Verdi’s Rigoletto is the cruellest opera
“Rigoletto is the cruellest opera, breeding
Tragedy out of dead minds, mixing
Amorality and desire, stirring
Numbed moral sense with easy death.”
Apologies to Thomas Stearns Eliot.
And on that cheery note, on the first day of spring, a sunny, equinoctial day in New York, with birds a-tweet in Central Park, it’s off to the Met for the reprise of their 2013 Michael Mayer production of Verdi’s moral wasteland opera, Rigoletto.
In Rigoletto context is everything. It’s based on Victor Hugo’s powerful play, “Le Roi s’Amuse,” about royal amorality at the court of François I, which was banned after only one performance in 1832. Must have been cracking.
The story of the monarch who seduced his jester’s (Triboulet) daughter, who is then murdered in error as the cursed Triboulet seeks revenge against his monarch, was a tad too sensitive for the taste of Louis Philippe I’s officials. The last thing the newly installed monarch – acceded to the throne in 1830 – needed was a reminder from the republican Hugo to his not so terribly loyal subjects about how corrupt monarchy could be.
His sensitivity is understandable. After all, he had been forced into exile for 21 years after the Revolution and sentenced to death by his own father, “Phillipe Égalité,” who tried to curry favour with the Revolution and had his head chopped off for his pains. Louis Philippe’s crown always sat on a “shoogly head”. He was forced to abdicate after the revolution of 1848.
Verdi loved the play and firstly used the plot as the basis of “La Maledizione” – focusing on the curse, rather than the character of Triboulet – in co-operation with librettist Francesco Maria Piave. Result? Banned by the authorities, three months before the planned original performance at Venice’s La Fenice. The Austrian authorities proved as tricky as the French. But, banned operas are hot property. This turned out to be a home run.
Unabashed, Verdi reset the action in Mantua, recast François as the sleazy local Duke and Triboulet as Rigoletto, a hunchbacked jester. His point was that the powerful theme of amorality pervading the work had relevance across time. It now passed muster with the regulators, asleep at the censor table.
So, Mr Mayer’s setting in a different time, 1960 Las Vegas, although a stretch across centuries, has precedent on its side. I instinctively distrust “out of period” productions, as often a mindless search for “relevance” and self-indulgent posturing by preening producers. But, boy, this Met production really works.
We are in the era of the Las Vegas “Rat Pack” – Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop among others, who partied to the point of orgy and famously dragged the powerful – John Fitzgerald Kennedy for one – into their louche circle. There was always a whiff of Mafia in the air.
This was the time when the tragic Marilyn Monroe was handed around like a plaything. She has a not so subtle walk on part in this production as the peroxided Countess Ceprano, pouting flirtatiously with the Duke.
Las Vegas is a useful metaphor. As easily, this could be the private suite at the top of the Carlyle Hotel on Manhattan’s East 76th Street, accessed by a private elevator from the garage, where JFK would party in the 60’s over weekends when Jackie was “away”, with pals and female company imported for the occasion. Or, are we talking Stormy Daniels with Donald Trump as the Duke? Turpitudo in perpetuum. (Immorality is timeless).
The neon flashes and glitters, the dinner jackets are tastelessly sequined, the gambling tables overflow with chips – and two sinister elevators on each side of the stage mark the entrances to rooms where untold evils – the rape and abduction of Gilda – unfold. Only ascending and descending lights, marking floors, represent the passage of characters to and from the rooms. It’s left to the imagination what happens when the lights go out.
When Rigoletto’s housekeeper, Giovanna (American mezzo, Jennifer Roderer), is left bound and prostrate in the elevator following Gilda’s abduction, the doors open and close silently on her protruding, obstructing legs as the action continues mid-stage; a wonderfully sinister touch.
In Act III the storm is graphically depicted by neon arcing across the stage and eerie, wind effects. There’s nothing like a programme note warning of strobe lighting and gunfire to stir the blood!
A subtle touch; the casino’s pendant lights are versions of the Met’s celebrated Lobmeyr chandeliers. The auditorium and the stage casino become one. Don’t dare think you are merely a spectator. The drama unfolding is happening in your world, too. Verdi’s theme is timeless and involving.
The role of the pain in the ass Count Monterone, whose daughter the Duke has seduced, happens to be played by an Arab sheikh of the sort frequently seen at international gaming tables. Nothing unusual there, you might think.
Wrong. One of my fellow diners came back at the first interval from the ladies restroom agog with news that the New York chatter round the washstands had been about how disgraceful it was to humiliate Muslims on stage. Eh? Goes to show how bonkers politically correct Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New York is becoming.
What they must have said at the second interval after the Sheikh had been shot out of hand in Act 2 is, fortunately, unknown.
One of my gripes about out of period settings is that no one takes the trouble to match the libretto with the change in time. So, in the 2016 Edinburgh Festival production of Bellini’s Norma, set in World War Two occupied France, we had members of the Resistance reaching for their “swords” – which were obviously sub machine guns. Silly and unnecessary.
The Met’s subtitle team had got to grips with these inconsistencies and we were immersed in degenerate 60s patois, replete with “dolls”, “babes” and, when Rigoletto thinks he has triumphed over the supposedly assassinated Duke, “Now I’m the headliner”. Maybe the subtitlers were “having a larf”, over the top, perhaps tipping into parody. At least they didn’t descend to tweeting.
Rigoletto marks the beginning of Verdi’s second phase of composition, characterised by a more integrated presentation of aria and recitatif. The consequence is that both the music and the action are more fluent than with the then traditional form of set piece arias and the characters interact rather than declaim the plot, or their emotions, directly to the audience. Nothing interrupts involvement. Inevitably, the audience is sucked into the action.
The quality of acting to pull this off has to be high. Standout performers in this production were American soprano Nadine Sierra, as Gilda, and Italian tenor Francesco Demuro, as The Duke. Ms Sierra’s voice was mellifluous and seemingly unstretched. Her frequent a capella passages which call for sensitive delivery and perfect breath control were captivating. Ornamentation was never exaggerated.
Signor Demuro played the cavalier Duke to perfection. The litmus test of any Rigoletto is the legendary “La Donna È Mobile” aria. It was flung off lightly and almost innocently, as it should be. After all, the immature Duke thinks that seducing fickle women is as natural as paying off the likes of Stormy Daniels.
I did not like the voice of Italian Baritone, Roberto Frontali (Rigoletto). The audience clearly disagreed. But there were times when he was unsettlingly off pitch, also tremulous and he lacked the convincing outrage the paradoxical role demands. Maybe I was spoilt by Želko Lučić who played Rigoletto in the 2013 production. He exuded an air of grieving, tortured menace that Signor Frontali simply couldn’t match.
Maestro Nicola Luisotti, the Italian conductor, who debuted at the Met in 2006 and has six Met productions on his scorecard, had a triumphant evening in the pit. Because the house was far from full I dodged about a bit between acts and eventually settled in a box with a fine view of him and the orchestra for Act III.
There are a lot of demanding passages requiring complex (when is it ever not complex?) control of orchestra and stage action; for example, towards the end the passage, M’odi – Venti scudi hai tu detto (Hear me, twenty scudi you said) as Rigoletto pays off assassin, Sparafucile, (Slovakian bass, Śtefan Kocán), while the other characters act out different story lines in parallel.
The engagement Maestro Luisotti achieved with eye contact amongst all these independently moving parts and the sensitive changes in tempo and dynamics he wrung from his orchestra were truly impressive. Anyone who thinks conductors are superfluous and only go rum-ti-tum from the podium, take note.
Rigoletto is so familiar that it risks being hackneyed. Mr Meyer and the Met design team can take credit for taking on the challenge Verdi clearly relished in 1850, presenting it renewed; a searing, comfortless commentary on amorality, in dazzling style.