5 Things to Know About Rigoletto (Watch the Full Opera)

When a sharp-tongued court jester is cursed for his spiteful words, he is forced to hide his unworldly daughter from his own licentious master

Who Is This Really About?

The history of opera—and of the plays on which they’re often based—is inextricably tied to the history of censorship. For most of the last 400 years, composers, librettists, and playwrights who have tested the boundaries of morality and taste have had to rewrite their works to get them past official censors.

The main characters in Victor Hugo’s “Le Roi s’amuse" are the 16th century King Francis I and his jester Triboulet. Despite the three centuries between the action of the play and its first performance in Paris in 1832, the French government banned it after one evening, believing that the insults directed towards Francis I were in fact references to the reigning king, Louis-Philippe I.

Hugo brought a lawsuit to permit further performances of the play. This propelled him into celebrity as a defender of freedom of speech in France, though he lost the suit and the play was banned for another 50 years. It was to “Le Roi s’amuse” that Verdi turned when he received a commission from Venice’s Teatro La Fenice in 1850, as in his words it had “a character that is one of the greatest creations in theater, in any country and in all history.”

Negotiating With the Censors

The composer had faced censorship throughout his career and knew that getting his new opera past the Austrians, who controlled Venice at the time, would be his biggest challenge yet.

“Use four legs,” he told his librettist Francesco Maria Piave, “run through the town and find me an influential person who can obtain the permission for making ’Le Roi s’amuse!’”

The Secretary of the Teatro La Fenice, Guglielmo Brenna, promised Verdi and Piave that everything would go smoothly. He encouraged the pair to keep working on the opera for the rest of the year but in December the Austrian censor De Gorzkowski vehemently denied consent to the production, calling it “a repugnant example of immorality and obscene triviality.”

Piave reworked the libretto, turning the king into a duke and removing the hunchback and the curse from the story altogether. Verdi was against such a radical change and proposed negotiating directly with the censors over each and every one of their complaints. Brenna offered to mediate between the creators and the censors, and by January the parties had reached a compromise: the action would move from France to the defunct Duchy of Mantua; the king would become a duke; a scene in Gilda’s bedroom would be removed; Gilda herself would be killed instead of the duke; and, along with other changes to the names of characters, Triboulet would be called Rigoletto.

‘Don’t Even Whistle It’

Act III of Rigoletto sees the Duke of Mantua sing one of the most famous tenor arias in all of opera, “La donna è mobile.”

“Can’t live with them, can’t live without them,” is the Duke’s cynical message, who warns that woman’s fickle nature makes her untrustworthy before conceding that no man feels fully happy without a woman’s love.

Verdi knew that he had written a very catchy melody and was desperate for it not to leak onto the streets and canals of Venice before the opening night at the Teatro La Fenice in March 1851. The celebrated Italian tenor Raffaele Mirate was playing the Duke, and Verdi made him swear not to sing or even whistle the tune of “La donna è mobile” except during rehearsals. Not that he had much time to do so---to keep the music secret, Verdi handed the score to Mirate only a few evenings before the premiere. As for the rest of the cast and the orchestra, the Duke’s aria was revealed to them a few hours before the curtain was due to rise.

The first performance was a triumph and, as Verdi predicted, “La donna è mobile” became an instant hit. It was sung in the streets the next morning, and quickly became a showcase for the tenor voice as well as a barrel organ staple. In more recent times it has taken on a life of its own, appearing as a soundtrack in everything from adverts for tomato paste to the video game Grand Theft Auto.

A New Production

“I love music,” says the Italian-American actor, writer and filmmaker John Turturro. A Cannes Film Festival Award winner and frequent Coen brothers collaborator, he directs his first opera with this production.

“I grew up in a house full of music, listening to Verdi, Puccini, and also popular Italian music. Coincidentally, when I was approached for ’Rigoletto,' I was working on a screenplay for a project where Verdi’s music is very present.”

Turturro wants to pay homage to his Apulian father with the opera and has taken his duties as director seriously.

“I want to do justice to ’Rigoletto,’“ he says, ”to the material, in a complex and detailed way and not try to bring a conscious modern take on it, but plumb the depths of the piece.”

This has meant working closely with scene designer Francesco Frigeri to create a sense of civilization in decline, ruined by the bankrupt behavior of its rulers and citizens.

“We’ve worked very, very hard on the design to strip it down and avoid anything baroque in our interpretation and our realization of it. That’s what we hope to do.”

An Italian Musical Adventure

Opera may be Turturro’s present preoccupation, but over the past two decades he has developed a passion for one of Italy’s other great musical legacies.

“In 1997, I worked with Francesco Rosi on the adaptation of Primo Levi’s ’The Truce.‘ Through Francesco I discovered the work of the dramatist Eduardo de Filippo, and I acted in one of his plays, ’Questi Fantasmi' (‘These Ghosts’), which featured a lot of Neapolitan music. This gave me the idea to direct ’Passione,' a film about Neapolitan music and the city of Naples.”

A year before “Passione” was released, Turturro took audiences on a haunting, intimate journey around Sicily in the film “Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy.“ Working at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo has allowed the Brooklyn-born star of ”Barton Fink“ to return to the island of his maternal grandparents, saying that ”directing ’Rigoletto’ felt like a very natural next step in my Italian musical adventure.”

From OperaVision