Rigoletto

With just a few carefully chosen dramatic elements—a splendid royal palace as the site of debauchery and crime, a noble duke as a lascivious tyrant, and a court comedian as the emotional epicenter of a heartbreaking tale—Giuseppe Verdi’s brilliant, blood-soaked Rigoletto turned the 19th-century social order on its head. Written during an era when revolutions roiled Europe and age-old absolute monarchies teetered on the brink of extinction, both Verdi’s opera and the Victor Hugo play that inspired it were met with official censorship and condemnation. Yet as Verdi well knew, the very plot points that so infuriated the authorities (such as a nobleman’s shameless savagery and a humble jester’s murderous revenge) also lent the story an undeniable narrative flair.

For director Bartlett Sher, Rigoletto is a story of power and corruption—and the disastrous consequences of allowing autocratic tendencies to go unchecked. To fully explore the work as a political parable, Sher has transposed the story from 16th-century Mantua to the brief period of democracy in Germany between the two world wars. The Weimar Republic, as this period was known, was an era of both tremendous artistic output and profound political instability, as the ongoing traumas of World War I, the economic effects of rampant inflation, and the terrifying rise of fascism seeped into every facet of daily life.

This guide takes Sher’s “lessons from history” as its mandate. Using Rigoletto as an interdisciplinary lens, it focuses on three distinct time periods and the political and artistic movements that defined them: the middle of the 19th century (when the opera premiered), the interwar period in Europe (when Sher’s production is set), and the world in which we now live. The information on the following pages is designed to provide context, deepen background knowledge, and enrich the overall experience of attending a final dress rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera.