All tickets 100% authentic and valid for entry!
Rigoletto
Rigoletto is an Italian opera in three acts with music composed by Giuseppe Verdi and a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. The opera is based on Victor Hugo’s 1832 play titled Le roi s'amuse. It premiered at the La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy, in March 1851. This was despite the Austrian control over theaters in northern Italy.
The opera was originally titled La maledizione (The Curse) to signify the curse placed on the Duke of Mantua and his court jester, Rigoletto, by the jester's daughter. The opera is one of the first masterpieces by the composer and his sixteenth in the genre.
Background Information and History
Victor Hugo’s Le roi s'amuse (The King Amuses Himself) was deemed controversial, scandalous, and unacceptable as it portrays King Francis I of France as a womanizer. The play was banned in France for two decades after it premiered. Finally, it was staged in 1882. When Verdi decided on the play for his next opera, he and Francesco knew it wouldn’t be easy to convince the Austrian censor board. They tried their best to convince the censor board members to give permission for the opera. However, De Gorzkowski denied permission in 1850.
After many discussions between the production team and censor board members, they came to a compromise that the action scenes in the opera would be removed and that the characters would be renamed. The king became a Duke, and the setting changed to a land that no longer existed. A couple of scenes were deleted and altered to present him in a better light. The court jester was renamed Rigoletto, which became the opera's title.
Verdi continued to work on the music close to the premiere date. He refined the tracks even during rehearsals. He also asked his lead opera singers and others to keep the tracks a secret, worried that someone would steal the compositions. In fact, Verdi made his singers swear that they wouldn’t even whistle a portion of the tune except during the rehearsals.
The modern productions of Rigoletto opera made drastic changes to the setting. In 1982, Jonathan Miller changed it to New York’s Little Italy from the 1950s with the Mafia as the main characters. In 2005, Doris Dörrie changed it to The Planet of the Apes, and the 2014 production by Australia's Opera Queensland made former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi the main character.