Verdi: Man and Musician / His Biography with Especial Reference to His English Experiences

by Frederick James Crowest

In Paris a French translation of Rigoletto was equally well received.

The musical characteristics of Rigoletto were immediately discerned and discussed. The general drift of the criticism was that in Rigoletto melody was wanting, that there were no fine concerted pieces, and that the opera possessed everything save living properties. The truth was, Verdi was expressing himself in something of a new language that had yet to be learned.

Here is what an impartial critic thought of Rigoletto at the time of its production:—

"We have never been the champions nor the detractors of Verdi, and we recognise in Rigoletto a higher order of beauty than struck us even in Ernani and the Due Foscari, and an abandonment, at the same time, of his most palpable defects. Rigoletto cannot be ranked, however, as a masterpiece; it is full of plagiarisms and faults, and yet abounds with the most captivating music."[37]

The following is what the Athenæum had to say of Rigoletto, a work which, by the bye, was performed at the Royal Italian Opera, Covent Garden, as recently as last season, when it was received with well-nigh unbounded applause and real pleasure:—"Such effect as Rigoletto produces is produced not by its dramatic propriety of sound to sense. There is hardly one phrase in the part of the Buffoon which might not belong to Signor Verdi's Doge in I Due Foscari or to his Nabucco. The music of combination and dramatic action, again, is puerile and queer—odd modulations being perpetually wrenched out with the vain hope of disguising the intrinsic meagreness of the ideas, and flutes being used for violins, or vice versâ, apparently not to charm the listener but to make him stare. Thus, the opening ball scene, accompanied throughout by orchestras on the stage, the abduction finale, the scene between Rigoletto and the courtiers, and the storm in the last act, are alike miserable in their meagre patchiness and want of meaning.... Signor Verdi is less violent in his instrumentation in Rigoletto than he was in his earlier operas; but he has not here arrived at the music of intellect and expression, which is French or German, as distinguished from the music of melody, which is Italian.... The air of display for Gilda in the garden scene, called in the published copies of the music a Polacca, though in common tempo, is as ineffective a mixture of commonplace and eccentricity as it ever fell to the lot of a prima donna to deliver."[38]

The Times spoke thus of Rigoletto:—"The imitations and plagiarisms from other composers are frequent, while there is not a single elaborate and well-conducted finale, or even morceau l'ensemble. In aiming at simplicity, Signor Verdi has hit frivolity. In other operas he has often, with a certain degree of success hidden poverty of idea under a pompous display of instruments; but in the present, abandoning that artifice, and relying upon the strength of his melodic invention, he has triumphantly demonstrated that he has very few ideas that can be pronounced original. In short, with one exception (Luisa Miller), Rigoletto is the most feeble opera of Signor Verdi with which we have the advantage to be acquainted, the most uninspired, the barest, and the most destitute of ingenious contrivance. To enter into an analysis would be a loss of time and space."[39]

And yet, after forty years or more of musical progress, a crowded fashionable house, to say nothing of the wisdom of the management, will assemble to give its time, attention, and money to listen to an opera which, if we are to believe these two sapient leading critics of a past age, was scarcely worth the paper upon which it was written! Both old and new journalism to-day appears to have everything to say in favour of Rigoletto! Instead of the opera dying, it has proved, we repeat, one of the most admired of Verdi's early works, and we who are living the years of this closing nineteenth century can see what a fitting connecting link Rigoletto forms between Verdi's First and Third period works. The composer bridges us quietly over from impulsive musical youth to a ripe artistic fulness which, natural as it all seems to us who can look back upon Verdi's gradual development towards perfection of style, must have bewildered his closely scrutinising contemporaries. No previous work of his had shown similar masterly force and originality. Apart from the evergreen "La Donna è mobile" air, such attractive numbers as the soprano romance, and the soprano, tenor, and bass duos in the second act, are beauties of the opera that will always tend to keep it on the stage; while no praise would be too much to bestow upon the quartuor in the last act, a piece of concerted music which competent judges are agreed would of itself be sufficient to stamp Verdi as a composer of rare fancy and imagination.

Since its style and merit were maintained in several works that followed it, this opera well lends itself as the starting-point of a Second era in Verdi's career as a leading composer for the Italian lyric stage.

Rigoletto was the first of a series of fine examples of dramatic art, which brought world-wide fame and ample profit to Verdi, lifting him, at the same time, into the first rank of operatic composers. In the face of its alleged defects—absence of melody and concerted pieces, together with a subdued, restricted orchestration—the audiences accepted it, the general feeling being that it stood unsurpassed by any Italian opera. Every habitué of the opera-house to-day is familiar with the sparkling beauties of Rigoletto, and fittingly enough, the opera finds a place in almost every season's programme. The strongest proof of its merits, however, is the fact that performances of the work, extending over a period of forty years, have neither diminished its attractiveness nor prejudiced a new and rising generation against either the book or the music. Several of Verdi's early operas have weathered the test of time and fashion bravely, especially if we remember the evanescent nature of opera generally; but not one, not the Trovatore among his early works, is more highly regarded by musical people to-day than is Rigoletto, the Court Jester.