Rigoletto

Opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi

How deeply the fate of court jester Rigoletto and his sheltered daughter Gilda moves us! The opera was enthusiastically received at its premier performance in 1851 at Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Today, the opera continues to draw those who would always gladly be moved by Giuseppe Verdi’s melody of a futile quest for a little bit of happiness and the tragic experiences associated with this pursuit.

Rigoletto wants nothing more than retreating into a happy private life with his daughter after finishing his service to the court. Through his activities for the Duke of Mantua, he catches on to the thoughtless amusements, knows the pastimes of those who have it too good and who take too much. Lacking any awareness of wrongdoing, they have no concept of sympathy, simply because they defer to nothing and to no one. They are the law for they have the power. Rigoletto will at times join in, because it is the world in which he earns a living for himself and his motherless daughter. But then he flees into the purity of his domesticity. Which he can only maintain by keeping his private life strictly separated from his social one and raising Gilda isolated from the public eye. But isolation has its price: in church, the only public place she is allowed to go, Gilda meets the love of her life. For those not familiar with the story: her beloved is the duke himself, although incognito pretending to be a student. And Rigoletto, envied and hated by the others, unknowingly becomes the helper and accomplice in the abduction of his own daughter, bound for the Duke’s sleeping chambers. He swears revenge on the duke and arranges for his assassination.

Gilda learns of the conspiracy to murder the duke and follows her new life plan, modelled on not clinging but rather selflessly protecting – she sacrifices her life for her unfaithful beloved. She is inspired by an idealism known only to those who confront life with illusions. Fleeing through a life unknown for love, she is unprepared for it and destined to perish. Seeing his daughter dying instead of the duke destroys Rigoletto’s life.

What a dark panorama of the world unfolds in this opera!

The story’s poetic basis is Victor Hugo’s drama Le roi s’amuse. The premiere performance of the drama in 1832 caused a considerable stir, Verdi and his librettist Francesco Maria Piave were plagued by censorship: a governing sovereign, Francis I of France, was not permitted to appear on stage as a debauchee. Verdi sprinkled name changes for the main figures throughout his work and set it in a different place and time. And he made the court jester the title hero. And yet his peers would certainly not have had any trouble understanding the message as being contemporary.

With Rigoletto, Verdi, who himself lost two children in a short period of time and who was regarded as a politically and socially committed artist, created a musical drama of a world filled with justice and injustice in the face of misuse of power and self-serving love cutting deeply through life’s social strata and confines. Whether his figures are entirely guilty or only innocently guilty, they are trapped as if before a mirror. They are people with all their good as well as their bad sides. But there is also a woman – as laer in Il Trovatore and La Traviata – befallen by injustice on which she bases her love, her idealistic dreams of happiness maturing just as vaguely as the more or less realistic illusions of life held by the men.