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Maestro Patrick Summers illuminates the world events that surrounded Rigoletto and composer Giuseppe Verdi, and explains why this great tragedy is still making headlines more than 150 years after it was written.

Rigoletto costume, designed by Peter J. Hall Photo by Chris Novosad

On the Sunday following Victoria’s death (Jan. 27) another symbol of the nineteenth Century, composer Giuseppe Verdi, died quietly in Milan’s Grand Hotel, the streets outside having been muffled with straw to ensure that the maestro’s final days would not be disturbed by the tread of carriages. Few thoughtful people who read of the death of the British Queen or Italy’s musical hero of Italian independence could have escaped thoughts of the weight and speed of history’s passing. The United States seemed to be lying quietly in wait.

Verdi spent his final years, and much of his personal fortune, endowing nearly every charity in his native Parma, as well as establishing a rest home in Milan for needy musicians, the Casa di Riposa, which is still active, and where Verdi is entombed. No opera lover should miss the touching 1985 documentary “Tosca’s Kiss” (Il bacio di Tosca), about its inhabitants. By 1901 Verdi could look back on a composing career totally unique in one aspect: no other composer in history had changed his style so profoundly over the course of a lifetime. His operas fit roughly into three periods, “late” Verdi, 1862-1893, a period which includes his epic Don Carlos (for many, me included, his greatest work), Aida, Otello and the crowning smile of his life, Falstaff. There are sixteen “early” Verdi operas, from the period of 1839-1850, including Nabucco, Ernani, Attila, Luisa Miller, and the single work that more than any other shaped the future of the young composer, his opera on Shakespeare’s unmentionable “Scottish” play. Theater lore says one is never to utter its name in a theater, but you’re safe with its Italian title, Macbetto.  These aforementioned periods frame the fabled “middle” Verdi operas, from 1851 to 1862, and these years produced, in reverse chronology, La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny), Un ballo in Maschera (The Masked Ball), Simon Boccanegra, and the trio of repertory staples no opera company could long survive without, La Traviata, Il Trovatore, and the first work of his full maturity, Rigoletto.

The work suffers from such familiarity that we risk overlooking what an extraordinary opera it is. Rigoletto is closely based on Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi s’amuse (“The King has his Fun”), its plot intact, but with locale moved to Mantua and names changed and Italianized to satisfy the strict Austrian censors prior to its debut at Venice’s La Fenice, Venice still being under Austrian control in 1850. Hugo’s hunchbacked jester, Triboulet, who became Verdi’s Rigoletto, garnered the composer’s highest dramatic praise: “he is a character worthy of Shakespeare”; indeed, he is a sort of inverted servant version of Richard III, and has also been described too often, but correctly, as the Verdi baritone’s Hamlet. Verdi revered Shakespeare, and read various Italian translations of his plays throughout his life. Grateful as we are for his three operas based on the Bard’s plays, Macbetto, Otello, and Falstaff, one aches at one of the great might-have-beens in history, his sketched and long-discussed King Lear. Oh, what he might have written for Lear’s three daughters when one hears the riches he poured out for Rigoletto’s sole daughter, Gilda (Blanche in Hugo’s play).

Victor Hugo’s romanticism and rich mix of political and personal intrigue spoke directly to Verdi’s gifts as a musical dramatist; the composer’s earlier Ernani was based on a Hugo play. Le Roi s’amuse provided the most poignant of plot situations for Verdi, and one that always inspired his most beautiful music, the relationship of father and daughter. In consecutive years, 1838 and 1839, Verdi and his wife lost both of their infant children, a daughter and a son, neither of whom saw a second birthday. The pain of the loss remained raw for Verdi throughout his life, but he never wrote more poignantly about a father’s love than in Rigoletto, with the possible exception of Simon Boccanegra’s extraordinary duet with his daughter Amelia. It cannot be said that Rigoletto is a good father — to our modern sensibilities he’s quite a disturbing one — but his obsessive love for his daughter is drawn with some of the most beautiful music from any opera.

Rigoletto, like most of Verdi’s operas, needs no prior knowledge or preparation to be enjoyed, something which can’t honestly be said of many other composers. Still, as with any intelligent work, some prior knowledge can enhance the experience. The opera’s original title, La Maledizione, (the Curse), thought by the censors to be too permissive, is portrayed in the opera’s powerful and brief prelude, with its sinister alterations of uneasy silence with surprising quiet chords and massive fortissimo crashes. Rigoletto is a story about the consequences of deception, as every character in the piece is lying about something, except for, ironically, the hit-man Sparafucile. This is a violent and dark opera, set in motion by a lie, by Marullo, that Rigoletto is harboring a mistress. The deceptions beget more deceptions, until Rigoletto’s greatest fear becomes his tragic reality by his own actions. And the deceptions are played out musically: Rigoletto opens with the flippant and shallow music of the Duke’s party, music filled with dangerously off-kilter rhythms (the ear can never quite tell what beat of the bar we’re on!) and an unnerving sense of comic opera lightness. The opening “party music” has eight separate melodies, quite a feat for such a short scene. Verdi then stacks five of them on top of each other at the climax, creating a brilliant effect of a world moving just a bit too fast.

The most striking orchestral effect in the opera is the sepulchral back alley duet between Sparafucile and Rigoletto, in which the tragic crime is plotted. Solo cello and contra-bass, in octaves, play a serpentine melody of disarmingly sensual beauty, with little punctuations and gloating murmurs elsewhere in the orchestra, while the two singers converse above them, creating a strange tension between uneasiness and beauty.

Verdi was one of music’s truly gifted tunesmiths; melodies seemed to pour from him throughout his life, unstoppable. But the sketches of Rigoletto prove that he worked long and hard on them, sculpting them into memorable perfection and emotional specificity. The King in Hugo’s play is rather a relentlessly unlikable and shallow character; in Verdi’s opera, as the Duke, we see at least one moment of genuine affection and concern for the Gilda, however short-lived, in his aria that opens act two, one of the marvels of the score, “Parmi veder le lagrime”. It is followed by the men’s chorus (Rigoletto has no female chorus), “scorrendo uniti remota via”, their recounting of the kidnapping of Gilda. It’s a jaunty and gleeful tune, almost martial, full of the pride of their crime; it is also the melody most likely to visit at 4 a.m. while rehearsing or performing Rigoletto.

Rigoletto is an embarrassment of melodic and dramatic riches, so in the interest of space perhaps it’s best to look at the musical heart of the work, the second of Rigoletto and Gilda’s three duets, their extended scene which closes Act Two. Here, Gilda confesses that she has lied to her father, about having accepted the Duke’s flirtations at church, and met him in the garden of their own house. Her haunting aria “Tutte le feste al tempio” is introduced by an oboe solo, always a telling gesture for Verdi. Gilda is shamed by her abduction, and the music strongly implies that she has been traumatized by unwanted physical advances. Rigoletto, heartbroken at his daughter’s loss of innocence, invites her to weep, to allow him to bear the burden of her tears. The voices of father and daughter intertwine and softly weave around each other, as the violins play a simple gesture of quiet tears and familial pain. Few pages of Verdi’s music are as intimate as this one, or so blur the line between his life and art; one can practically hear Verdi wishing to hold his own daughter just as tenderly.

If the beautiful lyrical intimacy of Rigoletto’s score is what gives the works its soul, the constant public affection for the opera is undoubtedly due to the spirited and instantly memorable tunes that dot the score. The most famous music in the opera, the Duke’s act three aria “La donna è mobile,” went unrehearsed by Verdi until the last conceivable moment before the Venice premiere, and the orchestra and cast had to take vows not to hum it outside the opera house in order to preserve the surprise of it for the opening night audience. Verdi knew that once this tune was heard, it would define the work, or that someone would try to steal it. It has since found a unique place even in the vast din of popular culture. To this day, in performances of Rigoletto, or even in a concert performance of the aria alone, its jaunty introduction inspires the audience to delighted twitters of “Oh, I know this!” But near the end of the opera Verdi uses this utterly hummable and happy melody brilliantly: when Rigoletto hears it in the distance, he suddenly realizes that his revenge has gone horribly wrong.

Rigoletto is also justifiably famous for its brilliant third-act quartet, and little could be said about it that hasn’t been said many times. But try focusing your ear on each of the characters in the quartet individually, and alternate them every few seconds. There is a specific and identifiable character to each line, though they are all sung at once. Gilda and her father, at odds with each other over her continued affection for such a shallow man, are at odds with each other musically as well: near the end of the quartet Verdi writes their lines exactly, and challengingly, out of sync with each other, an extraordinary effect. The Duke’s lines, long, seductive, and high, are mocked by the low and chattering lines of Maddalena.

And Rigoletto has a fascinating dramaturgical stroke. Verdi was a stickler for historical accuracy: Mantuan clocks rang in “quarters,” meaning that at 12:30 p.m., one bell sounded, at 1 pm, two bells, at 1:30 p.m., three bells, etc until six bells indicated 3 p.m., then the whole sequence started over at 3:30 p.m., ending at 6 p.m., the next sequence ending at 9 p.m., with the sixth bell of the final quarter ending at midnight, which is why, in the final scene of the opera, Rigoletto says “mezza notte” (midnight) after six bells and not, as we would expect by modern clocks, twelve.

Houston Grand Opera’s current cast and production team of Rigoletto have been carefully selected. Rarely do we present a work in which nearly all of the major roles are being sung by an artist for the first time, but we have set about quite consciously to do just that with this production. Why? This opera is a repertory staple, and there are many ways to perform and prepare it. But to truly look at it anew, with eyes and ears as fresh as Verdi’s must have been upon writing, we decided to seek the next generation of Verdians, singers of imagination and youthful vocal quality, who could make a statement about this worked, informed by their own recent discoveries. The Russian soprano Albina Shagimuratova, having recently emerged from Houston Grand Opera’s studio, seemed to me to possess all of the qualities Verdi expresses in the role of Gilda, a youthful bright sound with “heft”, able to negotiate both the tender moments and the passages of full throated passion. Albina, having triumphed at last summer’s Salzburg Festival, is looking forward to important debuts around the world, in the finest opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York. A colleague of mine from the Metropolitan Opera, young American tenor Eric Cutler, sings his first Duke in Rigoletto. Eric and I recorded a DVD with the Met of Bellini’s I puritani, with Anna Netrebko, and at that time it struck me how closely related its treacherous tenor role is to Verdi’s Duke, musically, not as a character. How fascinating, I thought, to have a tenor capable of Puritani (and there have never been more than two or three of those at any one time), and an experienced Mozartean, essay the Duke, with vocalism more aligned to the predecessor works of Rigoletto than of the heavier roles Verdi would eventually write. The title character will be sung by Scott Hendricks, also of our studio of a decade ago. Scott is now of an age that he is beginning to take on Verdi’s famous baritone roles around the world (one must have the right combination of security and maturity before tackling them), and we were attracted not only by Scott’s rich vocal amplitude and ease with Verdi’s long lines, but by his natural (they really can’t be taught) instincts as an actor. HGO also welcomes back Lindy Hume, who directed our sweet, and wickedly funny, update of The Barber of Seville a few years ago; Lindy has the ability to create a unique atmosphere of positive discovery and dramatic profundity, both of which are vital to artists doing enormous and difficult roles for the first time. I’ve conducted Rigoletto at various times throughout my career, and it is always a thrilling and very satisfying work to lead. I’m excited to explore it with colleagues new to it, and to view it through their newness.

In closing, let us briefly shift our attention back to that news-packed January of 1901. On the 10th of the month, a Thursday, an event occurred in what was then an exotic and unknown place, an event that would change the world utterly and forever with enough passion and political chicanery to fill the plot of any Italian opera, and would create a new generation of reigns and monarchs. Just a few days before Queen Victoria, Giuseppe Verdi and their eras passed into history, on a hill just south of Beaumont, Texas, a few hearty and ambitious men watched as oil spewed more than a hundred feet above them from the “Lucas gusher” on a hill that would come to be known as Spindletop. On that chilly Thursday, the new era arrived.

Patrick Summers.
New York City, February 24, 2009

Music Director Patrick Summers is a frequent contributor to Opera Cues magazine.