The neon is fading from Rat Pack “Rigoletto,” but Met’s stellar cast plumbs the human tragedy
Nadine Sierra and Roberto Frontali in Verdi’s “Rigoletto” at the Metropolitan Opera. Photo: Marty Sohl
There’s no doubting that Michael Mayer’s flashing neon production of Rigoletto is effective entertainment: his cheeky, Vegas-inspired take on Verdi’s tragic drama is a playful twist, and on its best nights it has brought a fresh perspective to one of the most familiar pieces in the operatic repertoire.
Perhaps the novelty is wearing off, or perhaps the cast that opened the Metropolitan Opera’s revival on Tuesday night simply weren’t inclined to play along. Together they crafted a dark, compelling rendition of the story that made Mayer’s pole dancers and lines of cocaine feel incongruously glib.
Roberto Frontali doesn’t own the sort of rich baritone you’d usually want for the title role. He shows surprising ring at the top, and his tone is generally firm, but he lacks the round, full sound the fill out the lyrical vocal writing.
Frontali more than compensates with stunning depth of character: it was clear that his love for his daughter Gilda was the motivating force in his life, and that emotion fueled his singing. “Cortigiani,” his scathing aria in Act II, was taken at a breakneck pace, and in Frontali’s reading it was a thrilling journey from an explosion of rage to desperate pleading.
Nadine Sierra’s interpretation of Gilda gets stronger every time she returns to the role. Her singing on Tuesday was exemplary, luxuriating in her warm, lemony tone and showing off gauzy pianissimos at her top. Her “Caro nome” was a spectacular, sensual reading, becoming a coy duet with the orchestra as she settled into a carefree attitude. The showy, high-climbing cadenza at the end of the aria might have been a little much, but she pulled it off with style. As the innocent victim of the story, Gilda is the hardest character to square with Mayer’s tongue-in-cheek twists, yet Sierra managed to find some lovely human moments, especially in her tender duets with her father.
Vittorio Grigolo’s shining tenor beamed all night in his appearance as the Duke of Mantua, turning to liquid gold in a warm rendition of “Parmi veder le lagrime,” the tender aria at the top of Act II. This performance struck a different note from many of Grigolo’s other Met outings: his energy level was the same—there’s no pulling back on the throttle with this singer—but he usually plays his characters with a kind of manic earnestness. Here he brought that same intensity to a duplicitous, violent, thoroughly repulsive figure, and the result was truly disturbing—a macho goon with no moral restraint or fear of consequences. The lilting “La donna è mobile” had a sociopathic streak running through it.
Štefan Kocán made for a brooding, shady Sparafucile, Rigoletto’s hitman, offering a hazy bass but sounding weak on his bottom notes. Ramon Zaharia impressed in her company debut as Maddalena, showing a rich, dark sound more on the contralto side of the mezzo-soprano range.
Scott Scully was a smarmy, sycophantic Borsa, and Jeongcheol Cha brought swagger and an oaky barrel of a voice as Marullo. The imposing, cavernous bass that Robert Pomakov displayed as Monterone was ideal for booming out proclamations of doom. Jennifer Roderer’s dark mezzo-soprano sounded a little weary in the role of Giovanna, Gilda’s nurse.
It was an up-and down night for Nicola Luisotti in the pit: some raggedness in the orchestra early on cleared up and their sound thereafter was bright. Yet he made a number of odd tempo choices, such as that hell-for-leather “Cortigiani” mentioned above, and compensated for them with extra dynamic punctuation. The men of the Met chorus, at least, were luminous throughout Tuesday’s performance.
Rigoletto runs through May 10 at the Metropolitan Opera. Beginning April 26, George Gagnidze takes over the title role, with Rosa Feola as Gilda and Dimitry Ivashchenko as Sparafucile. Francesco Demuro, Matthew Polenzani, and Stephen Costello share the role of the Duke beginning March 6. metopera.org
Rigoletto at the Met
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The head of state is corrupt and venal. Instead of attending to the needs of the people, he spends his time chasing sex and committing assorted crimes to cover it up. One of his henchmen, who combines the roles of fixer and funnyman, has been energetically assisting his boss — but is also convinced that he can keep the contamination of his day job from washing back into his personal life. Of course he cannot, and the whole thing ends in disaster. The fish, as they say, rots from the head down.
Now, wait—before you scroll down to the comment section and start typing furiously — I’m not talking about Donald Trump and Roger Stone. Nor am I talking about the Clintons, their assorted hangers-on, and Monica. Nor am I talking about the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe — though I could be. I’m summarizing the plotline to Verdi’s Rigoletto.
To understand this is to understand why the Metropolitan Opera’s recent revival of a 2013 production of that opera, though musically spectacular, is such a huge missed opportunity. The opera tells a story as old and tragic as mankind, and as fresh and pertinent as a breaking-news tweet. But this production is set in Las Vegas in the early 1960s—perhaps the one setting, out of any time and place, that would most undermine its coherence. The choice makes a travesty out of the work.
My old boss Walter Russell Mead pointed out to me that recreating the Duke as a rat-pack gangster, rather than someone at least expected to rule well, robs Rigoletto of its message. How can corruption eat at the state through its leader’s misdeeds if there is no virtuous polity to begin with? Or, as a friend put it, speaking bluntly of Rigoletto’s daughter Gilda, whom Rigoletto tries to protect at all costs: “How am I supposed to care about this woman’s virginity in Las Vegas? Isn’t that why people went there?”
Indeed it was. No city on the planet has spent more time and money convincing people that actions there are consequence-free. “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” was the spirit long before it was the official slogan. And this is the 1960s: the era before Vegas became a family town. At least, such is Vegas’s reputation in the popular imagination, and as there is no effort to build up the world outside of the casinos, that’s all we have to go on. Forget Rigoletto’s daughter — what did the courtier Ceprano’s wife, or any of the other characters, come into town for? As a result of the setting, there are no stakes; no stakes, no tragedy.
If, on the other hand, you paid attention to the music and the lyrics rather than the visuals, you saw the pathos and power of the drama, which demands more serious attention than it’s getting. Rigoletto features at least one rape, a murder-for-hire, another (judicial) murder, and a lot of kidnapping. It builds a world in which Rigoletto is distracted from the abduction of his daughter because he’s busy (he thinks) helping the courtiers kidnap another man’s wife — something which, it’s clear, is all in a day’s work. The tensions within the court between this dark and dissolute reality and the air of carefree joie-de-vivre are present — or should be — from the minute the short but ominous overture melts away into a party scene.
To be clear, this production is a directorial — or to put it another way, conceptual — failure. Each component of the opera, though subordinated to this flawed vision, is as first-rate as a performance in America’s premier opera house should be. Vittorio Grigolo, who for my money is one of the best tenors now working, is as energetic in acting the Duke as he is skilled in singing him. Nadine Sierra as Gilda nevertheless steals a scene from him at the end of Act I, vocally and dramatically. Roberto Frontali, in the title role, is less a jester than a fixer, and one who has lost his hair, and by the end his family and nearly his mind, in the service of an ignoble leader. Štefan Kocán, as the murderer-for-hire Sparafucille, rounds out a cast of singers who can also act, while Nicola Luisotto conducted the Met Orchestra to its usual gold standard. And the sets, by Christine Jones, are remarkable — lavish, eye-catching renditions of a midcentury casino that fill the whole stage.
This last item, though, points to the heart of the problem: the producer, Michael Mayer, chose to prioritize spectacle over drama. Opera has had a bad reputation in the English-speaking world since at least the early 18th century, when Joseph Addison spent pages of the Spectator reviling it as irrational nonsense. Addison was a smart man; this was a spectacularly dumb take. The art form started as an attempt to revive ancient Greek drama (which, ancient sources tell us, made heavy use of music). Verdi (who came after Addison) is but one example of a serious composer, a man who adapted, and showed himself equal to, the works of Shakespeare, Schiller, Byron, Voltaire, and in the case of Rigoletto, Victor Hugo. The opera is based on the French author’s play, Le Roi s’Amuse, or The King Amuses Himself, set in the court of King Francis I.
But this old charge of nonsense received a curious validation in mid-century America. The closing of European immigration, which had filled the upper tiers of American opera houses with spectators for whom opera was first-language entertainment, and the end of the period when American elites aspired to imitate their European peers, led to a long period when very few audience-members knew the languages in which opera is written (mostly Italian, German, and French). In turn, that created pressure to stage only a very few operas, i.e. the forty or so works in “The Repertoire” that are good enough to sit through for four to six hours without comprehending a word, due to their sheer musical genius. And it created incentives to make the performances spectacles—with lavish, eye-popping sets, costumes, animals—and neglect the dramatic side of the art. This is not to bemoan cool sets; when they work, nothing is better. It’s to decry concepts that make no sense, that look cool but actively work against the spirit or text of the work.
The invention of surtitles (and the neat little screens-behind-the-seat at the Met) started to change all this. People often forget how recently this development came about — Met Titles were only installed in 1995. They led to a whole new generation of singers who can act and directors who can think as though they were responsible for a play as much as for a concert. But, unhappily, old habits die hard. Visual spectacle is to producers what halfhearted acting is to singers: an old temptation that still recurs—as it did here.
One suspects another excuse for this pointedly un-pointed production. “Politicization” is a word which the Met, whose audience is more politically diverse than heartland stereotypes of uptown Manhattan might suggest, would prefer to avoid. It must be admitted that writers who share the politics of myself and this magazine are often the ones most prone to voice such a complaint. And with good reason: the art world is rife with bad politicization that always seems to cut one way, from the trashy and incoherent Siegfried at the Bayreuth Festival, in which Americans in a trailer park smear each other down with oil, to George Lucas’s insistence that “George Bush is Darth Vader” and “Cheney is the Emperor.” Bad politicization happens when a director imposes his agenda artificially on a work. It’s preachy, obnoxious, and often corrodes the artistic value of the production in question.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as good politicization: attention to the politics inherent in a work. When the commentary is drawn out from a faithful reading of the work, and draws us further into it, there can be nothing to complain about—even if one does not like the message. Verdi provides fertile ground for those searching for such messages. There’s a reason Italian revolutionaries graffitied walls with Viva VERDI, and it wasn’t just because his name could be read as an acronym of Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia. His first major opera provided the unofficial anthem for the Risorgimento (“Va’ Pensiero,” from Nabucco). His work could be anticlerical (Don Carlo) as well as anti-monarchial. Austrian censors initially prohibited performances of Rigoletto, then called La Maledizione, before it was revised, reset in the ducal Mantuan rather than royal French court, and renamed. The composer ended his life as a Senator, and not just for his services to the arts.
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One reason to make peace with, or even encourage, good politicization is to be able to take the good with the bad. For instance, almost every comedy—certainly including Verdi’s—is, as critics from the Ancient Greeks down to the present day have noted, inherently conservative. (Among other reasons, comedies tend to convey a strongly pro-marriage message.) But there are higher reasons too. Politics, despite its seediness, is ultimately the managing of human affairs; thus, it is not surprising that an artistic genius who observes humanity would have insights adaptable to political life, or even drawn directly from it. And it’s ultimately the calling of a producer to help us more fully understand and explore great works of art—politics and all.
The Met’s production of Rigoletto is an excellent example of where engagement with the work as a drama, rather than trying to put on a spectacle, would have been the better move. Certain people at the Met — and a good chunk of the commentariat — may well be kicking themselves, if they think of it, that they blew a chance to critique the President with this Rigoletto. Had it been produced faithfully (in terms of spirit, not setting) it would have been read as a veiled shot at 45, regardless of the fact that it was written before his Presidential run. But looking to the past for lessons that will, by virtue of being timeless, apply to the future is not a trait associated with the politics of the President’s most trenchant critics.
Rigoletto” is a success on its own terms. Michael Mayer’s new setting for the opera is satin-smooth, with the avarice and rough sexuality of the Duke of Mantua’s Renaissance court finding a good enough parallel in Rat Pack-era Las Vegas. (He may want to rethink the idea of turning Count Monterone into an Arab sheikh, however.) But it is in the final act that the director of such Broadway hits as “American Idiot” finds himself out of his depth: with the original locale of a desolate rustic inn replaced by a seedy urban bar, Gilda’s self-sacrifice plays like bland comedy and the opera’s tragic core is tossed away. Still, Verdi would be glad that his show is making money, and the cast—which includes Željko Lučić, Diana Damrau, Piotr Beczala, and, not least, the men of the Met chorus—is outstanding; Michele Mariotti conducts with elegant aplomb.
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