Opera · Italian opera

Rigoletto

11 March 1851, Teatro La Fenice, Venice

Giuseppe Verdi · libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, after Victor Hugo

A hunchbacked court jester mocks the men whose daughters his libertine master has ruined, is cursed by one of them, and then loses his own hidden daughter to the same seducer. Verdi's first unqualified masterpiece turns Victor Hugo's banned play into a taut three-act tragedy driven by a curse, a sack and a storm.

How to spot them

▸Sixteenth-century Mantua: a jester, a womanising Duke, a hired assassin and his sister, and a daughter kept hidden from the world
▸Baritone jester, tenor Duke, coloratura soprano daughter, bass assassin, mezzo seductress
▸The famous moment: a jester opens a sack expecting his enemy's body and finds his dying child
▸Quiz clues: Victor Hugo, La Fenice 1851, the curse of Monterone, a quartet sung through a chink in a wall

Arias & moments — listen

"La donna è mobile" (1851)

The Duke's canzone on the fickleness of women; Verdi withheld it from the cast until the dress rehearsal so Venice would not be whistling it first

Recording: Giuseppe Verdi & Francesco Maria Piave · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

"Caro nome" (1851)

Gilda turns the false name her suitor gave her over and over in a coloratura reverie

Recording: Unknown · CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

"Bella figlia dell'amore" — the Act III quartet (1851)

Four characters, four states of mind, sung simultaneously either side of a tavern wall; often called the finest ensemble in Italian opera

Recording: Unknown · CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

"Cortigiani, vil razza dannata" (1851)

The jester turns on the courtiers who have abducted his daughter, rage collapsing into a father's plea

Recording: Unknown · CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

"Questa o quella" (1851)

The Duke's opening ballata: one woman is as good as another to him

Recording: Unknown · CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

"Pari siamo!" (1851)

The jester compares his tongue to the assassin's dagger — "we are alike" — brooding on Monterone's curse

Recording: Unknown · CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Quick-fire facts

•The source is Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse (1832), banned in Paris after a single performance.
•Austrian censors in Venice refused to let a king be shown as a lecher, so Hugo's Francis I of France became the fictional Duke of Mantua.
•Verdi's working title was La maledizione ("The Curse"); Monterone's curse is the opera's dramatic engine.
•The premiere was at La Fenice, Venice, on 11 March 1851; it was an immediate success.
•It is the first of the three operas often grouped as Verdi's "popular trio" with Il trovatore and La traviata, all written in 1851–53.
•Sparafucile, the assassin, and Maddalena, his sister, are the bass and mezzo of the Act III quartet.
•Gilda dies in a sack that her father believes contains the Duke; the Duke is heard offstage singing "La donna è mobile" as Rigoletto realises the truth.
•"Bella figlia dell'amore" was one of the first operatic excerpts widely sold on record, and Caruso recorded both it and "La donna è mobile".

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources

Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press) — Rigoletto
Stanley Sadie (ed.) — The New Grove Dictionary of Opera
Julian Budden — The Operas of Verdi