29/04/2026
About opera, stage direction, and musical dramaturgy.
I recently went to Rigoletto and wrote below about my impressions. The production itself gave me no serious objections, though I didn’t witness any revelations either. But the casting upset me deeply. A discussion then began with a singer friend about Gilda: can Gilda be sung by someone with a warm, mature feminine timbre, when the opera is about an inexperienced teenager with an abusive father?
My point: no, because it simply won’t work — it is not built into the score.
Her point: if the director shifts the focus and presents Gilda as a young woman rather than a teenager, then why not?
Let me explain my thoughts.
In opera, unlike spoken drama, the director is tightly limited by the music — by major and minor modes, harmonic changes, choice of key, instrumentation. The composer has already staged the scene in advance. The music itself already contains suggestions for set design, casting, and so on. There is certainly room for choice — but that choice is bounded by the score.
I remember how a director, who was actually a visual artist by profession, staged Falstaff at the Mariinsky by invitation of Valery Gergiev. Before that he had directed Simon Boccanegra, and it worked beautifully. There was sea, breeze, night atmosphere — and most importantly, nothing interfered with singing. And there was Vladislav Sulimsky — the best Simon ever. One of the rare times when I simply could not stop crying in the final act. Not out of pity for the hero, but because of the perfection of what was happening. (Gergiev was in tremendous form then too.)
Apparently, wanting to repeat that success, they invited the same director again.
But Falstaff is an entirely different creature.
There one must listen — the whole comedy lives in the orchestra. It simply has to be heard and visualised. But only someone capable of truly hearing and interpreting the score can do that.
In the end, the director (an Italian, incidentally — so the language of the opera was native to him) overloaded the stage with décor: antique chairs, symbolic objects, endless details. Yet nothing worked. Because everything missed the point. The music is bright — the stage is dark. The orchestra depicts a fall — nothing falls on stage. The musical tempo is quick — the characters move in lazy slow motion. And so on.
As a result, the photos were beautiful — but the show did not function. It ran a few times and was quietly shelved.
In the direction of Rigoletto I noticed no outrageous stupidity, except that one could very well have done without a ma********ng Gilda. Why? Could she in reality be doing that? Quite possibly — she is a teenager, after all. But in opera it is unnecessary, because it contributes nothing to the final catharsis. So why is it there at all?
Gilda’s age is already written into her music. Both her arias are simple melody, the simplest accompaniment. Giuseppe Verdi was not trying there to depict subconscious psychological movements of the soul. Gilda exists in order to make this story heartbreaking.
And the story is called Rigoletto.
He is vice in the service of vice, yet like any human being, he has something sacred in his soul — his daughter. And this is in the music: whenever he sings of Gilda, the music has unearthly warmth, beauty, fragility.
The opera is about that — not about him being a tyrant.
He locks her away. He does not even tell her his real name. Yet despite his sins we sympathise with him, because all of us fear above all else losing a child. We sympathise because both text and music place the emphasis on love. Holy love inside a corrupt monster.
But for that to work, we need Gilda the angel, not Gilda the woman, because Romanticism above all depends on contrast.
In Romantic works, strong ideas and strong passions are taken, stripped of unnecessary detail, pushed to opposite extremes — and then collided until they explode. At that moment the listener is meant to experience a spiritual or**sm, elegantly renamed catharsis. (It happens to me, though more often from recordings.) Lev Vygotsky describes this process brilliantly in The Psychology of Art.
That is why the failure of the Rigoletto I attended was this: in the final scene, when it is already clear that Rigoletto holds the co**se of his daughter in his arms, there was laughter in the auditorium…
Poor Verdi.
If you have seen the wonderful RAI series about his life, carefully based on historical sources, you will understand why I pity him. What creation meant to him. This was not Gioachino Rossini, for whom opera was also a highly successful business.
So, in conclusion: what distinguishes opera from any other theatre is that the composer limits the director’s imagination through music, in which everything is already there — emotions, heartbeat, atmosphere, weather.
Within those composer-given boundaries one should interpret, not arrive with a cloth, wipe the notes off the board, and paint one’s own reality over them.
And yes — there is also musical dramaturgy.
It happens rarely, only with truly great conductors. When you listen to the music, and it is shaped so magnificently — phrasing, vocal quality, orchestral colours, balance, tempi, metre and rhythm — that you do not need to see the stage at all. The music creates the images by itself.
That is what I expect in the theatre.
And I will never settle for less.
