Word: rigoletto
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...this be Rigoletto? The curtain rises on a mid-20th century New York City hotel ballroom instead of a 16th century Mantuan ducal palazzo; the Duke and his courtiers are not nobles but crime lords, and Rigoletto is a bartender, not a jester. The second scene takes place in a Little Italy tenement where Rigoletto has secreted his daughter, Gilda, and where she is wooed by the Duke, who sports a high school warmup jacket. The finale is set in a seedy, Hopperesque waterfront dive. When the Duke sings his famous La donna e mobile aria, in English, he first...
DIED. Tito Gobbi, 70, Italian baritone considered one of the finest singing actors of his generation, best known for such operatic roles as the sinister Scarpia in Tosca, lago in Otello, and the title character in Rigoletto; of cancer; in Rome...
...Rise of the Stage Director. All right, if there are no new works, then make old works new through flamboyant reinterpretation. The stage director, once a traffic cop, has become in effect a second librettist. These show doctors have made some startling alterations: Jonathan Miller updated Rigoletto as a '50s Mafia love story; Patrice Chereau set the Ring during the turbulence of the industrial revolution; Jean-Pierre Ponnelle WIDE WORLD played The Flying Dutchman as the phantasmagorical dream of one of its minor characters. Most radical of all is Peter Brook's La Tragédie de Carmen...
Urbane yet intense, scholarly yet venturesome, Miller has controversially reworked the classics of theater and opera on stages from Britain's National Theater to the Opera Theater of St. Louis. Among his six productions in the past year alone are a Rigoletto for the English National Opera, conceived as a Mafia saga, and a Hamlet in London rendered as Grand Guignol farce. He has also made films and TV shows, notably for BBC and PBS, including half a dozen feverish but authentic renditions of Shakespeare...
This, of course, is nonsense. Usually what the composer puts down on paper is what he had in mind. True, opera librettos have occasionally been censored (as was Verdi's Rigoletto), and sometimes the exigencies of performance required certain concessions in the music itself. Carmen, a failure when it was first performed at the Opéra Comique in 1875, was outfitted after Bizet's death with recitatives by Ernest Guiraud to replace its original spoken dialogue. But this did not change the essential character of the composer's conception...