Rigoletto (literally, “The Giggler”) has always been a piece I could take or leave, and mostly leave. I mean, on the one hand, it’s your basic 19th century verismo opera with some nifty tunes including that old chestnut “La donna è mobile” beloved of every undergraduate tenor and an opera guaranteed on name alone to sell out.
I generally put middle Verdi in that category of take it and leave it. That is, till now, and Pacific Opera Victoria’s production of Rigoletto. Wow. The production, under the smart conducting of Robert Tweten (making his Pacific Opera Victoria debut), really brings Rigoletto into a sharp focus with the orchestra exactly balancing the vocal forces at all times. While the “oom pa pa” feeling to some of Verdi’s music is still there, the way the music moves around the three-quarter time feels very fresh and new where the audience could hear all the ways in which Verdi wrote against that strong beat and included bel canto’s insistence on vocal proficiency.
And those vocalists! It is a wonder listening to singers such as Matthew Treviño (Sparafucile) and Marion Newman (Maddalena), the brother and sister of the piece who do much more with those roles than one usually sees as black and white, all evil characters. In contrast, Treviño and Newman inhabit the parts they play. Sparafucile is a man doing his job, proud of being a professional; there’s no real excitement to it for him. And his sister, Maddalena, is key to the plot by falling in love with (or perhaps sex with) the Duke and begging for his life, the twist that causes Gilda to die for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and little else.
The Duke is perhaps the real villain of the piece—take the Count from a Mozart comic opera and drop him into a tragedy where actions can have very real consequences and you get some sense of Matthew Pearce's Duke. He’s suave and elegant, but pretty much little more than a womaniser. His signature hit, “La donna è mobile”, is the standard catalogue of the sins of women, but in context, sung by a man with few morals at all, becomes deeply ironic. It’s his second singing of that now-famous tune offstage that alerts Rigoletto to the fact that his plan for revenge has gone terribly wrong. But you can’t help liking Pearce’s Duke. He’s good looking and basically pretty charming, even if he only uses that charm to seduce women, lots of women. No wonder Gilda fell for him.
Of course, Gilda is almost entirely an innocent. Her father has sheltered her to keep her out of trouble, and that fails the first time she’s let loose for a few moments. She runs into the Duke, who pretends to be the standard poor, bookish student and seduces her. For her, it’s eternal love. For him, it’s a notch on the bedstand, and so his signature turn is sung to Maddalena while Rigoletto and Gilda are listening in to that act of seduction. As Gilda rightly notes in horror, "he’s using the same words.”
Sarah Dufresne is amazing as Gilda, demonstrating both innocence but an insistence on being part of the world at large. That tension, between her lack of knowledge of the world and the world’s evil, is what ends her romance and her life. Dufresne’s Gilda, though, makes the plea for redemption for the evil world real. This Gilda really will join her mother in Heaven and pray for the souls of the world in which she had no place. We believe her rather than seeing it as the usual 19th common place.
While all the lead singers are wonderful, it’s Dufresne’s Gilda and Grant Youngblood’s Rigoletto that really set the stage on fire. Every time they sang with others (such as James Demler’s Monterone), I cared for them, I wanted to know what was happening. But when Rigoletto and Gilda sang together, I couldn’t take my eyes away from them. They communicate the pain each other felt: Rigoletto out of his care for his daughter Gilda, a 16-year-old who just wanted to know a little bit more of the world. She doesn’t even know her father’s name, ostensibly to protect her somehow, but in this case, because the opera is in large part about not knowing things: secrets run throughout this opera and not knowing something means danger, even death, is around the corner.
Glynis Leyshon’s stage direction uses the stage design by James Rotondo to highlight the shifting relationships between the characters. They know what they are about, and they listen, even when listening is a painful, hard and betraying act. Watching Dufresne’s face as her father forces her to watch the Duke’s seduction of Maddalena is a lesson in love gone very wrong indeed.
The whole opera is a lesson in love gone wrong: sometimes it’s withheld when it ought to be given out, sometimes it’s given out as one thing and is actually another, with sometimes fatal circumstances, but all in all, Leyshon’s direction makes it a very sharp fresh production. There are a few missteps (the chorus pantomiming their walking about looking for trouble and Rigoletto’s disability is all too reminiscent of the kind of blocking you saw in operas once they were no longer only sung except in the original language but before supertitles gave audiences a running text in translation, for instance), but still, very worth watching.
It is the more powerful for being in a house with approximately the number of seats at La Fenice where it premièred. The Royal Theatre makes this an intimate experience that is very welcome with the production fitting the size of the auditorium to perfection.