Verdi is magical and is able to make something rather banal very dense. This Rigoletto is the very case of such a metamorphosis. A father, a hunchback, has a daughter. We will never know who the mother was. The daughter has been raised and is looked after by some nuns. But churchgoing on Sunday morning is a very dangerous activity in Italy. That's where and when a young innocent girl can see the nice handsome boy she is going to start dreaming of. Rigoletto the father is a clown in town and he is facilitating the Duke's conquering of all young females that can move around. As such he is a jester and he attracts the hatred of all fathers, and at the beginning of one in particular who curses him. Verdi hence reverses the Don Giovanni tale. It is the servant who is going to be punished for the philandering of the master. Verdi also changes the tale by making fate the only and sole agent of the fulfillment of this curse. The Duke is going to notice Rigoletto's daughter at church and especially notice that she has noticed him. Then he will use his courtiers to make her elope, then to abuse her and then to drop her. Rigoletto will hire a hit man of the time to get even with the Duke, but I guess hit men were no longer what they had used to be when called Assassins. He kills the daughter instead of the Duke. The father has paid for the killing of his own daughter. The end is absolutely poignant: the farewell "note" of that poor girl to her father before she dies in his arms. Verdi has completely put a traditional situation completely on its head. First the servant pays for the philanderer (Don Giovanni). Then the daughter dies in the arms of her father, which is quite a twist from Romeo and Juliet or from Goethe's Werther. The soiled daughter is punished by her being killed in the place of the Duke by the hit man of her own father (think of Margaret in Faust, executed by the German Puritans for fornication in Goethe, executed by the Republic for overdosing her mother with sleeping potion in Berlioz, and executed by the Republic for killing her own child in Gounod). The Duke goes on unscathed (Don Giovanni of course who is punished, but also Faust who escapes but with the magic of his own damnation). But the Italian opera, Verdi's in particular, is absolutely magical to sing and evoke and recreate love. Love is their real stuff, love and its frustration of course. The love song of Rigoletto to his daughter is the most beautiful love song I know, because it is absolutely not sexual, not founded on desire, impulses, drives etc. It is a pure passion. The pure passion of a father for his daughter with a recollection of her dead mother in her: it is a double love song deeply dressed up in a mourning song. To reach such a love of pure passion has rarely been equaled. Romeo and Juliet are sexual lovers. As lovers their love is pure. But here we are beyond that purity in the virginal power of a father's love and a daughter's love. That enables us to see how vain and superficial the love of the Duke for his young and innocent conquests is. The Duke is the rotten enemy but this here moral society punishes the servant by having his daughter killed by a hit man paid by this servant her father. This production of the opera benefits from the fact it was filmed in Siena, on the main square, in a memorable site. The actors had to be wired but it does not show too much with modern technology. A pure moment of musical pleasure and passionate fascination this opera is.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
