera.’
The well-known quartet in Act 3 is the pièce de résistance of the opera. It has been described as one of the finest pieces of concerted music in Italian opera, an achievement comparable with some of Mozart’s. In this, the Duke seduces the prostitute with the glorious Bella figlia dell’amore while Rigoletto and Gilda eavesdrop; she is appalled; her father is determined to take revenge. The four characters express four different feelings at the same time. This is ‘something that can only be accomplished through the means of the music drama, for the music unites the outpouring of their various sentiments in a homogeneous constellation and lends it an accent of plausibility.’ Words alone could not express this.
However, La donna è mobile is the tune which immediately caught on with the public generally, and has done more than anything to make Rigoletto one of the most popular of all operas. Musically, that tune is not up to the standard of, say, the quartet. One expert has regretted how, ‘To the uninformed, La donna è mobile is Rigoletto.’3
Within five minutes of the curtain rising, we hear the Duke’s Questa o quella, and later, Gilda’s Caro nome. But the wonderful music does not stop there: we also have the Duke’s Parmi veder le lagrime, Gilda’s Tutte le feste, Rigoletto’s Piangi! piangi fanciulla and, not least, the final duet between father and daughter at the end. This is a feast.
Giuseppe Verdi, whose life spanned the 19th century, brought the development of Italian opera to its ultimate conclusion. He was born on 10 October 1813 in northern Italy, at Le Roncole, near Busseto in the Duchy of Parma. He died in Milan on 27 January 1901. When La Scala reopened after his funeral, the programme, conducted by Toscanini, included the quartet from Rigoletto, with Enrico Caruso as the Duke.
His studies in Milan were sponsored by a local businessman, Antonio Barezzi, whose daughter he subsequently married. But she died, as did their children, early on. After this, Verdi lived with (and eventually married) Giuseppina Strepponi, the daughter of the organist of Monza cathedral. She had an ‘endearing personality’, but also a ‘reputation’ for depositing unwanted children around the place. She was a star in the late 1830s and was the prima donna of Verdi’s early opera Nabucco, best known for the Chorus of Hebrews yearning for freedom. From early on, Verdi (and his name) was associated with the Italian nationalism spearheaded by Mazzini and Garibaldi, and this relationship contributed to his success.
By 1851, Verdi had composed or arranged eleven operas including the first of the three ground-breaking operas of the early 1850s Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata. He set himself up as a gentleman farmer on an estate he acquired at Sant’Agata, near his birthplace. It was a difficult time for the tactless, humourless and unforgiving workaholic. He felt he owed no thanks to the people of his birthplace who did not hide their outrage at his living openly with Giuseppina. His house was robbed by the servants; his mother died; he had major rows with his father about finances and with his father-in-law about family matters. This was the context in which he was working on Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata.
After the subsequent few years, which produced Les Vêpres siciliennes, Simon Boccanegra, Un Ballo in maschera and La Forza del destino, Verdi slowed up. Only four operas were composed in the last 38 years of his life. After Don Ca...