Synopsis

Act I
At a party in his palace, the Duke of Mantua boasts of his way with women.
He dances with the Countess Ceprano, and his hunchbacked jester, Rigoletto,
mocks the countess’s enraged but helpless husband. The courtier Marullo
bursts in with the latest gossip: Rigoletto is suspected of keeping a young
mistress in his home. The jester, unaware of the courtiers’ talk, continues to taunt
Ceprano, who plots with the others to punish the duke. Monterone, an elderly
nobleman, forces his way into the crowd to denounce the duke for seducing
his daughter and is viciously ridiculed by Rigoletto. Monterone is arrested and
curses Rigoletto.

Rigoletto hurries home, disturbed by Monterone’s curse. He encounters

Sparafucile, a professional assassin, who offers his services. The jester reflects
that his own tongue is as sharp as the murderer’s dagger. Rigoletto enters his
house and warmly greets his daughter, Gilda. Afraid for the girl’s safety, he
warns her nurse, Giovanna, not to let anyone into the house. When the jester
leaves, the duke appears and bribes Giovanna, who lets him into the garden.
He declares his love for Gilda, who has secretly admired him at church, and tells
her he is a poor student. After he leaves, she tenderly thinks of her newfound
love before going to bed. The courtiers gather outside the garden intending
to abduct Rigoletto’s “mistress.” Meeting the jester, they quickly change their
story and fool him into wearing a blindfold and holding a ladder against his own
garden wall; then they carry off Gilda. Rigoletto, rushing into the house, realizes
his daughter is gone and collapses as he remembers Monterone’s curse.

Intermission
Act I
In his palace, the duke is distraught about the abduction of Gilda. When the
courtiers return and tell him the story of how they took the girl from Rigoletto’s
house and left her in the duke’s chamber, the duke hurries off to the conquest.
Rigoletto enters, looking for Gilda. The courtiers are astonished to find out that
she is his daughter rather than his mistress, but prevent him from storming into
the duke’s chamber. The jester violently accuses them of cruelty, then asks for
compassion. Gilda appears and runs in shame to her father, who orders the
others to leave. Alone with Rigoletto, Gilda tells him of the duke’s courtship,
then of her abduction. When Monterone passes by on his way to execution,
the jester swears that both he and the old man will be avenged. Gilda begs her
father to forgive the duke.

Intermission
Act III
Rigoletto brings Gilda to a seedy club, run by Sparafucile, on the outskirts of
Act Through
town. III the window, they watch the Duke amuse himself with Maddalena,
Sparafucile’s
Rigoletto and sister.
GildaGilda
arriveisatheartbroken,
an inn on theand Rigoletto
outskirts sends where
of Mantua her offSparafucile
to leave
town
and disguised as a man. live.
his sister Maddalena He then pays
Inside, theSparafucile
duke laughs toatmurder the Duke.
the fickleness Gilda
of women.
returns andRigoletto
Gilda and overhearswatch Maddalena
throughask theher brother
window to duke
as the spareamuses
the Duke and with
himself kill
Rigoletto
Maddalena.instead.
The Sparafucile
jester sendsrefuses
Gilda offbutto
agrees
Verona that if someone
disguised as aelse
boyarrives at
and pays
the club before
Sparafucile tomidnight,
murder the he will kill that
duke. Gildaperson instead
returns and passMaddalena
to overhear off the bodyurgeas
the
herDuke’s.
brotherGilda, still inthe
to spare love, decides to
handsome sacrificeand
stranger herself for the
kill the Duke. Her
hunchback plan
instead.
succeeds,
Sparafucileandrefuses
Sparafucile stows Rigoletto
to murder her body but in the trunk to
agrees of kill
a car.
theThe
next returning
stranger
Rigoletto
who comes gloats overinn
to the hissorevenge,
that he willwhenbehe suddenly
able to produce hearsa the deadDuke’s
body.voice
Gilda
from inside
decides tothe club. herself
sacrifice He discovers
for thehis dying
duke. She daughter,
knocks atwho theasks
doorhisandforgiveness,
is stabbed.
and realizesreturns
Rigoletto with horror thatthe
to claim Monterone’s
body, whichcurse has been
he assumes fulfilled.
is the duke’s. As he gloats
over the sack Sparafucile has given him, he hears his supposed victim singing in
the distance. Frantically tearing open the sack, he finds his daughter, who dies
asking his forgiveness. Horrified, Rigoletto remembers Monterone’s curse.

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In Focus

Giuseppe Verdi

Rigoletto
Premiere: Teatro La Fenice, Venice, 1851
A dramatic journey of undeniable force, Rigoletto commands the respect of critics,
performers, and audiences alike. It was immensely popular from its premiere—from
even before its premiere, according to accounts of the buzz that surrounded the
initial rehearsals—and remains fresh and powerful to this day. The story is one of
the most accessible in opera, based on a controversial Victor Hugo drama whose
full dramatic implications only became apparent when transformed by Verdi’s
musical genius. Rigoletto is the tale of an outsider—a hunchbacked jester—who
struggles to balance the dueling elements of beauty and evil that exist in his life.
Written during the most fertile period of Verdi’s artistic life, the opera resonates
with a Shakespearean universality.

The Creators
In a remarkable career spanning six decades in the theater, Giuseppe Verdi
(1813–1901) composed 28 operas, at least half of which are at the core of today’s
repertoire. His role in Italy’s cultural and political development has made him an
icon in his native country. Francesco Maria Piave (1810–1876), Verdi’s librettist for
Rigoletto, collaborated with him on ten works, including Ernani, La Traviata, La
Forza del Destino, and the original versions of Macbeth and Simon Boccanegra.

The Setting
Victor Hugo’s 1832 play Le Roi s’Amuse (The King Amuses Himself), set at the court
of King François I of France (circa 1520), is a blatant depiction of depraved authority.
In adapting it, Verdi and Piave fought incessantly with the Italian censors in a well-
documented battle. It makes for interesting reading, particularly in revealing what
Verdi found important in the story and what he considered superfluous. Though Verdi
had no love of royalty and favored a republic, he was not a proletarian ideologue like
Hugo, and he tended to view people more as individuals than as representatives of
classes. He was content, with Piave’s deft juggling, to set the opera at the non-royal
Renaissance court of Mantua and to change all the names but held firm on other
issues in the story, such as the curse that is the catalyst of the drama. Although the
Duke remains unnamed, he was modeled on history’s Vincenzo Gonzaga (1562–1612).
The Gonzaga family motto—”Forse che sì, forse che no” (“Maybe yes, maybe no”)—
provides an interesting insight into some of the Duke’s cavalier pronouncements. In
Michael Mayer’s Met production, the action unfolds in Las Vegas in 1960, a time and
place with surprising parallels to the decadent world of Verdi’s original setting.
In Focus

The Music
Rigoletto contains a wealth of melody, including one that is among the world’s
most famous: the tenor’s jaunty “La donna è mobile.” The opera’s familiar arias—
“Questa o quella” and “Caro nome,” for example—are also rich with character
insight and dramatic development. The heart of the score, though, lies in its fast-
moving subtleties and apt dramatic touches. The baritone’s solos, “Pari siamo”
(Act I) and “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata” (Act II), are epic scenes telescoped to
less than ten minutes each. The celebrated father-daughter duets also reflect
Verdi’s overall design. Rigoletto sings of his protective love for Gilda in Act I in a
spun-out phrase of simple, honest melody, while her music decorates his. In their
subsequent scene in Act II, Gilda’s music (and, by implication, her life) is similarly
intertwined with that of Rigoletto, until finally her melody breaks away as she
strives to declare her adolescent independence. The famous quartet “Bella figlia
dell’amore” (Act III) is an ingenious musical analysis of the diverging reactions of
four characters in the same moment: The Duke’s music rises with urgency and
impatience, Gilda’s droops with disappointment, Rigoletto’s remains measured
and paternal, while the promiscuous Maddalena is all over the place. In the
context of the opera, the merely lovely music becomes inspired drama.

Met History
Met audiences first heard Rigoletto within a month of the company’s inaugural
performance, on November 16, 1883. The 1903–04 season opened with the
company debut of Enrico Caruso as the Duke—a role that he went on to sing
to sing 38 times before his premature death in 1921. The opera’s title role was
identified for many years with Italian baritone Giuseppe De Luca, who gave
96 performances between 1916 and 1940. Other notable Met Rigolettos have
included Leonard Warren (1943–59), Robert Merrill (1952–72), and Cornell
MacNeil (who surpassed De Luca’s record with a record 102 appearances between
1959 and 1980). A new production in 1951, with Warren in the title role and Hilde
Güden as Gilda, in her first Met appearance, also featured the company debut of
designer Eugene Berman. Audience favorite Roberta Peters sang Gilda 88 times
between 1951 and 1985—more than any soprano in Met history. In 1977, John
Dexter directed a new production, which starred Sherrill Milnes, Ileana Cotrubas,
Plácido Domingo, Isola Jones, and Justino Díaz. A new staging by Otto Schenk
premiered in 1989 with June Anderson in her Met debut as Gilda, Luciano
Pavarotti as the Duke, and Leo Nucci as Rigoletto. The current production, by
Michael Mayer, opened in January 2013, with Michele Mariotti conducting Željko
Lučić, Diana Damrau, and Piotr Beczała. In subsequent seasons, this production
has also featured performances by George Gagnidze and Dmitri Hvorostovsky
in the title role; Lisette Oropesa, Olga Peretyatko, Sonya Yoncheva, and Nadine
Sierra (the latter two in their Met debuts) as Gilda; and Vittorio Grigolo, Matthew
Polenzani, Stephen Costello, and Joseph Calleja as the Duke.
Program Note

A
s with Beethoven, Verdi’s body of work is often divided by contemporary
commentators into three artistic periods. In the first, stretching from
1839 to 1850, Verdi was at his most prolific, quickly completing 15 operas
that established him with audiences of the time as one of the world’s leading
opera composers and the successor to Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini, all of
whom had recently died or retired. The towering masterpieces that guaranteed
Verdi’s position alongside opera’s few all-time great composers, however,
did not appear until the second and third periods of his career, marked by a
significant break away from, or at least a highly innovative re-interpretation of,
the traditional forms and expectations of Italian opera, to which his early works
had mostly adhered. Keeping with the Beethoven analogy, Rigoletto was Verdi’s
“Eroica,” marking the beginning of the composer’s middle period and clearly
surpassing in originality and achievement all of his previous work. At its 1851
premiere and throughout the ensuing 13-performance run at Venice’s Teatro La
Fenice, Rigoletto was an enormous success, and it traveled quickly from there.
By 1855, the opera had been produced throughout Italy, across Europe, and
as far afield as New York, Havana, and Montevideo, Uruguay. This international
success, combined with the premieres of Il Trovatore and La Traviata—which
followed close on Rigoletto’s heels in 1853—put to rest any remaining doubt
regarding Verdi’s operatic primacy.
But despite Rigoletto’s eventual success, it was very nearly killed before its
birth, needing something of a political miracle just to see the light of day. After
receiving the commission from La Fenice, Verdi—an ardent humanist, democrat,
and patriot who longed for Italy to be free from the autocratic rule of France and
Austria—turned to an uncomfortable source of inspiration: a play by Victor Hugo
called Le Roi s’Amuse (“The King Amuses Himself”). Scathing and bleak, it centers
on the amorous exploits of the historical French king François I and the downfall
of his physically deformed and morally corrupt jester Triboulet, who encourages
and makes light of the king’s lechery. The hunchbacked antihero ultimately reaps
the poisonous crop he has sown when François discovers and rapes his sheltered
daughter, whom he has hidden away from the corruption of the court. Worse yet,
in a botched attempt to arrange the king’s murder in revenge, Triboulet causes
instead the death of his own daughter.
Naturally, Austrian censors (who had jurisdiction over northern Italy, most of
which was a province of the Habsburg Empire at the time) were not impressed
with Verdi and librettist Francesco Maria Piave’s work. Three months before the
scheduled premiere, the administration of La Fenice received a letter from the
authorities expressing the regional governor’s disappointment that Verdi and
Piave “should not have chosen a more worthy vehicle to display their talents
than the revolting immorality and obscene triviality of La Maledizione [The Curse,
Rigoletto’s original title].” The letter communicated that any performance of the
opera was absolutely forbidden and instructed that no one’s time be wasted
Program Note

with protestations or appeals. Luckily, this last directive was ignored, and after
extensive revisions to the work’s setting and its characters’ identities—the scene
moved from the French court to Mantua, King François became the local duke,
Triboulet became Rigoletto, and so on—the newly titled Rigoletto won its
approval for performance from a censor who, by a crucial twist of fate, was an
opera lover and an admirer of Verdi’s work.
Though the play’s political bent surely played its part in attracting Verdi’s
attention, it was the emotional, psychological, and narrative power of Le Roi
s’Amuse, and the depth and inherent contradiction of Triboulet’s character, that
most appealed to Verdi, an intensely intellectual and extremely well-read man
for whom literature, poetry, and drama held as much significance as music. (The
collection of authors on whose work he based his operas reads like a cross-
section of history’s great writers: Hugo, Byron, Schiller, Voltaire, and most of all,
Shakespeare, a formative influence and continual source of inspiration for Verdi,
who claimed to have read and re-read the playwright’s works since childhood.) It
is therefore hard to overestimate the composer’s level of admiration for Hugo’s
play, which he described in a letter to Piave as “one of the greatest creations of
modern theatre. The story is great, immense, and includes a character who is one
of the greatest creations that the theatres of all nations and all times will boast. …
Triboulet is a creation worthy of Shakespeare.”
The genius of Verdi’s transformation of Hugo’s spoken drama into Rigoletto—
and indeed of the stylistic step forward represented by this first work of Verdi’s
second creative period—is the closeness of music, text, and action. Form and
content are streamlined and treated fluidly so that neither the drama nor the
music is distorted to fit the other, but rather the two are woven into a single
organic whole. In the case of Rigoletto, this makes for a grim, vicious, and
powerfully effective work, an opera noir in which the tension never flags and
no respite is provided from the disturbing arc of the plot. Verdi and Piave have
stripped Hugo’s story and characters down to their bare essentials. From the
opening scene—in which Monterone spits out his curse at a man so depraved
that he would taunt an anguished father unable to protect his daughter—to the
final scenes—in which Rigoletto himself tastes the impotence and torment of
that very same situation and worse—not a single word of text or note of music
is wasted. This is not a cathartic tragedy or a tale of noble sacrifice. There are no
admirable characters here, no moral lesson, no redemption, and no silver lining.
There is only a merciless depiction of the dark side of society.
With his music, Verdi takes all of this and makes it human, creating the
psychological and emotional dimension that is mostly absent from the minimalist,
clear-eyed text. Largely abandoning the predictable alternating structure of
recitative, aria, and ensemble numbers, Verdi instead drives constantly forward
in an arioso-like mixture of the three, relying mostly on passages for two or more
characters that flow seamlessly together. Trimming the fat of virtuoso vocal
display, he strives for naturalness of expression. Consequently, what solo numbers
there are must be handled by the performers with tasteful understatement to
avoid seeming out of place and stalling the crucial momentum. As Verdi himself
explained in response to a request for an additional showpiece aria for the
soprano who first sang Gilda, “any new number would be superfluous … [and]
would make no effect without the right time and place. … My intention was that
Rigoletto should be one long series of duets, without arias and finales, because
that is how I felt it. If anyone replies, ‘But you could have done this or that or the
other,’ I can only say, ‘That may be, but I did not know how to do any better.’” It
comes as no surprise, therefore, that Rigoletto’s finest moment is the ingenious
Act III quartet, combining the work’s emotional high point with its musical one
and achieving a level of perfection matched by few other passages in all of opera.
One is also constantly amazed by Verdi’s inventiveness and ability to
unmistakably conjure his desired emotions and impressions while leaving them
unspoken. Through evocative scoring (the chorus’s imitation of wind during the
storm in Act III), thematic manipulation (the curse leitmotif that is established
in the opera’s very first measures and lurks beneath each of its character’s
realizations of their fate), and pitch-perfect character painting (the very nature
of each personality revealed by their music), Verdi’s score communicates
subliminally with the listener. In Act II, for example, “while [Rigoletto] sings and
moves us to pity,” musicologist Vincent Godefroy observes, “the orchestra
is commenting on his daughter’s experience behind the locked door. …
Concentrate on the orchestra and you will hear the rape of Gilda.” Of similar
genius is the treatment of “La donna è mobile,” by far the most frequently
excerpted bit of Rigoletto. So carefree and charmingly tongue-in-cheek on its
own, Verdi’s jaunty little tune is positively slimy in context, and when its distant
strains return in the final scene to transform Rigoletto’s bloodthirsty gloating to
horrible dread, the effect is viscerally sickening. These musical masterstrokes,
resonating with the listener on a subconscious and primal level, ensure that
even in our desensitized modern world, Rigoletto will never lose its power to
send audiences home feeling profoundly impressed, mentally unsettled, and
most likely a bit queasy.
—Jay Goodwin
Jay Goodwin is the Met’s Editorial Director.