Rigoletto

When Victor Hugo staged his piece Le roi s'amuse in Paris for the first and for now the last time, the performance ended with the piece being banned immediately. When Giuseppe Verdi, the composer of the Italian Risorgimento, set about setting the piece by the revolutionary-minded French writer to music, he too met with opposition from the censorship authorities almost 20 years later.

Although he had to rename his melodrama from La Maledizione (The Curse) to Rigoletto and move the setting to the court of a fictional Duke of Mantua, he left the plot and its crass untouched: Rigoletto incites the unbridled duke to constantly abduct and abduct beautiful women and only ridicules their families. For this, he is cursed before the entire court by the desperate father of one of the dishonored. However, his daughter Gilda keeps Rigoletto hidden from the shameless hustle and bustle. Yet the duke has already cast his eye on her. When Gilda succumbs to the duke's seduction, Rigoletto devises a deadly revenge plan, which in the end does not fall victim to the duke but his own daughter. The well-known tenor hit “La Donna è Mobile”, of all things, becomes the cynical cipher of failure. In Verdi's first work of the maturing period, trivial things as grotesque and high pathos are interdependent. The contrasts of bright band music and the most expressive cantilenas form an uncompromising masterpiece that sweeps over the audience in tremendous scarcity and sharpness.