*** Résumé en anglais seulement ***
The opera s dramatic structure frames and enhances the characters. Scenes of magnificence regularly alternate with scenes of darkness and squalor. From sumptuous interiors, we move to a dark street, a lonely inn. The secondary figures are astutely counterpoised: the plotting courtiers against the plotting Sparafucile and Maddalena (also ambiguously tender-hearted). When Rigoletto says Pari siamo , he could be expressing the motto of the whole work: the beautiful and the ugly can be equally good, equally evil.
At its Fenice opening on 11 March 1851, Rigoletto was immediately popular; but it was not immediately understood. The Gazetta di Venezia attacked: The composer or his librettist ... have sought the ideal in the deformed, the horrible ... We cannot praise these tastes. And Chorley, in his Musical Recollections (1862), while generally praising the opera, wrote: The part of the buffoon s daughter ... is cold, childish, puerile. ... Even in the quartet ... her share amounts to little more than a chain of disconnected sobs ... These devices belong to low art.
Rigoletto has survived the incomprehension of critics as it survived the censors scissors. Its variety, its profundity, its brave originality have kept it alive; we need only listen, admire, and be moved.