Rigoletto (review)

This presentation of a 1996 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden production of Rigoletto is the perfect cure-all for seasoned opera buffs who have attained an intractable immunity from the shocking themes that inhabit most of Verdi's operas. Director David McVicar has more than restored the morbid, gruesome, and downright squalid natures of most of the characters in the opera, making it brazenly clear that the title character is an impudent, stupid pimp, and the Duke of Mantua a corrupt, horny rapist. The Sparafucile is, as usual, evilly sinister, but the Maddalena is the sluttiest wench in memory. Be advised, the back of the DVD cover carries the warning: "Contains nudity." And that ain't all it contains!

In the first scene one sees hordes of comely, buxom ladies prancing around merrily—and topless. There is lusty, same-sex kissing as well as a very attractive young couple (à la David and Venus de Milo, the one ostensibly the already corrupted daughter of Monterone) whose meager threads are stripped from them and who are thrown atop one another by the throng to "unite." The titillating "results" are obscured by the onlookers. For maximum effect, we see the title-role hunchback in the most graphic simulated sex scene I've ever seen in an opera: Rigoletto grips one end of his "walking stick" with his crotch and the other under the dress of a nymphette, all the time gyrating back and forth; the camera captures the look of intense orgiastic pleasure on the jester's face (unflinchingly portrayed by Paolo Gavanelli). Granted, Rigoletto and the Duke are unsavory characters, and, in this day and age, perhaps the story's shock value needs to be reemphasized to convey its vicious irony. But just try to concentrate on the music during this sequence!

At any rate, director David McVicar (who gives a thoughtful, insightful interview in the DVD's "Extra Features") largely succeeds in delineating the precise nature of the relationships between the characters, and their motivations, fears, and desires all loom blunt, real, and implicit. I'm not sure what Verdi would have thought of McVicar's treatment of the Pasolini-esque opening scene, but he undoubtedly would have approved of the director's vision and vivid carrying out of the themes within the story.

If Michael Vale's costumes are in the traditional dress of the period, his sets aren't. We see a decaying glass and black-rusty steel underworld of unrelenting grimness, the various tableaux somehow looking like a bombed-out industrial section of a city, in which only the beams and metal fragments remain. What nature of symbolism this is supposed to depict escapes me, but because it advances the dark, foreboding aspects of the story, it succeeds on its own terms.

Gavanelli, at the outset costumed like one of the comic-grotesque villains in the Mad Max film series, may very well be the best Rigoletto in the world today. Having seen his neutral Riccardo in I Puritani at the Metropolitan Opera, and having heard his ineffective Filippo on the Berlin Classics Beatrice di Tenda recording (reviewed in these pages), ¹ I was pleasantly surprised by his performance here. Vocally, he is for the most part worthy of his illustrious predecessors, displaying a fine-grained, dark baritone of unusual smoothness. High or low, there are no significant problems, besides his penchant for "straightening" out the tone occasionally when he goes after a "reflective...