Houston Grand Opera gives ‘Rigoletto’ a new look
“Rigoletto,” Giuseppe Verdi’s tragic 1851 opera about a revenge plot gone horribly awry, carries more than its fair share of 19thcentury baggage. Houston Grand Opera’s latest production, which opens Friday at the Wortham Center, brings the story’s lurid qualities into sharp relief through garish costumes and surrealistic set design.
Verdi’s sublime music stirs a cauldron seething with deceptions, disguises, kidnapping and murder. The action revolves around the powerful Duke of Mantua, a nobleman cad who seduces commoners and courtiers’ wives alike with impunity. His jester Rigoletto, who insults members of the Duke’s court for a living, is also an overprotective father who keeps his daughter, Gilda, under virtual house arrest.
When Gilda falls in love with the Duke, who disguises himself to follow her to church — the only place Rigoletto permits Gilda to go — things come to a head. Between its portrayal of a callous upper class and dismissive attitudes toward women, the similarities to the present day are not lost on HGO’s creative team.
“I think it’s very hard for audiences to watch this piece right now, as people have become much more aware of women’s rights and how women are treated, and the sort of #MeToo world that we live in right now,” set designer Erhard Rom says. “I think ‘Rigoletto’ has great relevance in the manner of the life the Duke of Mantua is leading.”
“Looking at it from the lens of (a) contemporary audience, there’s inherent misogyny written into the text of the script purposefully,” adds costume designer Jessica Jahn, “but also just because of the time period that it was written, there was also a lot of (unintentional) sexism written in, as well as ideas of extreme violence and aggression and rage and — what’s the best way to put it? — indifference to humanity.”
Setting it post-World War I
Based on a play by “Les Misérables” author Victor Hugo, “Rigoletto” was set in Renaissance-era Italy after censors at the time expressed misgivings about the source material. This production pushes the action forward to the years following World War I, when Europe was reeling from the war’s unspeakable horrors and nationalism and fascism were on the rise.
“Setting it in Italy is something that we maintained, but there (was) a desire to … find a place where we thought the audience could feel a stronger sense of danger and (the) power structure that would make the conflicts of the piece more powerfully illustrated,” Rom says. “The Renaissance can be somewhat picturesque, and then (audiences) could get lost in something that seems very decorative rather than meaningful.”
“(We) realized that that kind of environment both worked for the piece but also was able to mirror a lot of what is happening internationally today,” Jahn adds. “So without setting it right now, we could hold up a mirror to some of the same issues.”
Rom’s designs took some inspiration from the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, the 20th-century Italian artist who, he once wrote, saw the world as “an immense museum of strange things.” Chirico is credited as a founder of metaphysical art, a precursor to the surrealist movement that was in full bloom after World War I.
“If you look at (his work), it’s very geometric angles, very stark and strong angular light shafts coming through buildings and corridors and so forth,” Rom says. “That language and that quality seemed really the right world for the Duke of Mantua’s terrible place.”
Other parts of Rom’s set nod to the midcentury architects Aldo Rossi, whose buildings bear a strong resemblance to de Chirico’s work; and Carlos Scarpa, whose three-windowed balcony from the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona reappears here to represent the “giant cage” in which Rigoletto tries to sequester Gilda. A prominently displayed reproduction of Annibale Carraci’s painting “Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne” both symbolizes the Duke’s debauchery and layers the Renaissance into Rom’s era-hopping design.
“I think that ties into not wanting to be realistic and literal about this,” he says. “It wants to have a kind of surrealistic quality so that we really get into the emotions of the characters and really get into the psychology.”
‘Beautiful people doing horrible things’
For her costumes, Jahn took a cue from the work of painters including Rene Magritte, Max Ernst and Otto Dix — artists who amplified and distorted real life to create dreamlike, or nightmarish, images. Latter-day fashion designers such as Galliano, Gauthier and Alexander McQueen, whose over-the-top creations often poked fun at stuffy notions of haute couture, also played a role.
“I think that was what we were leaning towards, (where) there’s a sense of opulence that also feels unnerving,” Jahn says. “It’s pushing the boundaries of ‘What is too much?’ Like garishness, or crassness. That was interesting to me.”
The surrealistic environment also allowed Jahn to take her ideas for the characters well beyond the pale of more conservative productions.
“I think one of the things that’s helpful is they are unintentionally iconographic,” she says. “They're almost caricatures of themselves.”
This is especially true of the “slick and reptilian” attire of the Duke and his well-heeled entourage. The men in the chorus are dressed identically.
“They are the 1 percent,” Jahn says. “They are the people that are able to do things without consequence, and we needed to somehow keep that visually very separate from the people that they are taking advantage of.”
Elsewhere, Jahn envisions Gilda, the sheltered naïf, as the “perfect ingenue … she’s the innocent girl that is unintentionally surrounded by things that are not like her.” Rigoletto is rendered as a clown instead of a jester; other than that, Jahn says, “clowns in the 1930s are
cree-py, so I didn’t have to do much.”
Seeking an appropriate way to outfit the opera’s other non-elite characters — the assassin-for-hire Sparafucile and his sister Maddalena, who attempts to seduce the Duke in a critical Act 3 moment — Jahn conducted research that led her to the realm of sideshow and vaudeville performers, about as far away from high society as it gets.
“(I) realized that might be our in because it then attached them to Rigoletto, at least in a conceptual way,” she says. “And then, honestly, who doesn’t want to see a cool tattooed lady onstage? It’s awesome.”
Beautiful people doing horrible things is the essence of “Rigoletto,” but the opera’s ultimate duality might lie with the score itself.
“What we are a little bit doing with our aesthetic is presenting something that is beautiful but showing it also to be grotesque at the same time, which is what I think the intent of Verdi was,” Jahn says. “It’s like, this beautiful, beautiful music that is so opulent, and there’s moments that are so sad, but then there’s moments (when) the sadness is beautiful.
“That contrast is so interesting,” she adds. “I guess, if anything, that’s the same thing that I think we’re trying to do, without making it a costume piece. Because I think that sometimes that’s the other thing that can happen — it just becomes about beauty, and we sort of forget that the underlying story is kind of a mess.”