![]() ![]() Transposed to Mantua, translated into Italian and considerably shortened by the librettist Maria Piave before being set to music, Victor Hugo’s original story seduced audiences for its subtle nuances, accentuated by Verdi’s orchestration. It is precisely in these contrasts that Rigoletto’s success lies. Le National, for example, on 25 th November 1832, remarked that although art had once been confined to “regions pure and ethereal” where it lived on “fresh air and honey”, it now drew “its models from low brows and bulging eyes, from bulbous noses, hunched backs and bloated stomachs.” The most irascible critics were unanimous in judging such dissonance as unrealistic and were scathing in their condemnation of such gross coarseness in a tragic hero. The attribution of sublime paternal love and a tragic destiny to a grotesque buffoon, despite being essential to the alchemy of the author’s romantic design, was greeted with both jeers and applause in equal measure. A court jester who could have been lifted straight out of a Shakespeare play, he seems to correspond exactly to the motley-coloured striped costume with which he is traditionally decked out. Victor Hugo’s Triboulet is a highly-contrasted figure. Under the baton of Nicola Luisotti, this new production of Rigoletto marks director Claus Guth’s first collaboration with the Paris Opera. Monstrous and heartrending, grotesque and sublime, the title role reaches its apogee in the aria “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata”, whose descending movement, from the explosion of rage to the moment of entreaty, confirms the composer’s ability to adapt a form inherited from bel canto to theatrical realism. On discovering in the works of the French writer to whom he would owe Ernani, the greatest triumph of his “difficult years”, a parallel with the triangle formed by the King, his daughter and the jester, it was “like a thunderbolt, an inspiration”.īetween the frivolous, licentious Duke, and Gilda, a victim of the ignorance which holds her captive, stands the double-faceted character of the hunchback, both buffoon and curse-obsessed father. No doubt, he was already imbued with the play by his revered master, Shakespeare, when he read Victor Hugo's drama. It’s a work worthy of Shakespeare!” A few months before he wrote those words to Francesco Maria Piave urging him to “turn Venice upside down and persuade the Censor to authorise the subject” – no easy matter given that moral values would be easily offended – Verdi was working on an adaptation of King Lear. “Oh! Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse is the greatest subject, and perhaps the greatest drama of modern times. ![]() To give her back will cost you nothing, my daughter is all I have in this world. The duke’s famous aria, La Donna è mobile, is only the tip of the iceberg."Gentlemen, give an old man back his daughter. Nevertheless, this impassioned master-piece in which hate, violence, love, curses and vengeance rub shoulders, contains sublime music that inaugurated a new style combining theatrical realism and melodic appeal. The first part of Verdi’s popular trilogy, Rigoletto was initially completely rejected by Venetian censors who obliged the librettist and composer to completely revise their work. The enraged hunchback plans to assassinate the duke… La Donna è mobile When the aristocrats discover her existence, they hand her over to the Duke as a form of vengeance. Detested at the court for his duplicity, he has another hidden side to him, specifically that of a loving father concealing the existence of his daughter Gilda. In Mantua in the 16 th century, the hunchback Rigoletto is the jester of a morally depraved duke.
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