VERDI’S RIGOLETTO: THE KING AMUSES HIMSELF

authority on Rigoletto, these and other innovations establish the opera as the gateway to Verdi’s middle period—the most significant breakthrough among the “big three” (with Il trovatore and La traviata).

With Rigoletto, he asserts, Verdi launched Italian opera from evolution to revolution. Even more remarkably, Verdi accomplished this transformation in 1851 with a drama that remains irreducibly modern today.

Rogues’ Gallery: The Dramatis Personae of Rigoletto

Even if you’ve never encountered the expression “Fish stinks from the head down,” you’ve probably heard something like it and can surely surmise what it means: that moral corruption at the top makes its way down through an organization. Some version of this truism exists in many different cultures, and it aptly summarizes the moral lesson of Rigoletto: In Mantua, where the opera takes place, the medieval duke’s personal immorality pervades his entire court. As characters in a drama, they are vivid and surprisingly modern—but it is hard to sympathize with them.

Rigoletto is a single father whose difficult life suggests the trendy term “intersectionality”: He works hard to provide a safe home for himself and his daughter, but as an employee with a disability, he faces discrimination every day in a hostile working environment. As a dad he is overprotective; his efforts to safeguard his daughter make her less safe, not more so. In serving as court jester for a man he hates, Rigoletto has decided to “go along to get along.” The ugliness of his physical deformity can be seen to reflect his moral compromise.

Gilda, Rigoletto’s daughter, seems at first blush to be radiantly lovely and perfectly innocent. Held back from the world, she knows nothing of it; but even after glimpsing reality, she prefers ignorance to learning about the truths of love, power and betrayal. Her sacrifice of her own life to save the duke can be seen as an act of love, but even after seeing his duplicity firsthand, she becomes his facilitator through a suicidal act. According to one wag, if willful moral ignorance were illegal, Gilda might’ve gone to jail instead of dying.

The Duke of Mantua is a figure of utter hypocrisy and moral dissolution inside a package of power, swagger, and sex appeal His anthemic aria, “La donna è mobile”— nominally about women’s fickleness— actually reflects his own inconstancy.

Sparafucile is a Mephistophelian figure of menace who dwells in shadows—a stock operatic character whose baseness is reflected in his bass voice. The aria in which he introduces himself culminates in a famous, long-held note that is one of the lowest in the operatic literature.

Maddalena is Sparafucile’s sister and quite literally his partner in crime; she works as his “man-bait” to lure potential victims to their roadside inn. In the famous Act III quartet “Bella figlia dell’amore,” with the four principals singing dazzlingly braided vocal lines reflecting their contrasting desires, the “beautiful child of love” addressed by the Duke is not Gilda, but Maddalena.