United Kingdom Verdi, Rigoletto: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Welsh National Opera / Pietro Rizzo (conductor). Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 21.9.2024. (GPu)
Thank goodness that the planned strike which would have prevented this performance was suspended just a few days before the premiere. What we saw and heard was an utterly convincing argument for the necessity of the continuation of Welsh National Opera’s work, not only within Wales but also in England. We heard some especially fine singing (most notably from Soraya Mafi as Gilda and Daniel Luis de Vicente as Rigoletto), singing which, at all times articulated the respective emotional lives of Gilda and Rigoletto.
Verdi never composed his projected version of King Lear, but he came close to doing so in Rigoletto, with the Fool as the tragic hero. Shakespeare’s Lear cannot distinguish between the real love that Cordelia has for him and the kind of calculating ‘love’ which Goneril and Regan pretend to have for him. The Duke in Verdi’s opera is unable to discern how different his sexual pleasure with his court ladies is from anything one might reasonably call love. Rigoletto can initially only express his love for his daughter very crudely, by keeping her imprisoned in his house. That Gilda should end the opera dead in her father’s arms is as inevitable as Cordelia’s appearance in her father’s arms in the last scene of Shakespeare’s play.
Although Victor Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse was the direct source of the libretto by Francesco Maria Piave and the composer, it was surely also influenced by Verdi’s great, but frustrated enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Verdi’s use of Hugo’s play was frequently expressed in ways which evoked Shakespeare’s King Lear, so that, for example, he admired Hugo’s character Triboulet, the jester in Le roi s’amuse, as ‘a creation worthy of Shakespeare’. The Fool in King Lear is in many ways different from Rigoletto, but Triboulet/Rigoletto acquired, for Verdi a related power over his mind; writing of the reactions of the Venetian censors he declares to Piave: ‘I observe finally that we are to avoid making Triboulet ugly and hunchbacked … Putting on the stage a character who is grossly deformed and absurd but so inwardly passionate and full of love is precisely what I feel to be so fine. I chose this subject precisely for those qualities, those original traits, and if they are taken away I can no longer write music for it. If you tell me that my music can stay the same even with this drama I reply that I don’t understand this kind of reasoning, and I must say frankly that whether my music is good or bad I don’t write it at random, but always try to give it a definite character’ (Carteggi Verdiani, ed. A.Luzio, Rome 1935-1947, pp.109-111, translated thus in Julian Budden, Verdi, 1985, New York, 1987, p.57).
The minor figures in the cast were largely reduced to misguided (self-deceived) representatives of a lovelessly promiscuous court, their lack of self-knowledge evident in a chorus from early in the first act:
‘Tutto è gioia, tutto è festa!
Tutto invitaci a goder!
Oh, guardate, non pa questa
Or la reggia del piacer?’
‘What gaiety! What party spirit
What splendid entertainment!
Oh, just look, would you not say
That this was the realm of pleasure?’
This ‘jolly’ tutti invites the audience to judge what is happening on the stage – a writhing mass of courtiers and women of the court, with sexual acts being performed here and there amidst the frilly knickers (from designer Annemarie Woods) and bare flesh. Most would, I assume, judge it to be, not the Arcadian-sounding ‘realm of pleasure’, but a state of rampant debauchery. It is at this point that Monterone (Paul Carey Jones) enters and delivers his curse, a curse which troubles Rigoletto greatly (though not the Duke) and which resonates throughout much of what follows and is crucial to Verdi’s success in fusing the comic and the terrible, which he saw, in a letter to Salvatore Cammarano (in 1848) as characteristic of ‘Shakespeare’s manner’.
Given the blindness as to the nature of love which permeates King Lear and the manner in which love is distorted in Rigoletto, what happens in Verdi’s opera is inevitable – the destruction of those who are genuinely capable of love.
The Duke of Mantua was pleasantly sung by Raffaele Abete – a late replacement for Leonardo Capalbo – who perhaps hadn’t fully come to terms with the production, since his voice seemed underpowered and lacking in strength of characterisation. On the night, he was seriously overshadowed by Daniel Luis de Vicente’s Rigoletto and the Gilda of Soraya Mafi.
The Spanish-American baritone, Luis de Vicente has sung a number of major Verdi roles – such as Rigoletto (in Palermo and Prague), Simon Boccanegra (in Essen) and Nabucco (Slovak National Opera); this wide-experience of Verdi’s demands on his singers was evident in all aspects of his performance here. The weight of his voice was deeply impressive in the later stages of the opera, when he approaches the tragic realisation of what he has done. The interaction with the Gilda of Soraya Mafi was profoundly moving in the final scenes, in which Mafi’s voice metamorphosed from the girlish glow and brilliance of ‘Caro nome’ as it was deepened by an understanding of how her father loved her. Luis de Vicente and Mafi were the stars of this production, as their reception by the first-night audience recognised.
Amongst the lesser roles Nathanaël Tavernier’s Sparafucile exerted a quiet menace and Alyona Abramova, as his daughter Maddalena (the resonance of the name is significant) made a strong impression in the limited opportunities the opera offers her. The stage idiom of this production made it seem natural that the allegorical language of the morality play should be a major part of how it defines itself in Act III, as when, referring to the Duke, Rigoletto declares ‘Egli è Delitto, Punizion son io’ (He is Crime, I am Punishment).
Finally, I must commend the excellence of the WNO’s chorus and orchestra under conductor Pietro Rizzo. This was the company’s first performance of a production directed by Adele Thomas. Its boldness encourages the belief that her appointment as WNO’s General Director and CEO will surely be – adequate funding notwithstanding – a wholly good thing.
Glyn Pursglove
Cast:
Duke – Raffaele Abete
Rigoletto – Daniel Luis de Vicente
Gilda – Soraya Mafi
Monterone – Paul Carey Jones
Sparafucile – Nathanaël Tavernier
Maddalena – Alyona Abramova
Borsa – Zwakele Tshabalala
Marulla – Alastair Moore
Count Ceprano – Martin Lloyd
Giovanna – Sian Meinir
Page – Francesca Saracino
Usher – Julian Boyce
Production:
Director – Adele Thomas
Designer – Annemarie Woods
Lighting designer – Guy Hoare
Choreographer – Emma Woods
Fight director – Kate Waters
Chorus master – Frederick Brown
