“Rigoletto” RoyalOperaHouse showed not only what audiences have been missing, but what, at something like its best, opera can be
, you tend to think, when, in the first act of “Rigoletto”, the assassin Sparafucile emerges from the shadows to offer his services to the title character, a hunchbacked jester at the court of the licentious Duke of Mantua. Rigoletto takes his contact details, just, you know, on the outside chance that he might want to off someone. Yet in Oliver Mears’s new production at the Royal Opera House in London, the hit-man seems to have been summoned forth by the dark mood of the story.
The problem is that the plots of opera are often byzantine and sometimes incredible. To squeeze in the story alongside the music, some of the elements of the narrative tend to be accelerated. There is a lot of love at first sight; by contrast, death scenes are often eked out to include improbable last-gasp arias. For modern audiences, the tendency of heroines to snuff it during these climaxes, often at the hands of men, is another turn-off.
The curtain rises on a freeze-framed, acrobatic jumble of bodies that mimics Caravaggio’s “The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew”. It is a gorgeous opening; in Simon Lima Holdsworth’s set design, the ensuing antics at the duke’s court unfold in front of vast replicas of mythological paintings by Titian, which reinforce the mood of impunity. The choreography of the chorus, an all-male gang of courtiers, conveys the mutual dependency, menace and escalating cruelty of men in numbers.
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