San Francisco Opera: Rigoletto

Yesterday was my first visit to the San Francisco Opera this season, midway through the run of Rigoletto, a magnificent production of this magnificent opera. It's wonderful to see a standard war-horse of an opera (meaning one considered sure-fire at the box office) not being taken for granted but instead lavished with care & consideration, reminding us why it became a classic in the first place. Conductor Eun Sun Kim produced sounds that were lush yet propulsive; the soloists & chorus were fully committed to their roles, & included sharp stage business I didn't remember from previous productions; the singers held notes just a bit longer, pianissimos floated just a bit more ethereally, than expected; so much beauty & skill to examine the complexities & highlight the sordid tragedies of this work.

This production uses the de Chirico-inspired sets (designed by Michael Yeargan) familiar from previous stagings here of Rigoletto; this was a good as well as probably economical decision, as the sets are striking & effective, setting the stage, literally, for this world that is beautiful & empty. The buildings, often an undifferentiated black, lean in at odd angles, like a German Expressionist film set; the windows glow with strange bright colors: acid greens, icy deep blues, a burning red (the interior of Rigoletto's house, where he hides his beloved daughter Gilda, glows with this red, the color of passion &, since this is Catholic Italy, martyrdom). The buildings are crowded in, leaning over the action, but empty of human life (the action all takes place in front of them, or in the one large room off to the side which converts from Rigoletto's house to the "inn" of Sparafucile & his sister Maddalena, the hired killer & his sex worker/accomplice sister representing  a grotesque inversion of the loving family represented by the jester & his daughter). The buildings of the se are omnipresent, looming, a bit threatening beneath the aesthetic veneer, but ultimately empty of human life or warmth: in short, an apt summation of the swirling & glittering world of the Duke's cruel & superficial court.

The slight air of unreality, of representation poised right above the "realistic", helps propel us into the very foreign world of this opera, a world in which family honor is a matter of utmost importance & in which a curse can have actual meaning. (Who these days, coming in off the street, really believes in either of those things?) Rigoletto is unnerved by the thunderous curse of Count Monterone, &, of course, ultimately the curse does land on his head. But Monterone has also, simultaneously, cursed the Duke, who blithely escapes all punishment – vengeance does not alight on the strong & powerful, or perhaps it's really the seductive & charming, the sexy, who escape (it's the Duke's handsome figure & winning ways that lead Maddalena to plead with her brother to kill a substitute instead).

The substitute, of course, is Gilda, seduced & abandoned by the Duke, who nonetheless acts to save his life by giving up her own (apparently agreeing with the poet that Love is not Love that alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove). I know a lot of people who have problems with her. I find her an original & even unsettling character; raised in isolation, she knows little of the world she is naively eager to join, but isolation has not left her fearful, & has given her some startlingly bold ideas: here we are, in conservative Catholic Italy, in a world where family honor & prestige count for everything, in which women are seen mostly in relation to the men who protect or possess them, & yet she has sex outside marriage with the Duke, chooses him over her family, commits what is essentially suicide (a grave sin), & while dying not only doesn't repent: she (with breath-taking audacity) assures her father that she is going right up to Heaven. Her isolation may be what protected her from the conventional social pieties, but she clearly has worked through to some original ideas of her own; her idealism, & her generous (& wasted) love ultimately seem both innocent & perverse. She removes herself from the constrictions of her world, landing simultaneously below & above them, & this is what makes her the epitome of a certain style of the High Romantic: alone & superior, the bold individual outcast against a corrupt & superficial world, a rebuke, by the purity of her soiled existence, to the the humdrum tawdriness of the life around her.

And here I will look at Rigoletto in the light of The Music Man, which I think, probably vainly, might be a first. I first saw the classic 1962 film just a few years ago (I have never seen it on stage), & contrary to what I had heard & assumed, Marian the Librarian was not a naïve, hopeful young woman whose very innocence is what converts con man Harold Hill to honesty: she was, instead, a restless, intelligent woman who understood perfectly well that Hill was very likely a con man who would bring her heartache instead of happiness: but to her the risk was worth it, to have a life that expanded beyond the narrow confines she was trapped in, even if the expansion led to grief & not joy.

Similarly, Gilda ultimately understands what the Duke is worth. Even his brief moment of genuine feeling for her at the beginning of Act 2 (Ella mi fu rapita!) is self-deluding, though sincere: even if we didn't have the little shock of finding out shortly, via a page sent to look for him, that there is, in fact, already a Duchess married to him, it is inconceivable that a Duke would marry the daughter of his jester. But Gilda chooses an impossible love. She chooses to choose, for herself. I think a lot of contemporary audiences end up angry with the social system that led to this situation, & I would agree with their anger, but they also often seem angry with Gilda for making this decision, & I guess that's where I would disagree: what is the freedom to love if it does not include the freedom to be perverse & self-defeating? As with Cio-Cio San, another woman who chooses to reject her family & create her own identity, we may not approve (for whatever our approval is worth) of the identify she has chosen, but it's the essence of her self-creation that she is free to choose what she thinks is right, not what we'd like her to choose, in some ideal world.

That's a lot to lay on one soprano, but Adela Zaharia carries it off. A tall, striking woman with a strong presence, she conveyed Gilda's strength as well as her sorrow. When she is kidnapped, & then when she is re-united with her father, she is wearing a long, angelically floating white robe. As Rigoletto orders the courtiers out & tries to comfort her, he picks up the nearest cloak to wrap her in, meaning to cover & protect her. It is a deep red (again, the color of passion, of sexual shame, & of martyrdom). She soon lets it drop, reverting to her angelic white: she feels she has done no real wrong. The father/daughter duets in this work (& in Verdi's works in general) are justly famous, & the melting Gilda was matched by the volcanic Rigoletto of Amartuvshin Enkhbat. Depths of gorgeous sound issued from him when he was alone with his beloved daughter, but his scorn for the courtiers came from a different place. He constantly prowled around the court, gesturing rudely with his bauble, actively engaged in his satirical (& therefore judgmental) role. Even when he is pleading for help from a courtier who he hopes is sympathetic, he can't resist an alienating, self-defeating jab, noting that it would "cost nothing" for the courtier to help him. Perhaps the daughter inherited some of the father's perversity.

Yongzhao Yu as the Duke floated through his court, projecting the character's easy heedless charm, tossing off his famous aria on the fickleness of women with aplomb. Aleksey Bogdanov thundered authoritatively as Monterone; Peixin Chen made a foreboding Sparafucile (I love the character's flat refusal to cheat a customer by killing him & just taking the money, like a common thief; you can see the bones of Hugo's romantic drama beneath the libretto). J'Nai Bridges is an enticing, complex Maddalena, & I think this is where phrases like "luxury casting" come to mind. All the performers are at a very high level, & that includes the chorus, singing with point & passion. There were staging moments with them that I don't remember from earlier productions: a campy, rather catty re-enactment for the Duke of the kidnapping of Gilda, some coordinated, dance-like movements that looked frivolous & decadent.

I'm kind of sorry to bring down the tone here by mentioning some audience giggles at some of the plot mechanisms – yes, nineteenth century opera / Romantic drama have conventions that now seem outdated to us! Who knew! It's always seemed to me that openness to theatrical conventions, even outmoded ones – openness to the artificial, to the foreign – is the true sign of sophistication, not giggling at plot devices from an obviously different time & place. On the train after the performance, I ended up talking with two young women who asked about Rigoletto. (They were coming from Ray of Light's production of the musical Nine to Five, which they said was really good.) One of them mentioned a man I've often seen around Civic Center after opera performances (he was there again last night). He clearly has a trained operatic voice. He also clearly has fallen on hard times, for the usual reasons, & is now trying to create an acceptable life for himself. The woman who brought up this man said she wished someone would write an opera about him & his struggles, titling it with whatever the masculine equivalent of La Traviata would be. She saw the connection between the world of Romantic opera & the streets around us: beyond the theatrical styles of another time, beyond the outdated concerns for family honor & suchlike, those are our contemporaries on stage: the bitter joker, the heedless, privileged man of power, the young woman who loves not wisely but too well, the sneering, shallow crowds the circulate around the powerful, mocking the weak, the person whose anger ends up destroying himself: this is news from our own time. With this production, San Francisco Opera has done justice to the truth of Verdi[s vision.