New Rigoletto brings boos back to La Scala

A cheer for the boos. I wish audiences, particularly Italian, would be more critical and more aware of their heritage. But modern audiences are so insecure, and so terrified of coming across as not riding whatever wave is fashionable at the time a new opera production is thrown at them, that they accept everything. We live in the “everything goes” era in which apparently everybody save the composer and the librettist have “rights” – the “right” to demolish an existing work of art.

Nobody questions anything. “I think it is fundamental to return to the violence that Verdi had in mind” says Martone. Based on what? Can he read Verdi’s mind from beyond the grave? Can we read about this strange quest for violence in Verdi’s letters? Not that I know of, but I stand corrected if he wrote about this. For now, without evidence, I take it Martone puts words in Verdi’s mouth. If Verdi had wanted the populace to storm the palace and kill the Duke, he would have told Piave so. We can read what Verdi wanted in the libretto – he had wanted for the Duke to go his merry way, singing a last insolent high B 😉 . Verdi had also placed Rigoletto’s modest house in a rather good neighborhood, just across the street from the Ceprano palace, not in the “periphery with its drug addicts and homeless” (“A sinistra, una casa di discreta apparenza con una piccola corte circondata da mura. Nella corte un grosso ed alto albero ed un sedile di marmo; nel muro, una porta che mette alla strada; sopra il muro, un terrazzo sostenuto da arcate. La porta del primo piano dà sul detto terrazzo, a cui si ascende per una scala di fronte. A destra della via è il muro altissimo del giardino e un fianco del palazzo di Ceprano.”) This is why the courtiers can fool Rigoletto and abduct Gilda with her father’s unwitting participation. Martone’s hubris is scary.

Is this the same Martone who did the Napoli Otello production? The Martone who said “Torno a Otello ma Desdemona non è più una vittima”? Extract from Verdi’s letter 1887, April 2nd:
“But Desdemona is not a woman, she’s a type! She is the type of goodness, of resignation, of sacrifice! There are creatures born for others, unconscious of their own ego!”
You won’t find this in the Naples Otello. Instead, you will find Desdemona with a gun, a walking ad for violence-derived “empowerment.”

If Martone wants to jump on the bandwagon of female empowerment (Otello) or social justice (Rigoletto), both on paper (ahem, stage), why doesn’t he create new original works to deal with the subject? Does he lack artistic imagination? It seems so. Or perhaps he lacks money – to make a movie you have to persuade private people to back you, to make an opera production based on schema X all you have to do is trust your begging hand under the nose of an opera manager and he will, very obligingly, put a wad of crisp bills in it, freshly out of the state coffers (in Europe.) And if the stage director lacks the mandatory artistic imagination for supporting the original work, better insult Verdi indirectly implying his oeuvre is so limited from a musical & dramatic point of view, it can’t speak to us on its own terms. And while the director is at it, better insult us too – we’re so backward, so devoid of imagination, we can’t understand anything that isn’t refashioned to make it look like it is literally about some contemporary issue, and totally at odds with the music and the text.

Sorry for the rant, you may delete it if you’d rather not have it on your site.