When opera & news was collide
COC’s Rigoletto plays into debate on male entitlement
Treasures of our culture sometimes clash with how things really ought to be. Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigo
letto offers a case in point. It has been one of the world’s favourite operas since its premiere in 1851. One of its arias, “La donna e mobile” (“Women are fickle”), is known and enjoyed even by people who have never been inside an opera house. But that aria belongs to a piece of musical theatre that depicts men at their worst.
The Canadian Opera Company opens its own production, last seen here in 2011, on Saturday at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. It will run for 10 performances until Feb. 23.
The setup for this tragic tale is simple: the Duke of Mantua is the lord of all he surveys, including every winsome lass. His jester, the hunchback Rigoletto, obsessively hides his daughter from this world so that she can remain the pure, unspoiled apple of his eye.
The boss spreads his love around indiscriminately, with no concern for the lives or emotions of the women he touches. The servant hoards his love, with no concern for the life he is smothering in the process. The mixture of the two stirs up a boiling pot of rage and revenge.
These sorts of behaviours have been exploding in our faces in recent weeks, months and years, as we confront the self-entitlement of so many men. Yet we continue to hum “La donna e mobile” as we shower or as we leave the opera house.
Director Christopher Alden’s and designer Michael Levine’s production plays up the dark themes by updating the action to a Victorianera club where the gentlemen are, under their genteel surfaces, anything but gentle.
I couldn’t help asking soprano Anna Christy, who sings the role of Rigoletto’s daughter Gilda in this production, how she reconciles her character’s situation with today’s heightened awareness around sexual predators.
“Because I’m telling a story, not something that is actually happening to me, it doesn’t bother me at all,” she responds.
“It’s not like we’re making a comment on how things should be like now; we’re telling a story through the lens of this other period of time.”
Christy continues: “Christopher Alden, our director, is making the point that, in this particular setting, women were used as currency. He’s driving the point home by almost forcing it, by making it really come to the forefront and making it bigger and more obvious than it even might have been back then. For me that’s interesting because it’s a way for me to find out how things have changed.”
In other words, this old-favourite opera is being used to show us how, although we still have work to do as a culture and as a society, we have already made great progress.
“You could just do Rigoletto as, ‘Here’s this guy who has had a rough life, who has a good, solid job in entertainment and has this secret life at home with a daughter who he doesn’t want exposed to the world he works in.’ That’s totally fair and you could just tell the story straight,” Christy says. “That’s definitely a possibility but, in my experience, it’s always far more interesting to introduce other themes that will elevate our telling of that story.”
Elevation is what making art is all about. And maybe we won’t hum “La donna e mobile” quite the same way afterward. Classical music writer John Terauds is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.