Rigoletto

by Giuseppe Verdi (libretto by Francesco Maria Piave after Hugo)

seen by live streaming from Covent Garden on 16 January 2017

David McVicar's 2001 production is here revived by Justin Way with Alexander Joel conducting Dimitri Platanias as Rigoletto, Lucy Crowe as his daughter Gilda, and Michale Fabiano as the Duke of Mantua.

The setting of the story reeks of privileged corruption, the Duke setting the tone for his whole court with his droit de seigneur attitude towards any woman who takes his fancy. Rigoletto, the hunchbacked court jester, colludes in this to the extent that he mocks anyone who complains of the general debauchery; consequently he is not much liked by anyone else. Fatefully he imagines - as so many do - that he can control a barrier between his public behaviour and his private life, in which he expects he can protect his innocent daughter Gilda from any danger. He reckons without the strength of his enemies and the power of Gilda's naive love to lead to reckless self-sacrifice. The result is personal disaster, perhaps made worse by the realisation that there are apparently no adverse consequences for the Duke who just hums his way on towards the next seduction.

The tone of the story is excellently matched by the stark setting (designed by Michael Vale), a sloping wall broken by a slanting doorway and window with unsettlingly partial pediments. When presented as the palace front, this looks like blotched stone. In reverse, with supporting struts, torn wire mesh and an upper floor, it becomes a wall with dirty glass giving on to slum quarters inhabited variously by Rigoletto and Gilda, and by the assassin Sparafucile (Andrea Mastroni) and his sister Maddalena (Nadia Krasteva). Thus the palace looks forbidding, while the commoners live in squalor. No amount of finery can disguise the Duke's moral squalor; but the commoners are hardly beacons of virtue either. Even Gilda, pure of heart, has no real sense, thinking it worthwhile to allow herself to be killed to save the life of a serial adulterer.

However, it is hardly to the point to press the moral point too closely. What raises the opera to classic status is the sheer power of the music both to express extremes of passion - whether noble or cynical - and to reveal depths of anguish and contradictory impulse, as various characters sing alone or in sublime duets, trios and quartets. This production is blessed with excellent singers, Platianas giving a commanding performance as Rigoletto, moving from cynical jester to tortured and vengeful father, and matching a powerful vocal presence with physical agility even as he moves about the stage almost spider-like with his two crutches. Lucy Crowe's Gilda provides a beautiful contrast as she negotiates the exposed high notes of the part to extract all the pathos of a pure spirit brought cruelly down by the sordid realities of her situation. Michael Fabiano gives the Duke a charismatic physical presence and matches this with the confident tones of a man who can do whatever he wants - imagining that he might be made pure by love but equally content just to live in the moment with whomever takes his fancy - the beguiling sexual predator it his most dangerous.

It's a fitting production of a dark piece, though I wonder whether the lighting levels may not have made it literally rather too dark for the audience in the opera house itself. In the cinema streaming it often looked as if only the principal singers were well lit, and even then, not strongly.