Hume's "Rigoletto" as an Appology

What I'm about to discuss in this post is a theme to which I will return: opera and ballet companies trying to make older works relevant to contemporary life because they just don't have anything comparable with which to replace them.

Opera companies regularly try new works and subscribers dutifully attend, but most are not particularly successful.  The "hits" are for the most part tried and true operas from the past even if many of the story lines were somewhat problematic when first performed and a lot more so now.




Last summer, for instance, the Seattle Opera put on Giuseppe Verdi's "Rigoletto," an 1851 opera based on a story by Victor Hugo. According to stage director Lindy Hume, what's notable about this opera is the fictional Duke of Mantua's appalling treatment of women, evoked in arias that declare women to be unreliable or that declare girls to be all the same to the Duke.

How many years behind bars would he get if tried alongside Harvey Weinstein?

"The topic of sexual assault and violence against women in opera is right there in front of us, either to explore or ignore," Hume said in the Seattle Opera's program notes. And that's not just with respect to "Rigoletto," she noted.  In general, "sopranos must rehearse how to fall, be stabbed, brutalized and thrown across the room."

So why not scrap "Rigoletto" and others like it and replace them with new works attuned to modern life?

Largely, of course, because when it comes to the music and especially the arias (songs) for great voices -- arias that are memorable and often heard outside the context of the full opera -- no one does it anymore. The original point of opera was supposed to be vocalization of the highest order. Singers trained, among other things, to fill a huge concert hall without amplification and the best of them were the celebrities of their day.

"Even contemporary audiences in a post-#MeToo World, who can't but gasp at his (the Duke's) shameless audacity and brazenness, adore those arias -- which is what makes them so brilliant!" Hume observed.

Further rationalizing her involvement as a self-declared feminist in the Seattle Opera's production of "Rigoletto," Hume says Verdi's depiction of fear, violence and misogyny plus obscene wealth and the criminality of high political power is all too representative of our own times.  "This is the world of Verdi's "Rigoletto" and of our own."

So instead of a new opera composed by a contemporary equivalent of Verdi (is there one anywhere?), we had the same old wonderful thing set in set in the recent Italy of disgraced prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The "update" was in this case OK, but the original setting makes far more sense.

Hume's production was in effect an apology to the public for the failure of contemporary composers to rise to the level of the greats of the past.