‘La donna è mobile” – woman is fickle – sings the Duke of Mantua in two of opera’s most famous minutes. They come in Verdi’s Rigoletto and it’s the tenor’s showpiece aria.
Typical. While Rigoletto – a baritone – gets the name recognition, the guy with the stratospheric voice (in this case local hero Amitai Pati) gets the girl(s) and the hit song.
It’s the baritone’s lot, reckons James Clayton, who sings the title role in the forthcoming New Zealand Opera production. “I’m kind of used to it,” he says, philosophically. “You’ve got these cameos where the tenor comes in and does his bit, and Gilda [the soprano lead] has [the aria] Caro nome, but Rigoletto is the glue that threads through the whole opera and fleshes out the character.”
So while others revel in the big tunes, the hunchbacked jester Rigoletto is the opera’s emotional centre. He’s a nasty wee thing, too, except sometimes he’s not. Employed by the over-sexed duke, Rigoletto takes spiteful delight in taunting the husbands and fathers of the boss’s conquests. It’s a character trait that leads to him being cursed.
Conversely, Rigoletto sings tenderly of his late wife, and is also a doting father to his beautiful daughter, Gilda. It is by Rigoletto’s actions that Gilda, the only person he truly loves (sung in New Zealand by Clayton’s fellow Western Australian Elena Perroni), meets her end.
Clayton and Perroni aren’t the only Australian imports – the NZO season uses the design of the Australian Opera’s 2023 season originally created by director Elijah Moshinsky. Inspired by Federico Fellini’s classic film La Dolce Vita, it comes complete with 1950s Italian costuming and a Fiat Bambina. Which is more a car for a clown than a killer. The setting, though, is less important than the sentiment.
Clayton says that Rigoletto’s duality is critical to the opera’s success. We must have at least some sympathy for the devil.
“The story only works if you get pulled into the pathos of [Rigoletto’s] character and feel sorry for him, otherwise he’s just a two-dimensional villain.”
He’s anything but that; Rigoletto is one of Verdi’s most satisfyingly complex roles.
“It’s a fun character to play; you can be quite mercurial if you want to,” says Clayton. “He’s all the facets of humanity rolled into one character [and] the goal is to have the audience conflicted at the end.”
A lot of the depth comes from Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto and, particularly, Victor Hugo’s source material, the play Le roi s’amuse (The King Amuses Himself). Through the story, we learn that Rigoletto has been maltreated and despised his whole life, literally and metaphorically prodded with a sharp stick. Moreover, as court jester, his entire existence is a joke. His back story is peppered with tragedy, principally the death of his adored wife, who was Rigoletto’s saviour and redeemer; we can understand if not forgive his prickliness.
Hugo’s play was almost two decades old by the time Verdi composed Rigoletto, but the historical context matters. Le roi s’amuse, the tale of the lustful King Francis, Triboulet his jester, and Triboulet’s daughter, appeared for one performance in 1832 before it was banned for its perceived criticism of the sitting French monarch, Louis-Philippe. The king ruled until 1848, when his abdication was forced by the revolutions that gripped Europe that year, and which also swept – unsuccessfully – through the various Italian states.
Verdi was a fitful revolutionary. He supported the idea of Italian unification – some scholars, for example, see Nabucco’s famous Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves as veiled patriotism – but the composer was disinclined to storm barricades. He was, however, angered by the censors, whose grip had tightened in the wake of 1848′s upheavals.
This was the environment that birthed Rigoletto, which premiered in 1851. The story we know today failed to pass the censors, who branded Hugo’s play a “repugnant example of immorality and obscene triviality”.
As a result, the original opera is set in Mantua, not France, and the king becomes a duke. Despite the censors’ wishes, though, Verdi would not budge on his main character being physically deformed. “A hunchback who sings – why not?” Verdi proclaimed, “I thought it would be beautiful to show this character as outwardly deformed and ridiculous, and inwardly passionate and full of love. I chose the subject precisely for these qualities.”
It was neither the first nor last time Verdi tussled with moral opinion. Un ballo in maschera (1859), about the assassination of the Swedish King Gustav III, was predictably and particularly troublesome.
Verdi’s private life, meanwhile, was considered faintly scurrilous, too. After the death of his beloved first wife, Margherita Barezzi, in 1840, Verdi entered a relationship with the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi. The pair were together for half a century, but lived in provincial Parma for 10 years before they married, scandalising the locals. Strepponi was said to be distressed by their reaction. Verdi appears not to have been bothered, because if his private life was complicated, professionally, things were never better.
Nabucco (1842) had made his name, but Rigoletto marked the beginning of Verdi’s golden period. The composer knew it was good. So certain was he that La donna è mobile would be a hit that he forbade his original tenor, Raffaele Mirate, to even whistle the tune in public before the premiere, in case someone copied it.
But while La donna … is the smash, the quartet Bella figlia dell’amore (Beautiful daughter of love) is the masterpiece. Here is where the characters’ competing motives are laid bare, and it’s the point where all the dualities and contradictions of the opera converge. Gilda, who’s fallen for the duke, learns that her love is seducing another (this, remember, is the guy who said women were fickle).
He’s being libidinous and lascivious, despite having professed his love to Gilda. The woman he’s seducing, Maddalena, is pretending to be interested, when actually she’s trying to lure the duke to his death. Rigoletto is the one who’s arranged the murder because he loves his daughter so much he can’t bear to see her upset. In short, people are complex. That goes for those in the audience, too, says Clayton.
“People shouldn’t just be, ‘Boo!’ But also, ‘Poor guy, he killed his daughter! Argh, I don’t know what to feel!’ That’s the goal, and I think that’s what Verdi was going for all the way through.”
NZ Opera’s Rigoletto plays at the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Auckland on September 19, 21 and 25.
