Patrick Bade
Rigoletto, Part 1

Patrick Bade - Rigoletto, Part 1

- Good. So, I’ll get started then. So, I’m afraid I’m not talking about Don Giovanni as was originally billed, because I found I didn’t have the right materials with me here in Paris. I’m going to talk about “Rigoletto” instead, and also, really, on the advice of Wendy and at the request of a number of listeners, I’m going to take this a bit slower and I’m going to do it over two sessions, and this enables me to play longer musical extracts. So, “Rigoletto” was first performed in 1850, and it’s the first of three great masterpieces by Giuseppe Verdi that he wrote in very quick succession, “Rigoletto,” “Il trovatore” and “La traviata.” So, he’s in his late thirties and he really hits full maturity at this time. And it’s quite interesting to bear in mind, he’s in his late thirties, so he has already outlived Mozart, Bizet, Gershwin by a year or so, and Schubert and Bellini, really by several years. You wonder what we’d think of Verdi now, if he died before he wrote these operas. And he’d already written 16 operas in what he called his galley years. Now “Rigoletto” was commissioned in Venice from the Fenice. One of the, many people think it’s the most beautiful opera house in the world. Ravishing setting, of course.

You could approach it by canal and with these very beautiful interiors recently restored after a fire. And so there was always a big problem where in Italy, when you were commissioned to write an opera, you had, at this time, before the unification of Italy, you had to get it past the censors. And they were always very, very nervous that an opera could be too exciting for an audience. I think I’ve already mentioned this famous incident when, in Brussels in 1830, when the audience became so excited that they rioted and that triggered a revolution leading to the creation of a new country, the country of Belgium. This was particularly sensitive, of course, in Italy. But so Verdi came across the subject of, it’s a play by Victor Hugo that had been premiered in Paris in 1831, called “Le roi s'amuse”. And it’s a play based on history, there are historical characters in it. The main tenor character is Francis I of France. But he was thought to be very handsome, and he was a great lover and a great womaniser. So this is what Verdi said to, wrote to his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave. He said, “I have in mind a subject that’d be one of the greatest creations of the modern theatre, if the police would only allow it. But who knows? They allowed Ernani, they might even allow us to do this.

And at least there are no conspiracies in it. Have a try. The subject is grand, immense, and there is a character in it who is one of the greatest creations that the theatre of all countries, in all times, can boast. The subject is "Le roi s'amuse.” The character is Tribolet, who later becomes Rigoletto. So, in fact, they did have problems with the censor because they didn’t want to represent royalty behaving badly on stage. We know royalty, of course, never behaves badly. So they said, “All right, you can do it, but it can’t be the King of France. It has to be somebody else.” So they changed the setting of the opera from France to Mantua, but they kept it in the same period. They kept it in the 16th century. That was very, very important to Verdi. Verdi always felt that each opera had what he called a tinta. That’s the colour. It’s a flavour and it’s the flavour of the period. I mean, when he was forced, for the same reasons, to change the subject of the masked ball in “Un ballo in maschera”, he changed it from the Royal Court of Sweden to Boston. But he was adamant he didn’t mind changing the continent and the place, but it had, because he felt the music of that opera, had the colour of, for him, the 18th century.

So, he really didn’t want to change the century. So I think Verdi would’ve been extremely out of sympathy with the tendency of modern opera directors to swap periods and modernise the subject or opera. So here is what Mantua looked like in the 16th century, in the middle of its lagoon in northern Italy. And so we start off with the… I think now it’s quite difficult to realise how radically original “Rigoletto” was for Italian audiences. It would’ve been startlingly new, startlingly original. Not just for Italian audiences, for audiences throughout Europe. And in fact, it got pretty terrible reviews. The “Gazette Musicale de Paris,” after the premier in Paris said, “‘Rigoletto’ is the weakest opera of work of Verdi. It has no tunes. This opera has hardly any chance to be kept in the repertoire.” That that goes down with, you know, one of the most disastrously inept reviews of all times. No tunes? Excuse me. I hope that all of you’ll be humming the tunes by the end of this lecture. But even though the critics didn’t get it, the public did. It was a huge success with the public from the start. And it’s one of Verdi’s operas that has never, ever gone out of fashion. It’s been consistently a staple of the repertoire from 1850 to the present day. Now, remember those of you who listened to my last lecture, there was a little debate at the end. Various people were saying, “Why did I say that Don Carlos is a great masterpiece, but it’s flawed.” And I’ve had some quite interesting correspondence about that with people since the lecture. My friend Mike in Munich, he gave me the very interesting idea. He said, “One of the problems is it’s too long, it’s not very well proportioned.”

But he said, the real, the key problem really is the balance between the personal and the political. And that Verdi really struggles a bit with that. But “Rigoletto” is just one of those operas that is perfect. I think of “Tristan und Isolde,” I think of “La boheme,” whether they, you know, they’re operas that just seem to have written themselves. And this is one of those operas. Verdi does not put a foot wrong in this opera. Now, I’m going to play you, it has a very brief prelude. It doesn’t have an overture. And it begins with, really what Wagner would call, a light motif, a theme, a motto theme. Played very ominously on the brass. And it goes, . And it is, the words come later in the opera. The old man cursed me. And in fact, a working title for the opera before they set on “Rigoletto” was “La maledizione,” “The Curse.” And you’ll see that the curse plays a very central role in the plot of this opera. So, here is the opening statement of the very brief prelude to act one. We have a rapid change of mood. We’re plunged into a rather wild party, in some modern productions, really even an orgy in the Ducal Palace of Mantua. Verdi’s festive, his party music, in these early operas, it always sounds a little bit like a, sort of, small town Italian band, of the kind that he actually conducted in his hometown of Busseto. But here it is. And the first of the three main characters that we meet is the Duke of Mantua. It’s a wonderful role for a tenor. He’s in many ways a very unpleasant character. He’s shallow, narcissistic and an exhibitionist. And you may say, “Wow, yes, a tenor.”

It’s the perfect role for a tenor. And there are many tenors who really, hardly have to act in this role. What you really, it needs a very beautiful, seductive voice. Of course, it’s nice if he’s good looking too. But the important thing is that the voice itself has to seduce and you have to believe in him as a seducer. Otherwise, why is it that all these women fall for him? So it’s always been a preferred role for the greatest tenors and three very famous Duke of Mantuas here, Enrico Caruso on the left, Jussi Bjorling in the middle, and Luciano Pavarotti on the right. And he is introduced with his little aria, “Questa o quella” which expresses his philosophy of life, which is to have sex with as many women, almost indiscriminately, as he possibly can. And we’re going to hear this in a modern recording with the very excellent Maltese tenor, Joseph Calleja. I really love the sound of his voice. I’ll be interested to know how you react to it. In a way, it’s quite an old-fashioned sound. He reminds me, very much, of the famous tenors, Italian tenors, at the interwar period. It’s a very bright, warm, Mediterranean sound with a little ripple of fast vibrato.

• So next we meet the title role character of Rigoletto, who is the court jester to the Duke of Mantua. And this is one of the greatest roles for a baritone in the entire operatic repertoire. It’s a wonderful, wonderful role. I mean, I often fantasise about what, if I come back in another life, I’d like to come back as a singer, what kind of singer would I like to be? What roles would I like to sing? I’d love to be able to sing “Rigoletto.” It must be immensely satisfying for any great baritone. So he needs, certainly, a great voice with quite a good top to the baritone range. But above all, he needs to be a great singing actor. This is a costume design on the left, the original production on the right. A very famous Rigoletto, the late 19th century Battistini. If you remember, I played his voice to you a week ago in “I puritani.” Victor Maurel, one of one of Verdi’s favourite singers on the left. Again, Battistini on the right. Giuseppe De Luca, Titta Ruffo, these are very… I mean, there’ve been so many great Rigolettos. Tito Gobbi, Carlo Galeffi, Robert Merrill. I’m going to mainly use recordings of Tito Gobbi, who seems to me, in my opinion, is the finest Rigoletto of all, on record. So, he’s a very complex character, and he was really the main reason that Verdi was attracted to the subject.

In another letter to his librettist, he says, “To me, there is something really fine in representing on stage, this character so ugly and ridiculous, but inwardly, so impassioned and so full of love.” So we first meet him, we see him at really, at his most unpleasant. He encourages the Duke of Mantua in his immoral excesses. And he mocks, cruelly mocks the victims of the Duke. And so we have the character of Monterone, a small role for a bass, who comes in and he denounces the Duke for seducing his daughter. And Rigoletto mocks him. So Monteretti turns on him. He turns on him and the Duke, and you can see, he says, “I curse you.” And particularly to Rigoletto, he says, “As for you, Serpent, you can laugh at a father’s anguish, a father’s curse be on your head.” Well, I’m sure you know from Italian operas, curses are always very effective. They’re not something to be taken lightly. And in this case, Monterone really touches on Rigolettos Achilles heel. ‘Cause Rigoletto has a secret, which is the daughter that he loves so much. So, to get a father’s curse is something very terrible for him. And he reacts, he’s says, . He’s absolutely horrified at this curse.

• Now the scene changes to Rigoletto’s house and Verdi is extremely specific in his instructions of what the scenery should look like. And this is always the case with Verdi. And I think he would be very, very unhappy indeed with the extremely cavalier way that modern directors stage his operas with very different settings. So, this is what he asked for. He says, “Left, a modest house with a small courtyard enclosed by a wall. In the courtyard, a great tree, with a marble bench beside it. A door in the wall opens to the street. Above the wall, a terrace over a lodger. From the second story, a door opens onto the terrace, which can be reached by a stair in the front. To the right of the road, a much higher wall beyond which can be seen one side of the Palace of Ceprano. It is night. Rigoletto enters right,” on the right hand side, “his cloak wrapped tightly around him. He’s followed by Sparafucile, who carries a huge sword beneath his cape.” But very, very specific instructions here, This scene is wonderfully eerie and spooky. Rigoletto encounters this thug Sparafucile in the street. First of all, you can see, as he arrives, he’s totally haunted by this curse that’s been put upon him. Yet he keeps on saying to himself, he keeps on repeating , the old man cursed me.

Now Verdi has often been criticised, especially in his earlier operas for the crudity of his instrumentation. And it’s certainly true, of course, compared to Wagner or even compared to Weber. His orchestration is really quite rudimentary. But, in this scene, it’s absolutely brilliantly effective. He creates a wonderfully eerie, menacing, sinister effect. We have a conversation that goes on between Rigoletto and Sparafucile. Rigoletto initially thinks that Sparafucile is going to mug him. And he says, or is going to ask for money. And he says, , “No, I don’t have any money.” And then Sparafucile says, “No, no, no, I don’t want money. I’m an artisan.” His skill is actually murder. And what he’s actually offering Rigoletto, he says, “If you want anybody bumped off, I’ll do it for you.” So it’s a very dark sinister scene down a dark alleyway. And as I said, the mood is created with very simple, but very original orchestration. It’s muted cellos, double bass. And they play this rather sinuous, sinister melody. And with the two singers just talking over the top of it and underneath the strings we have clarinets, bassoons. And it’s, as I said, a wonderfully sinister and spooky little scene.

• So Sparafucile departs and Rigoletto is left alone. And he then embarks on this great monologue. And I stress this is a monologue. It’s not an aria, as Italian audiences would’ve understood it at the time. It doesn’t have the form of an aria. But it’s a wonderful opportunity for a great singing actor like Tito Gobbi, who we’re going to hear here. And he has to go through the whole gamut, really, of human emotion. Bitter, self anger, sort of, lachrymose, self-pity, tender love for his daughter. He had to go through a whole range of different emotions and to express them with his, with the colour of his voice.

• Wonderful snarl in Gobbi’s voice. Nobody does that better than him. Now, he enters his house and for the first time, we meet the heroine of the opera, his daughter Gilda. And I want to introduce you now to the Gilda of my dreams, which is Amelita Galli-Curci. She was an Italian singer. And in the early years of her career, she had modest success in the provincial theatres of Italy. She never sang at La Scala. She went to South America and sang in Bueno Aires with modest success. And then in 1916, height of the First World War, there was the German U-Boat campaign at the Atlantic. It was too dangerous for her to return to Europe. So she decided to stay in the Americas. She went to New York, she auditioned for the Met, they turned her down. And then she went up to Chicago and she made her debut as Gilda in Chicago in 1916. And it was one of those really famous, a star is born occasions, you know, she was an incredible overnight sensation. And she immediately became the second most popular classical recording star, after Caruso. Her record sold in huge numbers around the world and they’ve been reissued any number of times. And she’s always been one of the most loved singers on record. Her voice has, I played you her before in the “I puritani” lecture. Her voice has such a special quality. It’s so pure and so warm. But it’s also, I think she always sounds so natural. She sounds, she never sounds like she’s trying, she always sounds like it comes to her naturally. And she sounds completely sincere. So she’s just utterly perfect in this role. Oh yes, to say that, of course, she was at the height of her success in Chicago in the early 1920s.

This is a period of, you know, prohibition, gangsterism. That’s Al Capone on the left, Bugsy Moran on the right hand side, were engaged in this war of gangsters with all these terrible massacres and so on. And there’s a famous story… Oh, here is Galli-Curci with her very frequent partner, the very elegant tenor, Tito Schipa. And there’s a famous story about a gangster being gunned down by the police in Chicago. He was actually on the way to the opera. And in his jacket, they found a ticket for “Rigoletto.” Rigoletto was performed every year in Chicago in this period. And I always think, “Oh, poor guy. Couldn’t they wait till after the performance? At least he would’ve died happy if he’d heard, the last thing he heard was a wonderful performance of "Rigoletto” with Galli-Curci and Tito Schipa. Anyway, this is a very famous story, and of course it inspired a scene, which I think you all know. I’m sure you do, in “Some Like It Hot” when you have this conference of the inverted commas, “the friends of Italian opera.” George Raft as Spats Colombo. And he’s questioned about his alibi for the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago. And he tells the police, “Oh, I was at 'Rigoletto.’” And he turns to his right, to the guy you see on his right for confirmation.

And he says, “Sure, boss, we was at ‘Rigolettos.’” And that in turn, of course, that famous moment in that movie, that was what gave Jonathan Miller the inspiration to set his version of Rigoletto in this gangster land in America. A very famous production that went for many years at the English National Opera. Anyway, here we go, straight into, this is the final section of very long duet between Rigoletto and his daughter. And I’ve got another interesting quote from Verdi about this opera. He says, “Let me say that I conceived ‘Rigoletto’ almost without arias.” That is true. There is only one aria in the whole opera that forms, that follows the conventional form of an aria, i.e. recitative, aria, cabaletta. And I’ll be talking about that at the beginning of next week’s or Wednesday’s session. So he said, “I conceived the ‘Rigoletto’ almost without arias, without finale, with only as a string of duets.” So, here is the end of the first of three very extended duets, between Rigoletto and his daughter, Gilda. And here we have Giuseppe De Luca and the wonderful Galli-Curci.

• Now, Gilda is left alone and she has her big solo scene. I call it that ‘cause it’s not, as Verdi says, strictly speaking, an aria in the conventional sense. Now, she has been chatted up on the way from church by this very handsome young man. Oh no, first of all, I’ve got the scene where he, the Duke in disguise as a student, he calls himself Gualtier Malde. He now suddenly appears, he’s been let in by Gilda’s servant, Giovanna. And he presents himself to her. And, as a student without means. It’s funny, in the back of my mind, this opera is always in German for me because I got to know it through a German recording, which I’ll tell you more about later. And so in my mind he’s saying , which means I’m a student and without means. And he seduces her. And this really has to be seductive. You’ve got the score here, and you can see that it starts off, he starts off ppp. So that’s, it more than pianissimo, it’s pianississimo. He has to start very, very softly. And then he has to gradually build up to double f, to fortissimo. So, and there are many changes of dynamic in it. Now, Verdi was always adamant that he wanted his singers to sing what was in the score. And he complained about singers who played around with what he’d written. He was very strict. He wanted them to really follow his instructions. But, so I’m going to play you two versions of this solo of the Duke of Mantua. The first is from the very famous recording with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi. And it’s with Giuseppe Di Stefano. And he has, of course, a very lovely voice, one of the most beautiful voices of his generation. And certainly as far as the notes are concerned, and as far as the tempo is concerned, he does actually pretty exactly follow what is in the score. But he certainly doesn’t, as far as the dynamic markings are. He does not start pianissimo. He starts, sort of, mezzo-forte, and actually there is very little variation, in terms of volume. He’s singing pretty well full out throughout.

• Now I’m going to play you the same section with a singer of Verdi’s lifetime. This is Fernando de Lucia, who’s, the height of his career was in the 1880s and the 1890s. Verdi must have heard him on many occasions. As far as I know, there is no letter where Verdi specifically writes about Fernando de Lucia. But he does write about other singers, particularly, a singer called Angelo Masini, who’s known to have been very similar to de Lucia. And who Verdi admired very much. And although Verdi wanted singers to sing exactly what he’d written, he certainly would expected a singer to exercise a certain freedom rhythmically and to use what the Italians called rubato. Rubato is robbed time. So you don’t sing to a strict beat. You can speed up, you can slow down. And my guess is that Verdi would’ve found what we’ve just heard, very pedestrian. Actually rather dull. And he would’ve been more used to hearing something like what we’re going to hear now. Many differences. First of all, you may notice that this is transposed downwards. It’s obviously recorded towards the end of de Lucia’s career and I think he probably couldn’t manage the higher tessitura. Overall, it’s much, much slower. But within this slower rhythm, you’ll hear how he speeds up and slows down at various points. And also you’ll, he’s much, much more observant of Verdi’s dynamic markings. So, he really does start softly and builds up to a much louder climax.

• So, it’s a performance full of extraordinary light and shade and beautiful, beautiful expressive touches. So now we come to, as I said, to Gilda’s big number, “Caro Nome,” “Dear Name.” She’s turning over in her mind, she’s just discovered this name of this beautiful young man, who’s really been stalking her and who she’s fallen in love with, Gualtier Malde. She keeps repeating his name. And it starts off very, very simply. But as she turns over the name again and again in her mind, the simple melody becomes more and more ornamented with exquisite, little lacey ornaments and trills. Now, the first soprano who had to sing this in Venice in 1850, found it difficult. And her husband wrote to Verdi complaining about the difficulty of the aria. And Verdi wrote back to him saying, “As for the cavatina in the first act, I don’t see where the difficulty comes in. Perhaps you haven’t understood the tempo, which ought to allegretto molto lento, at a moderate pace and sung sotto voce. It shouldn’t give the slightest difficulty.” Well, he’s really being disingenuous because this is not an easy aria to sing. But what he’s saying is it shouldn’t sound like it’s difficult. She’s got to sound like a young girl who’s just musing to herself. She’s not got… What he really doesn’t want is for the singer to sound like a prima showing off her coloratura skills. So anyway, I’m going to go back to Galli-Curci. This is a recording made very soon after her sensational debut in 1916 in Chicago. And it shows her voice at its very freshest.

• As I said, that’s not an aria that has a conventional form at all. You would normally expect an aria like that to have a cabaletta, that’s a very fast, showy concluding section, and you’d expect it to end with some spectacular high notes. But instead, Verdi requests that the singer should walk slowly off stage. She has to mount a staircase, she’s carrying a candle, she’s going to bed, and she’s still musing on this name Gualtier Malde. And she has to walk off stage holding an endless trill. And so it’s not a showy ending at all. It’s very difficult. It’s more difficult than going up to a top D or top E or whatever. But, certainly in the past, very few sopranos followed Verdi’s instructions because they thought they were going to get more applause if they went up to a high top note. But one singer who does exactly what Verdi asked for and does it, in my opinion, better than any other singer on record, is the German soprano Erna Berger. And this is from that recording I mentioned earlier, which was the recording in which I got to know the opera. I bought it on an LP. I suppose I must have been about 12 or 13 from Smith’s in Godalming High Street. And I had absolutely no idea that this recording was actually a German radio broadcast. Can you imagine, November, 1944 from Berlin.

You think, my god, where did they even find a building with a roof on in Berlin in 1944? But it’s a great recording, it’s really a wonderful recording. And next to Galli-Curci, Erna Berger is my absolute favourite Gilda on record. And I had the great pleasure spending two days with her once by Ruit. When was that? It was in 1989. And she was a sweet woman, a very sweet woman. I really felt, you know, if Gilda hadn’t died at the end of “Rigoletto” and she lived to be an old woman, this is how she would’ve turned out. And we had these long, long, long conversations. Of course, there was an elephant in the room and the elephant in the room was Adolf Hitler because she had been one of his favourite singers and she was required to sing for him in his birthday concerts in April every year. Of course, I didn’t dare to bring up that subject with her. I think I might now, but I didn’t then. And in fact, I mean, she was never a member of the Nazi party. She was courageous enough to refuse to sign the Nazi inspired petition against Fritz Busch in Dresden in 1934, so. And I’m not sure that you can necessarily blame someone for being liked by Adolf Hitler, but here she is singing this incredible, wonderful, endless trill as she walks off stage.

• Now, that’s how it should be done, and you’ll probably never get to hear it again like that. Now, act one ends with the evil, nasty, malicious courtiers of the Duke of Mantua. Who are out to play a malicious practical joke on Rigoletto. They bring him along and they recruit him, as they say, to help them to abduct the daughter of the Count Ceprano who lives in the house opposite Rigoletto. But they blindfold him and they spin him around. They get him to hold a ladder while they climb over the wall into Rigolettos house, and they abduct Gilda and you hear her cry as she seized by them and carried off. And then right at the end, Rigoletto pulls off his mask, his blindfold, and he realises that he’s been duped and that his daughter has been stolen. And he cries out . It’s the curse. So I’m going to play you this music, this end of act one with the wonderful conspirators music. Verdi’s great at conspiratorial music. It always, it’s a wonderful, kind of, mixture of sinister and slightly comic. A little bit, there’s a little touch of keystone kops always about his conspirators choruses.

• [Rigoletto] Gilda! Gilda! Gilda! Gilda!

• Right. So that’s it. Let’s see what questions I’ve got.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Did I wear a mask at the flea market?

A: Mostly not because it’s in the open air.

Don Giovanni, I’ll have to do it now after Christmas.

Somebody pointing out joy. Yes, it is true. The festive music in “Traviata” sounds, actually quite similar to the festive music in “Rigoletto.”

Yeah, well it depends, in the production, when the curtain goes up, I have to say. Lillian Levy, “I first discovered Joseph Calleja when he was 19. Totally unknown, still a student singing at the festival in Waterford.”

Oh, lucky you. Well, I, your husband and you predicted a prestigious future, well done. Since there was no TV at the time of Rigoletto’s role was to amuse the Duke at the court and taunt the courtiers, when he went too far the Duke would reign him in. That’s true.

Q: “Why did the critics not like it?”

A: I mean, you know, there is a whole book, I’m just trying to think what his name is. Very brilliant American critic of critical abuse. There’s a whole book of it. All the absolutely idiotic things that critics have said about great music.

You know, that “Carmen” had no tunes and you know, so many great works have been absolutely lambasted. It’s called that the “Dictionary of Musical Invective,” “Dictionary Of Musical Invective.” If you look it up, it’s very amusing. It makes good bedtime reading.

Bring you back to brilliant orchestration. Yes, so simple and so brilliant and so effective. The orchestration at the beginning of that scene, I don’t think, I think it’s… You were talking about the Bregenz production?

Yes, with the huge head. I saw that production actually. It must be about three or four years old and I’m quite sure you are right. I think Verdi would’ve absolutely hated it.

“'Pari Siamo’ is ‘Rigoletto’s’ ‘Credo.’” Yes, I suppose I can see the parallel there. Well, of course, they’re both of them very, very great scenes for a baritone who’s also, who’s a good singing actor.

This is Barbara Grice, she’s saying, “Sponsored ‘Rigoletto’ at Chicago Lyric Opera 2017/18 with the Italian soprano Rosa Feola as Gilda.” I don’t know her. “She was such a success that she’ll be singing Gilda at the Met this season.” I will look her up.

“Amelita was very famous for singing flat, and I don’t mean to demean the beauty of her voice, but years later she found she had a goitre.” Yeah, that is true. It was a problem that increased. I mean, she started to have intonation problems in the late 1920s and it’s true, she had to have an operation on her…

So, this is Michael who much prefers Joan Sutherland sing Gilda. No, I don’t, I think Gilda should sound light and I’m going to be very provocative here. I’m going to say I want a Gilda where I can actually understand something that she’s singing. And I remember taking a car journey with an Italian opera director called Mario Corradi and he was playing, it was on his CD player, “Rigoletto” with Sutherland and Pavarotti. And he suddenly turned to me and he said, “What language is she’s singing in?” I mean, you couldn’t understand a single word. The end of the aria. No, no, I’m sorry. It’s very difficult for me to, you know, to always match up the music with what’s on, what’s being on the screen. Let me see.

Yes, it’s fantastically dramatic end to the act. I mean, Verdi, as I said, he doesn’t put a foot wrong either musically or dramatically.

Q: “Why the picture of Edward G. Robinson?”

A: It was to go with the story about the gangster being shot down by the police on the way to the opera.

Thank you for your nice… The German Gilda, she’s called Erna Berger. And it’s on, there is a list of all, that you should have been sent, of all the recordings that went out with the PowerPoint.

Q: “Was Rigoletto Jewish?”

A: You know, I’ll tell you a very interesting thing. This is something I should have talked about. Rigoletto is an outsider. And Verdi was very, very fascinated by outsider characters. And you could say that, you know, with those three great operas, “Rigoletto,” “Trovatore,” “Traviata,” the characters that engaged in and made him want to write those operas, each is really an outsider. Azucena, also. I mean, she’s a gypsy, she’s not Jewish, but she could be. So, I think it’s quite an interesting question because, yes. I mean, as you know from Trudy’s lectures, it’s been both the strength and the danger for Jews in Western culture that they have been outsiders. And as I said, Verdi was very, very engaged with outsiders. You could have a, you know, a Jewish Rigoletto would be a very believable character.

Thank you, Colleen. “I saw the production taking place in Chicago in nightclubs. You say you don’t care, loved the music.” I mean, it is true. “Rigoletto,” I mean like “Boheme” or “Carmen,” it’s one of those operas which is just indestructible. It’s so perfect. Good.

Well I think that’s it for today and I’ll continue with “Rigoletto” on Wednesday. Thanks everybody. Bye-Bye.