Rigoletto by Verdi, to 24 helmi 2022, Alkaen (2022/2022), Ohjannut Bartlett Sher, Musiikinjohto Ivan Repušić, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, Germany

When Victor Hugo performed his play "Le roi s'amuse" for the first and, for the time being, last time in Paris in 1832, the performance ended with the play being banned immediately. When Giuseppe Verdi, the composer of the Italian Risorgimento, was preparing to set the play 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 melodramma from “La maledizione” (“The Curse”) to “Rigoletto” and relocate the setting to the court of a fictional duke of Mantua, he left the plot and its crassness untouched: Rigoletto donated the rampant duke constantly seducing and kidnapping beautiful women and has nothing but ridicule for their families. He is cursed in front of the entire court by the desperate father of one of the dishonored. However, Rigoletto keeps his daughter Gilda hidden from the shameless hustle and bustle. Even so, the Duke has already had an eye on her. When Gilda succumbs to the Duke's arts of seduction, Rigoletto forges a deadly plan of revenge, in which in the end it is not the Duke but his own daughter who falls victim. The well-known tenor hit »La donna è mobile« becomes the cynical code of failure. In Verdi's first work during the period of maturity, 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 bursts over the audience with tremendous conciseness and sharpness.