The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (39 page)

In an eighteenth-century Tyrolean village, Luisa Miller, daughter of an old soldier, is in love with a young peasant lad who courts her.
The vicious Wurm, himself lusting after
Luisa, informs her father that the young man is in fact Rodolfo, son of the local landowner, Count Walter, Wurm’s employer.

The duchess Federica is expected to make a dynastic marriage to Rodolfo, but he tells her that he loves Luisa, to whom he now reveals his true identity.
Count Walter is enraged by Rodolfo’s behaviour and takes reprisals against Luisa’s father.
To save his life, Luisa is forced to write a letter renouncing Rodolfo and offering to marry Wurm.
Rodolfo finds the letter and is so shocked by its contents that he resolves to kill both himself and Luisa.
Having made her confirm that she did write the letter, he produces some deadly poison which they both drink.
As she is dying, Luisa reveals the truth to Rodolfo, who manages to muster enough strength to kill the nefarious Wurm.

What to listen for

Like many of Verdi’s earlier works, the musical quality of
Luisa
Miller
rises as the opera progresses, picking up from a slow start to reach a conclusion of great intensity.
Much of the vocal writing harks back to Donizetti, but there is also evidence of a more poetic, inward quality which Verdi’s previous operas lacked.
The role of Luisa is problematic, requiring a soprano who can handle high-lying coloratura (as in her first aria, with its staccati) but who also commands more weight than the traditional ingénue.

The opera is also unusual in containing two strong baritone roles in Walter and Miller, whose arias succeed each other.
Tenors relish Rodolfo and the plangently lovely aria ‘Quando le sere al placido’.
Other highlights include the unaccompanied quartet in Act II, Luisa’s ‘Tu puniscimi, o signore’ and her duet with Miller ‘La tomba è un letto’.

In performance

Because the setting of this opera is more intimate and domestic than Verdi’s other early operas, several attempts have been made to put the scenario into a modern suburban context –
not easy to make convincing, given the conventional melodrama of the plot.

Recording

CD: Placido Domingo (Rodolfo): Lorin Maazel (cond.).
DG 459 481 2

Rigoletto

Three acts. First performed Venice, 1851.

Libretto by Francesco Piave

Verdi thought Victor Hugo’s play
Le
Roi
s’amuse
to be ‘perhaps the greatest drama of modern times’, and despite problems with the censors, he and Piave managed to transform it into one of the strongest and most coherent of Italian opera libretti.

Plot

In the decadent Renaissance court of the libertine Duke of Mantua, the vicious hunchback jester Rigoletto is terrified when he is cursed by Monterone, whose daughter has been seduced by the Duke and who has now been arrested for denouncing him.
Some cynical courtiers decide that they will abduct a beautiful young woman whom the widower Rigoletto is said to keep locked away in his house.
This is in fact Rigoletto’s beloved daughter Gilda.
Unbeknownst to her father, Gilda has fallen in love with a handsome young student – the Duke in disguise – whom she has met in church and who secretly visits her at home.
The courtiers trick Rigoletto into helping them abduct Gilda.

The Duke is delighted by this prank and uses the opportunity to seduce Gilda.
When Rigoletto discovers what has happened, he vows revenge on the Duke, despite the pleading of Gilda, torn between loyal filial devotion to her father and love for the Duke.
In a sleazy inn, on a stormy night,
Rigoletto pays the professional assassin Sparafucile to murder the Duke and deliver his corpse in a sack.
The Duke is enticed to the inn by Sparafucile’s exotic sister Maddalena, who is so charmed by him that she persuades Sparafucile to trick Rigoletto and substitute an innocent passer-by.
Hiding outside the inn, Gilda overhears all this, but because nothing can quench her love for the Duke, she decides to sacrifice herself in order to save him: she enters the inn and is duly murdered.
Sparafucile hands the sack over to Rigoletto, who opens it to find the body of his daughter, as the voice of the Duke is heard gaily singing in an upstairs room.
Monterone’s curse has been fulfilled.

What to listen for

One of Verdi’s most strongly characterized operas – the Duke, Rigoletto and Gilda are all masterly psychological studies, and Gilda, in particular, torn between love for her father and the Duke, makes one of the most touching of operatic heroines.

Each of the three principal roles also offers great vocal challenges.
Rigoletto is written for a high-lying baritone.
All aspects of his complex character are embodied in the scene at the end of the second act, when he confronts the courtiers and is then reunited with Gilda.
The singer must in turn convey the playful hunchback jester, the tragic father, the crazed avenger.
He must shout his anger with roof-raising force, sing his grief with a firm legato, convey his fatherly love with a gentle warmth and take care that he doesn’t drown Gilda out in their concluding duet.

The Duke is a fine role for a lyric tenor, although many find the rum-ti-tum cabaletta to the Act II aria so difficult that they cut at least its second verse.
Conductors like Riccardo Muti who are strict about performing only the notes that Verdi wrote (rather than those that show-off tenors have traditionally interpolated) also insist that the tenor performs ‘La donna è mobile’ without a cadenza and concluding high B (a note which Verdi cleverly saves for the recurrence
of the tune, when Rigoletto realizes that the Duke has not been murdered).
Gilda’s virginal purity misleads some opera houses to cast a very light or soubrettish soprano.
This is not wise: even though more mature voices sometimes have difficulties with the high-lying ‘Caro nome’ and its staccati and trills, most of the role requires a stronger lyric timbre.

Rigoletto
also ranks as one of Verdi’s most innovative scores, avoiding both conventional aria structures and large-scale ensembles, as well as using long duets to advance the drama.
Note also the recurrent use of the ‘Maledizione’ theme, the all-male chorus, and the absence of an overture.
The last act – with the moans of an off-stage chorus representing the looming storm, the wonderful quartet for the flirting Duke and Maddalena, the love-lorn Gilda and the wretched Rigoletto (in which each voice is brilliantly contrasted and distinguished), the airy bravado of the Duke’s ‘La donna è mobile’, the fury of the breaking storm and Rigoletto’s discovery of the dying Gilda combine to make an exemplary piece of operatic story-telling.

In performance

A taut and exciting drama, written, as Verdi put it, ‘without arias or finales’ – certainly not of the obvious kind.
The most celebrated modern production is undoubtedly that of Jonathan Miller for ENO, who relocated the action to the territory of
The
Godfather
: New York’s Little Italy with the Duke as a young gang-leader, and Rigoletto as his henchman-cum-barman.
‘La donna è mobile’ emerges as a tune from a juke-box, to which the Duke sings along.
Miller’s concept has been much imitated.

Other productions have concentrated on the idea, resonant in our own era, of the Duke’s court as a place of extreme decadence – a moral line which provides a splendid excuse for plenty of titillatingly orgiastic goings-on in the opening scene.

Recordings