An Insight Into Verdi's Rigoletto with Timothy Nelson of IN Series

Artistic Director of IN Series, Timothy Nelson, shares an in-depth insight and analysis into Verdi's Rigoletto ahead of IN Series' production this month.

Giuseppi Verdi at his most “Verdian” increasingly gravitated towards the Shakespearean. His affinity for Shakespeare is well known, and a relationship that IN Series has explored deeply. He voraciously consumed, albeit in Italian translations, all the Bard’s plays. Early in his career he boldly set Macbeth in a composition breaking with bel canto traditions, creating a work that is wholly satisfying, and foreshadows the mature Verdi’s courage and ingenuity. Throughout his career, Verdi made attempts at setting “King Lear”. So much was this not-to-be masterpiece Re Lear front of mind for Verdi, that his last words “one button more, one button less” allude to the last words of Shakespeare’s mercurial old anti-king: “pray you, undo this button”. Instead of “King Lear”, however, Verdi came out of a decade-long retirement to complete his oeuvre with the towering pair of Otello and Falstaff. Arriving at these final works, Verdi had figured out and/or invented how to maintain his own Italian bel canto voice while eschewing the traditions of that form so as to realize the complexities and gnarly complications inherent in constructions of William Shakespeare. What Verdi achieves with these final two operas is setting a play of Shakespeare to music without losing what is quintessentially Shakespearean about it. This might bring a double-take from the reader, but upon examination of where Shakespeare appears in the operatic canon, it is clear that there is very little of Shakespeare’s essential spirit and poetic genius in Gounod’s take on “Romeo and Juliet”, Berlioz’s setting of the same or response to “Much Ado About Nothing” in his Beatrice et Benedict, Thomas’ “Hamlet”, and the list goes on. This even includes Verdi’s own Macbeth which, for all its fantastical elements, pales to the alchemy of the Scottish play itself. To set a plot of Shakespeare to music is not at all the same, it would seem, as writing an opera that is Shakespearean. Verdi uniquely, and only at the end of his life, seems to crack the code of doing just that.

This is not to say, however, that Verdi wasn’t writing Shakespearean operas until the triumphs of Otello and Falstaff. On the contrary, Verdi’s interests and perhaps propulsion as a musical dramatist already veered towards the Shakespearean many decades before writing those final two operas, when he was much more comfortable in approaching works by Schiller, Dumas, or Hugo. Increasingly, Verdi was both disinterested in, and skeptical of the love interests and machinations of tenors and sopranos in his works. He became drawn, rather, towards the relationship of fathers and children, most often daughters. This interest had, of course, a musical consequence, as Verdi’s lead characters, while the tenor of course never ceases to appear, become baritones. This is certainly true of La Traviata (which closely followed Rigoletto), where Alfredo as a role is small and carries little of the dramatic energy of his father Germont. Similarly, Simon Boccanegra, Il Trovatore, Un Ballo in Maschera, Don Carlos and I Vespri Sicilliano all elevate the baritone to a central and ultimately more complex place in the narrative than the tenor. This is because Verdi delighted in complexity and in the resulting dramatic ironies, just as Shakespeare does. Love is secondary, a driving force, but neither the source of tragedy nor resolution. It is an impetus for pride, jealousy, vengeance, folly: much more human, and Shakespearean flaws (one could say Shakespeare himself took this from the central concerns of the Greek playwrights of course).  

Rigoletto is considered Verdi’s first great opera of his middle period in which he grows into his own prowess as a composer and dramatist. Searching (with librettist Francesco Maria Piave) for a subject that would provide the energy an opera required, the creators turned to the five-act play Le Roi s’Amuse (“The King Amuses Himself”) by French writer Victor Hugo. The play centers around King Francis I, a corrupt and detested womanizer, and his historical court jester Triboulet. In Triboulet, Verdi saw the potential for a character that provided the energy he needed, an energy impossible to find in the young love interests of the tenors and sopranos that populated the bel canto canon before then. He said of Triboulet “there is a character that is one of the greatest creations that the theater can boast of, in any country and in all history”. It is not a passing coincidence that he spoke in almost the exact same way of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and its titular character. In Le Roi s’Amuse, Verdi found a story that sufficiently fit the conventions of the bel canto, such that he could achieve the tone and themes of Lear without writing “Lear” itself, a plot that would have proved impossible to fit into the style of Verdi’s age (not until Falstaff could Verdi, then an old and famed composer beyond the cares of his younger self, totally do away with the strangle-hold of such conventions). This is attested to when, in an effort to appease the censors place onto the work La Maledizione (the original title of Verdi’s setting of Hugo, still set in France with its king and jester), Piave created a version that removed the jester storyline entirely. Verdi would not consider it. The clown was what was meaningful to him, essential, and the King (the tenor) was merely a foil.

In writing Rigoletto, Verdi ultimately threads the needle of form and function not only with expert skill, but with the ingenuity that is essential to the work’s greatness. He does not do away with the bel canto tropes of oom-pah accompaniment, melody for melody’s sake, dance forms at odds with the settings of the drama, love duets, cadenzas designed for virtuosity alone, etc. Instead, put into the mouths of the Duke and the Mantuan courtiers, this music becomes the fuel of the fire. It is precisely the frivolity, the propulsion, the toe-tapping melody, the absurdity of this musical form and its conventions that is juxtaposed with the tragedy of a jester now renamed Rigoletto. And, when Rigoletto the character chooses to take up this type of music (in the first scene of Act I or the second scene of Act II), the horrible irony of his position is made more acute, more painful. That which in so many other operas of the bel canto (many of those of Verdi himself) elicits chuckles or eye-rolls from a dramatically attuned contemporary audience, in Rigoletto is at the heart of the storytelling mechanism’s power and effectiveness. The perfectly wedded dance between subject and style here creates Verdi’s first masterpiece. It is a marriage he only achieves elsewhere in Un Ballo in Maschera, and even then without the purity of narrative contained in Rigoletto. 

The aforementioned chuckles, however, still remain. And therein lies a sign of another of Rigoletto’s great achievements that even its composer could not have foreseen. Marjorie Garber, in the opening of her chapter from “Shakespeare After All” on “King Lear”, points out that, in the 20th Century and with the advent of existentialism in philosophy and the theaters of absurdity, cruelty, and alienation in the dramatic arts, the play takes on a reading that fits neatly in a line with the works of Becket - especially Waiting for Godot and Endgame - and it is a reading clearly articulated in Maynard Mack’s “King Lear” in our Time and Jan Kott’s seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary. This is of course about the particular way that “King Lear” explores the human condition, but on a more mechanical level it comes from the essential absurdity, and the resulting questions it gives rise to, of a King with no kingdom. The same essential absurdity rests in a clown who is not funny, who is the tragic center of a vortex of horror, forced to continue laughing at his own demise (Pagliacci seeks to achieve the same force, but the style of verismo composition robs it from rising beyond the weight of melodrama). Rigoletto laughs in howlings and terrifying vengeance, but more importantly, the audience laughs with him throughout. Verdi’s musical language provides the path to make the audience complicit in the horror of the tragedy. This occurrence, the audience being made to smile, tap its toes, laugh at terrible cruelty and violence, is at the heart of the theater of Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, or Peter Weiss. It is the theater of absurdity and cruelty, a century before their inventions, just as “King Lear” becomes prescient of contemporary theater. 

In Rigoletto, the title character, along with his daughter, is the least clownish person represented on the stage. The momentum of the piece is the way he is dehumanized, the way he is forced to wear the greasepaint of the Duke and others contained in the plot. The clown cries and the audience laughs - and what is worse is the convicting gaze that remains on the public as the curtain falls: “ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” 

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Timothy Nelson was named Artistic Director of IN Series in the Spring of 2018. Having founded and led American Opera Theater, he went on to maintain a career as director, designer, and conductor in Europe and North America, serving as Artistic Director for the Netherlands Opera Studio and the Nieuwe Stemmen program of the Rotterdam Operadagen, and creating productions for London’s Barbican, English Touring Opera, the Nationale Reisopera, Academy of Ancient Music, Iford Arts Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and others. He has been called by the New York Times “The Future of Opera.” Most recently he directed an acclaimed 2021 production of Cosi fan tutte with San Diego Opera.

With IN Series he has created pioneering work that has propelled the company to regularly lead Best of... lists in media outlets of the nation’s capital. Over the course of the 2020-2021 season Nelson developed INvision, a virtual multi-venue performing arts center housing digital content created by numerous innovative opera and theater companies across America. His own work in this platform has included films of Gluck’s Orphee et Eurydice, Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, and the recently released King Harald’s Saga by Judith Weir.