[[Listen]]
Gilda is moved to despair: "Ah, thus to me of love he spoke."
[[Listen]]
Rigoletto mutters of vengeance.
It is the Duke who begins the quartet; Maddalena who first joins in by coyly mocking him; Gilda whose voice next falls upon the night with despairing accents; Rigoletto whose threats of vengeance then are heard. With the return of the theme, after the first cadence, the varied elements are combined.
They continue so to the end. Gilda's voice, in brief cries of grief, rising twice to effective climaxes, then becoming even more poignant through the syncopation of the rhythm.
Rising to a beautiful and highly dramatic climax, the quartet ends pianissimo.
This quartet usually is sung as the pièce de résistance of the opera, and is supposed to be the great event of the performance. I cannot recall a representation of the work with Nilsson and Campanini in which this was not the case, and it was so at the Manhattan when "Rigoletto" was sung there by Melba and Bonci. But at the Metropolitan, since Caruso's advent, "Rigoletto" has become a "Caruso opera," and the stress is laid on "La donna è mobile," for which numerous encores are demanded, while with the quartet, the encore is deliberately side-stepped—a most interesting process for the initiated to watch.