(no subject)
Nov. 19th, 2013 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretLast night I saw Verdi's Rigoletto at the Met, with my friend Sara. I took Sara to see Ariadne Auf Naxos a few years ago, an amazing Strauss opera wherein a commedia dell'arte performance and a Wagnerian opera seria about the Ariadne myth are staged simultaneously on the same stage and start to blur together. It was a disaster from her point of view- the complicated musical joke went over her head completely since it was the first opera she'd ever seen. Since then I have attempted to advance her operatic education a lot more slowly- we've gone to see two operas by Mozart, one by Donizetti, and this one by Verdi, and she has enjoyed them all.
Rigoletto's another opera where I've long been familiar with parts of the music, but not with the opera. My knowledge of opera as haphazard and inconsistent- it seems odd that I'd be this deep into my interest in opera before seeing Rigoletto, but here we are. But my lord, the music. There's "La Donna e mobile", which is one of the most insanely catchy things in all of opera, there's "Caro Nome", which is just exquisitely lovely, I knew those things already, but in context they are a thousand times more momentous and powerful and moving.
Act I of Traviata is one of my favorite things in opera because the waltz serves as a connective tissue that moves from one scene to the next, embedding everything in one intricate structure- the music makes it clear that even as the opera moves from one mood and set of characters to the next, we are always at the party. But in Rigoletto, Verdi goes beyond this as he uses motivic consistencies and just outrageously clever segues to weave the whole opera of a single piece of cloth. There is always something going on in the music besides the vocal line, some other action moving the plot forward in parallel or contradicting the libretto or just winking at the audience. In the rare moments when singers go a cappella, the effect is scarily intensifying.
"La Donna e mobile" is the perfect thing to come from the Duke at that moment, and the way it keeps coming back, meaning something new each time and also adding something new to the plot each time, is amazing. I loved "Addio Addio" not just as a great piece of music, but as a takedown of those ridiculous arias where the singers repeat the same simple thought again and again until you just want to throttle them and say "We get it." Verdi does exactly that, but he makes it a musical characterization: Gilda and the Duke coquettish like a pair of lovers on a long distance call, each refusing to be the one who hangs up. That knowledge of operatic forms, constantly upended but always in the service of the storytelling, is what makes Rigoletto feel so exciting.
But I do want to move on to the scenario, because I have some mixed thoughts. Rigoletto is the story of a corrupt Duke and his jester Rigoletto. The Duke schemes to seduce Rigoletto's beautiful daughter Gilda. When he succeeds, a furious Rigoletto hires a hitman to kill him, but still in thrall to the unfaithful Duke, Gilda sacrifices herself to save the Duke.
It's a messed up story. It upends a lot of the moral order at the center of Don Giovanni, Da Ponte's idea that the pursuit of pleasure can provide temporal meaning to one's life, but it does not outlast this world. Our Don Juan here suffers no consequences for anything he does, and the opera is not exactly interested in asking why or why not. The opera isn't really all that interested in the Duke. This is Rigoletto's story.
Thus the opera is also not really all that interested in Gilda's story, though I think it does accord her agency in fascinating ways. One of the striking and simultaneously frustrating things about Gilda in the opera is that her arc lets her choose, after having lost her 'virtue' in Act II, to regain it through an act of her own volition. Of course, this act is giving up her own life. By sacrificing herself to save the man who took her innocence, she becomes innocent again. (One thing I really liked about the way Verdi draws Gilda is that it is very clear that we are supposed to understand that she is foolish and naive and her love is not true. In Puccini I'm never quite sure if I'm supposed to think that the heroes and heroines are idiots.)
But then we have Rigoletto himself. Who is a huge fucking dick, and everyone hates him, and refreshingly, he knows that he is a huge fucking dick. He knows that he is trapped in a terrible life that he doesn't know how to get out of, and he wants to get Gilda out of his trajectory, but he doesn't quite know how to do that either, so he seizes on INNOCENCE as this sort of magic formula that will save her. Being thoroughly corrupt himself, though, he doesn't understand how INNOCENCE actually works. He guesses that you cultivate innocence like a hothouse flower, by keeping it away from any possible corruption. And of course, this guess is disastrously wrong, because it leaves poor Gilda with no defenses whatsoever when his firewall is breached and the Duke gets in. I think the cruelest and most tragic part of the story is that I think Rigoletto's love for his daughter is the greatest trick he plays on her: He is corrupt and monstrous, and yet he is the most gentle and caring person she knows, and I think we'd be foolish not to surmise that Gilda sees her father, handsomely packaged, in the Duke, as she clings to her love for him long after he has cast her aside.
The Met's gorgeous new production sets the story in 1960s Rat Pack Las Vegas, with flashy suits and skimpily dressed women and SO MUCH NEON. Rigoletto as a more murderous Guys and Dolls. In a fine and subtle touch, the Met's subtitled translated libretto was updated to 1960s slang, giving full commitment to the reinterpretation.
This gave a sense of polished-over menace to the affair. The Duke, recast as a casino owner/mob boss, moved around the casino in total control of everything. He acted like the Duke of the casino- anything or anyone he wanted, he was given immediately. Rigoletto was both majordomo and master of ceremonies for the Duke's carnival of debauchery.
And the final act's set was amazing: one half of the stage comprised a seedy strip club, the other the hitman's car with its massive trunk to transport bodies, and behind it a string of neon lights that flashed with mesmerizing bolts of lightning to convince the audience of the storm assaulting our characters both physically and mentally.
On the other hand, I still haven't totally sussed out how I feel about the moral implications of the transported setting. As it is, with the Duke getting away scot-free, Rigoletto's moral dynamics are troubling and complicated, and I don't think the 1960s setting did much to clear that up. Certainly, setting the action a century later does nothing to improve the gender politics of the existing work. I don't know. More thought required, but I think my final conclusion may simply be that it was a staging that worked better visually than intellectually. Definitely worth seeing, though.
Rigoletto's another opera where I've long been familiar with parts of the music, but not with the opera. My knowledge of opera as haphazard and inconsistent- it seems odd that I'd be this deep into my interest in opera before seeing Rigoletto, but here we are. But my lord, the music. There's "La Donna e mobile", which is one of the most insanely catchy things in all of opera, there's "Caro Nome", which is just exquisitely lovely, I knew those things already, but in context they are a thousand times more momentous and powerful and moving.
Act I of Traviata is one of my favorite things in opera because the waltz serves as a connective tissue that moves from one scene to the next, embedding everything in one intricate structure- the music makes it clear that even as the opera moves from one mood and set of characters to the next, we are always at the party. But in Rigoletto, Verdi goes beyond this as he uses motivic consistencies and just outrageously clever segues to weave the whole opera of a single piece of cloth. There is always something going on in the music besides the vocal line, some other action moving the plot forward in parallel or contradicting the libretto or just winking at the audience. In the rare moments when singers go a cappella, the effect is scarily intensifying.
"La Donna e mobile" is the perfect thing to come from the Duke at that moment, and the way it keeps coming back, meaning something new each time and also adding something new to the plot each time, is amazing. I loved "Addio Addio" not just as a great piece of music, but as a takedown of those ridiculous arias where the singers repeat the same simple thought again and again until you just want to throttle them and say "We get it." Verdi does exactly that, but he makes it a musical characterization: Gilda and the Duke coquettish like a pair of lovers on a long distance call, each refusing to be the one who hangs up. That knowledge of operatic forms, constantly upended but always in the service of the storytelling, is what makes Rigoletto feel so exciting.
But I do want to move on to the scenario, because I have some mixed thoughts. Rigoletto is the story of a corrupt Duke and his jester Rigoletto. The Duke schemes to seduce Rigoletto's beautiful daughter Gilda. When he succeeds, a furious Rigoletto hires a hitman to kill him, but still in thrall to the unfaithful Duke, Gilda sacrifices herself to save the Duke.
It's a messed up story. It upends a lot of the moral order at the center of Don Giovanni, Da Ponte's idea that the pursuit of pleasure can provide temporal meaning to one's life, but it does not outlast this world. Our Don Juan here suffers no consequences for anything he does, and the opera is not exactly interested in asking why or why not. The opera isn't really all that interested in the Duke. This is Rigoletto's story.
Thus the opera is also not really all that interested in Gilda's story, though I think it does accord her agency in fascinating ways. One of the striking and simultaneously frustrating things about Gilda in the opera is that her arc lets her choose, after having lost her 'virtue' in Act II, to regain it through an act of her own volition. Of course, this act is giving up her own life. By sacrificing herself to save the man who took her innocence, she becomes innocent again. (One thing I really liked about the way Verdi draws Gilda is that it is very clear that we are supposed to understand that she is foolish and naive and her love is not true. In Puccini I'm never quite sure if I'm supposed to think that the heroes and heroines are idiots.)
But then we have Rigoletto himself. Who is a huge fucking dick, and everyone hates him, and refreshingly, he knows that he is a huge fucking dick. He knows that he is trapped in a terrible life that he doesn't know how to get out of, and he wants to get Gilda out of his trajectory, but he doesn't quite know how to do that either, so he seizes on INNOCENCE as this sort of magic formula that will save her. Being thoroughly corrupt himself, though, he doesn't understand how INNOCENCE actually works. He guesses that you cultivate innocence like a hothouse flower, by keeping it away from any possible corruption. And of course, this guess is disastrously wrong, because it leaves poor Gilda with no defenses whatsoever when his firewall is breached and the Duke gets in. I think the cruelest and most tragic part of the story is that I think Rigoletto's love for his daughter is the greatest trick he plays on her: He is corrupt and monstrous, and yet he is the most gentle and caring person she knows, and I think we'd be foolish not to surmise that Gilda sees her father, handsomely packaged, in the Duke, as she clings to her love for him long after he has cast her aside.
The Met's gorgeous new production sets the story in 1960s Rat Pack Las Vegas, with flashy suits and skimpily dressed women and SO MUCH NEON. Rigoletto as a more murderous Guys and Dolls. In a fine and subtle touch, the Met's subtitled translated libretto was updated to 1960s slang, giving full commitment to the reinterpretation.
This gave a sense of polished-over menace to the affair. The Duke, recast as a casino owner/mob boss, moved around the casino in total control of everything. He acted like the Duke of the casino- anything or anyone he wanted, he was given immediately. Rigoletto was both majordomo and master of ceremonies for the Duke's carnival of debauchery.
And the final act's set was amazing: one half of the stage comprised a seedy strip club, the other the hitman's car with its massive trunk to transport bodies, and behind it a string of neon lights that flashed with mesmerizing bolts of lightning to convince the audience of the storm assaulting our characters both physically and mentally.
On the other hand, I still haven't totally sussed out how I feel about the moral implications of the transported setting. As it is, with the Duke getting away scot-free, Rigoletto's moral dynamics are troubling and complicated, and I don't think the 1960s setting did much to clear that up. Certainly, setting the action a century later does nothing to improve the gender politics of the existing work. I don't know. More thought required, but I think my final conclusion may simply be that it was a staging that worked better visually than intellectually. Definitely worth seeing, though.