Soloists - VERDI: Rigoletto

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)RigolettoThe opera Rigoletto, described as a Melodramma, was first staged at La Fenice in Venice on 11th March 1851. A year earlier Verdi had expressed his delight with Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse, finding in Triboulet, the court jester at the centre of the drama, a creation worthy of Shakespeare. He urged his librettist Francesco Maria Piave, poet and stage manager of La Fenice, to secure the approval of the censors as soon as possible. Piave did as Verdi suggested, but whatever verbal approval he had from the censors was denied when it came to the point. The operatic version of Hugo’s play, under the title La maledizione ('The Curse'), was stigmatized as immoral and obscene, the latter stricture lying chiefly in the fact that the plot deals with the unscrupulous activities of a profligate king.Piave’s first suggested changes did not please Verdi. The King, Francis I, was to be a mere nobleman, the Duke of Ventignano, and there was to be no plot to kill him, while the murdered Gilda’s body was not to be hidden in a sack and Triboletto, the original of Rigoletto, was not to be an ugly hunchback. Negotiation with the censors followed, and something of Victor Hugo was restored. The villain was to be Vincenzo Gonzaga, referred to only as the Duke of Mantua, the deformity of the jester was permitted and there was no longer any objection to the sack. Censorship had caused delay and frustration, but by the end of December 1850 the matter was near enough to a settlement to allow Verdi to proceed with the composition in time for the carnival season.Verdi’s problems were not only with the censors and, to some extent, with Piave. He also had serious reservations about the proposed prima donna, Signora Sanchioli, known, Verdi suggested, for her Michelangelo poses. The final cast had Teresa Brambilla as the first Gilda, a 38-year-old, one of seven sisters well known on the operatic stage. The French-Italian baritone Felice Varesi, who had created the title rôle in Verdi’s Macbeth, was the first Rigoletto, and the part of the Duke was taken by the tenor Raffaele Mirati. Varesi’s daughter later recalled her father’s doubts about the possible reaction of the audience to his appearance as a hunchbacked buffoon and how Verdi pushed him onto the stage at the first performance, causing him to stumble, but at the same time impressing the audience, enraptured by such a dramatically appropriate entrance.Rigoletto, as the opera was now known, was an immediate success with the public, and was received equally well in Paris, where even Victor Hugo approved, and in 1853 in London. In Rome the censors had their revenge and Rigoletto now became Viscardello, a title and opera that Verdi disowned.The 1950 recording at the ballroom of Manhattan Center in New York City cast the experienced Verdian singer Leonard Warren as Rigoletto. Warren had been born in New York in 1911 and made his stage d&ea