World premiere: 11 March 1851, Teatro La Fenice, Venice
Premiere at the Bolshoi (Kamenny) Theatre:
31 January 1853 – Imperial Italian Opera Company
11 May 1859 – Imperial Russian Opera Company (performed in Italian, since 1878 in Russian)
Premiere of this production: 6 May 2005
Running time: 3 hours
The Performance has two intervals
Verdi's opera Rigoletto was written in 1850–1851 and was fated to be the most human and psychologically profound opera of its time. Its plot was taken from Victor Hugo's 1832 play Le Roi s'amuse, which had been banned by the French censor. The librettist Francesco Maria Piave reworked the drama, changing the characters: instead of King Francis I, whom it was impossible to depict on the stage due to the considerations of censorship, there emerged the Duke of Mantua, who bore the name of an actual ancient line that had, however, died out several centuries before, and instead of the jester Triboulet, a genuine historical person who served at the Court of King Francis, Rigoletto the hunchback was born (his name coming from the French rigoler – “to laugh”). Verdi and Piave stepped away from the canons of Romantic opera, in which good and wicked characters were typically clearly defined (albeit not without the possibility of their being transformed) and where in the finale a clear moral was to be drawn from their clashing together. Both the heroes and the villains were intended to be handsome, while any ugliness was to be enacted only by comic characters. Here, however, Verdi made the comic character into the hero, revealing his inner world to the audience, and, moreover, he rejected any unambiguous moral judgement on any of the characters' actions whatsoever, refusing to split them into the just and the guilty. All of the opera's characters rouse sympathy, each of them is complex, and it is possible to understand them all. The dissolute Duke is utterly charming and somewhat lacking in intelligence, though by no means evil. The hapless Rigoletto loves his daughter desperately, she being his one and only treasure and joy in life, though at Court he permits himself to poke cruel fun at the woes of others, including paternal woe (as a result of which he receives a father's curse). Gilda, Rigoletto's daughter and a beautiful young woman with a radiant and pure soul, transgresses her father's bidding, is denied his protection and is pulverised by the millstones of a bleak world, to living in which she is clearly ill-suited. Sparafucile the assassin is merciless, he creates an impression of something incredibly wicked, but this is neither more nor less than his work. He, too, is not devoid of the ability to manifest his humanity: in the opera we see that he loves his sister Maddalena.
The production at the Mariinsky Theatre makes use of large-scale sets in dark velvet tones, creating a sensation of immense space, be it the Duke's castle or the menacing countryside on a stormy night. Rather than interiors with abundant finely worked details we have before us large accent objects – the capital of a column, or free-standing candelabras taller than a man – and these create the space while not drawing our attention away from the characters' actions and their emotions. Denis Velikzhanin
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