Rigoletto (Verdi: Rigoletto). Baritone. A widower, father of Gilda and court jester to the Duke of Mantua. He is a hunchback and spends his professional time making snide comments about the Duke's guests. Despite all his sourness, Rigoletto mourns the loss of his wife and truly loves his daughter, whom he keeps well hidden from undesirable suitors. To get his own back on Rigoletto for his jibes, Count Ceprano arranges to abduct Gilda. He even enlists the jester's help, pretending it is all an innocent prank, and Rigoletto allows himself to be blind-folded and then holds the ladder down which his daughter is removed from the house. When the Duke seduces Gilda, Rigoletto vows revenge and hires the assassin Sparafucile and his sister Maddalena to kill the Duke. Maddalena falls in love with the Duke, and she and her brother decide to substitute another body in his place. Unknown to them all, Gilda dresses as a man and comes to the tavern. She is killed and put into the sack which is handed over to Rigoletto, who believes it contains the Duke's body. As he gloats over his revenge, he suddenly hears, in the distance, the Duke's voice, singing … Inside the sack he finds his dying daughter. This is one of the most spine-chilling moments in the opera - or, indeed, in any opera - as it dawns on the devoted father who is in the sack. Aria: Pari siamo! (‘How we are alike!’); Cortigiani, vil razza dannata (‘Vile, damned race of courtiers’); duets (with Gilda), including: Ah! Deh non parlare al misero (‘Do not speak to me of my lost love’); quartet (with Gilda, the Duke of Mantua, and Maddalena): Bella figlia dell'amore (‘Fair daughter of love’). Created (1851) by Felice Varesi.
Rigoletto is the first of the three ‘middle-period’ Verdi operas (the other two being Il trovatore and La traviata) and in it are found some of the great Verdi ‘hallmarks’ to which his earlier operas have been leading - the forceful, even vicious, baritone, the tender father—daughter duet, and the superb quartet (which, together with the sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor, is justly regarded as one of the greatest ensembles of 19th-cent. Italian opera). Since its creation this role has been sung by many great baritones, including Tito Ruffo, Mario Sammarco, Giuseppe de Luca, Tito Gobbi, Heinrich Schlusnus, Giuseppe Taddei, Leonard Warren, Ettore Bastianini, and Sherrill Milnes.
RIGOLETTO
(Rigoletto - Verdi)
by Frank Johnson
Verdi, seeking successfully to interest the librettist Piave in the subject, urged: ‘Give it a try! … [it] has a character that is one of the greatest creations that the theatre of all countries and times can boast … a creation worthy of Shakespeare.’ Actually, the character to whom Verdi referred - Triboulet in Victor Hugo's Le Roi s'amuse - is no such creation. He is a stock figure of the early romantic French stage. The action of Le Roi s'amuse looks outward to court intrigue, politics, and a society in which powerful males pleasure themselves with impunity. Hugo does not look into his characters. They look out at us.
But Triboulet, when turned into Rigoletto by Verdi and Piave, really is the great creation which Verdi over-generously saw in Hugo's play. The action of Rigoletto looks inward. Court intrigue, politics, and powerful men engaged in what we would now call blokiness, are simply the setting for a look inward to the soul of the central figure caught up in it all and wishing, like so many of us, that the world was not as it was.
Verdi's Rigoletto is often called Shakespearean, Pari siamo (‘We are alike’) being compared to a Shakespearean soliloquy. In any previous 19th-cent. Italian opera, including Verdi's, it would have been an aria with a swelling melody used twice. The 1851 Verdi chose instead an interior monologue. It is true then that Rigoletto as a character is Shakespearean, but he is something more. The character looks forward far more than back. Rigoletto is the precursor of the ambiguous figures in the plays of the 20th cent., including our own time. He is both good and evil. The duets with his daughter Gilda tell us that he is the first; the humiliating of Count Monterone that he is also the second. As with most people, there is more good in him than evil, as the music for his fatherly love shows. But, as with many people, circumstances caught him up in evil early on and he cannot escape it.
Also, like most of the great characters in 20th-cent. drama, he is not what he seems. There are elements in him of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman and of John Osborne's Archie Rice. Like them, his work necessitates his wearing a mask which hides what he feels. The Duke of Mantua does not know that he hates him. The courtiers do not know that he has a daughter. It is not until she sees him in his working clothes in the Duke's palace that Gilda knows what her father does for a living.
Verdi foreshadows another Italian dramatist, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) whose works are about role-playing and the difference between appearance and reality. It is now accepted that Rigoletto changed opera musically. Rigoletto's score is so much more advanced than what went before. But, just as importantly, with the character of Rigoletto, Verdi advanced 19th-cent. Italian opera as drama. Because of this ambiguity, the character is more real than any since those of Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea. He looks forward to Berg's Wozzeck and Britten's Grimes. And to 20th-cent. Man. Freud would have recognized Rigoletto as a standard patient. He is a divided soul; like most of us.
