Rigoletto

Opera in three actsLibretto: Francesco Maria Piave based on the drama of Victor Hugo The King is playPremiere: 11.03.1851, Gran Teatro La Fenice, VenicePolish premiere: 8.11.1853, Teatr Wielki, WarsawPremiere of this production: 12.03.1997, TW-ONOriginal Italian language version with Polish subtitles

Italy is an export country of beauty in every form, including architecture, music, as well as artistic crafts. Rigoletto directed by Gilbert Defl, with the scenography of Ezia Frigeria should be inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List. This performance delights with music that captures feelings in all registers: from the passion of life and passion to despair and mourning. It is also largely a tribute to theatrical craft. The spectacular palace of the Prince of Mantua stands on the stage just a quarter of an hour ago, but its beauty has been refined in every detail. A well-coordinated technical team with the utmost care disassembles the delightful stained-glass windows at the break, so that in the next painting we plunge into a different mood, remembering the splendor of the palace. In the next act, a heavy rain falls on the stage... Nowadays, very rarely on the opera stages of Poland and Europe you can see a performance faithful to its era, but at the same time moving and holding in suspense. It's a classic in the best sense of the word.

Rigoletto is Verdi's first finished masterpiece — capolavoro assoluto. Witnesses of the premiere, which took place in the Venetian theater of La Fenice on March 11, 1851, had no doubts about this. Success, however, was bought by the composer's exhausting conflict with Austrian censorship (at that time Venice was under Habsburg rule), which he could have expected in advance, reaching for Victor Hugo's forbidden anti-royalist drama The King Plays (1832). Verdi, however, succumbed to the purely theatrical qualities of this play, and having a unique sense of the stage effect, decided to listen to his intuition. He only obliged the librettist Francesco Maria Piavi to extreme caution. However, it did not work out for nothing. The censorship, acting under the name of the “Imperial Royal Directorate of Central Public Order”, after reading the libretto, issued an absolute ban on staging a work that it considered “immoral”. King Francis I of France was portrayed by Victor Hugo as a wicked fornicator cynically seducing the ladies of the court and the girls of the people.

The premiere of Rigoletto took place at the appointed time was due to Verdi's kindness to the director of the Venetian police, Carl Martelli, who agreed to perform the work on the condition that numerous changes to the libretto were made. Martelli also gave the title — Rigoletto. This name, from the French word rigolo — merry, was eventually given to the royal clown Tribulet from Hugo's play. The action was transferred from France to Renaissance Mantua, and the pick-up ruler was “demoted” to the title of prince.

There were so many proposals for changes to the libretto that Verdi could not hide his indignation. He gave him an expression in a letter to a friend, so that posterity could trace the genius's way of thinking. Verdi referred, for example, to the final scene of the work — here the pathetic clown Rigoletto discovers that the person he has ordered to be murdered is not the Prince of Mantua, but his own daughter, seduced by the ruler's beloved Gilda. “I don't understand why the bag is removed. What is the significance of this bag for the police? After removing the sack, who will believe that Rigoletto speaks to the corpse for half an hour before lightning reveals to him that it is his daughter?” Verdi grinned.

In the end, said bag remained in the action of the opera, as did many other details of the libretto, which at first aroused objections from the police. Fortunately for art, because in terms of musical dramaturgy, Rigoletto is a masterpiece, also thanks to his brilliant instrumentation (the orchestra suggestively illustrates the emotional states of the characters). It was from this opera that the famous aria of Prince The Woman Variable is, how perverse, because it flows from the mouth of an extremely changeable man. From it also comes one of the most beautiful and timeless vocal quartets in opera literature, in which each of the characters — Rigoletto, Gilda, the Prince and the Maddalena innkeeper — express their distinct mood.

Anyone who hears Rigoletto will never forget this music.

Choir and Orchestra of the Great Theatre - National OperasPolish National Ballet