Rigoletto by Verdi, From (2023/2023), Directed by Dorothea Kirschbaum, Conductor Giovanni Conti, Theater Mönchengladbach, Mönchengladbach, Germany

The only happiness in life of the court jester Rigoletto, who is in the service of the Duke of Mantua, is his daughter Gilda. When he has to witness how she succumbs to the wooing of his calculating master, he only wants one thing: kill the duke. He commissions the murderer Sparafucile to kill the unscrupulous seducer. However, when Gilda sacrifices herself for her lover, Rigoletto realizes that he has made a momentous mistake. Dorothea Kirschbaum and her set team tell Giuseppe Verdi's musical adaptation of the drama Le roi s' amuse by Victor Hugo as a true opera thriller in the setting of a not too distant future in which flesh and blood people and artificial intelligence share a utopian living space. In this friction between familiar opera dramaturgy and modern viewing habits, the exciting narrative style never loses sight of the center of the action: man's longing for love and his inability to escape fate.