When Victor Hugo brought his play »Le roi s'amuse« to the stage for the first and, for the time being, last time in Paris in 1832, the performance ended with the play's immediate ban. When Giuseppe Verdi, the composer of the Italian Risorgimento, prepared to set the work by the revolutionary-minded French writer to music, he too encountered resistance from the censorship authorities almost 20 years later.
Although he had to rename his melodrama from »La maledizione« (»The Curse«) to »Rigoletto« and move the setting to the court of a fictitious Duke of Mantua, he left the plot and its crassness untouched: Rigoletto endows the unbridled duke constantly seducing and kidnapping beautiful women and has nothing but mockery for their families. The desperate father of one of the disgraced curses him in front of the entire court. However, his daughter Gilda keeps Rigoletto hidden from the shameless goings-on. Still, the duke has already set his eyes on her. When Gilda succumbs to the Duke's arts of seduction, Rigoletto devises a deadly revenge plan that ends up killing not the Duke but his own daughter. The well-known tenor song »La donna è mobile« becomes the cynical cipher of failure. In Verdi's first work of the mature period, the trivial as well as the grotesque and high pathos are mutually dependent. The contrasts of garish banda music and the most expressive cantilenas form an uncompromising masterpiece that overwhelms the audience with tremendous brevity and sharpness.
