Fine voices, staid production: Rigoletto revived at Hungarian State Opera

As the curtain falls on Rigoletto with the weeping jester bent over his daughter’s corpse, it takes a leap to apply Giuseppe Verdi’s dictum that good opera must leave the audience “feeling enriched and inspired”. By the end, it’s seen a lecherous libertine deceive and rape an innocent young girl who then sacrifices her life for his, with her father, mocked and abused because of his deformity, being the ultimate instrument of her death. Inspiring performances in this revival went some way in lifting the darkness on the Hungarian State Opera stage.

It’s no coincidence that most of the characters are one-dimensional. The Duke of Mantua is driven by lust for Gilda, and the members of his court by revenge on him or his jester. Sparafucile is a cold-blooded murderer. Verdi designed their lack of complexity to turn the spotlight on Rigoletto and Gilda’s inner conflicts. The jester turns from a snarky mocker of the duke’s underlings to a dark avenger of the man who raped his daughter. But he’s also a loving father. Gilda is light surrounded by darkness, vulnerable yet brave, innocent yet passionate enough in her love for her defiler to die in his stead.

Attila Mókus and Zita Szemere not only played their roles. They seemed to transform themselves into Rigoletto and Gilda for the nearly three hours of this performance. Kudos to Mókus for not over-emphasising the hunchbacked jester’s deformity and focusing on his inner struggles instead. His dramatic baritone was scornful at one moment, tender, distressed, vengeful or broken in mourning at others, vocal signposts in Rigoletto’s descent into the hell of his own making. Szemere was able to rid her voice of filminess after the first few minutes to sing with beauty and sensitivity. Her halting “Caro nome” was just one example of her coloratura mastery, easily ascending to her high notes while delicately mirroring a young woman’s first hesitant stirrings of passionate love. 

As the Duke of Mantua, Gilda’s womanising paramour, Barna Bartos was a visually convincing libertine who delivers his “La donna è mobile” with the insouciant insensibility of a Don Giovanni. But his otherwise burnished lyric tenor showed some strain at the highest registers sometimes leaving him almost shouting. István Rácz’s Sparafucile, the hired killer, was a pleasure as one of the evening’s deeper voices along with Géza Gábor as Count Monterone and Antal Cseh as the nobleman Marullo. Szántó Andrea was good as Maddalena, as were Balázs Papp (Borsa), Lajos Geiger (Count Ceprano), Zsuzsanna Kapi (Countess Ceprano), and Bernadett Wiedemann as Giovanna. Ádám Cser and the  Hungarian State Opera Orchestra were more than at home with the score’s twists and turns, pacy at some points, dark and brooding at others.

The staging and direction didn’t work so well. One could ask if a cluttered opening banquet scene with the characters in period costumes under huge and heavy-framed pictures showing semi-naked orgies was necessary to point to the Duke’s libertine character. More pressing is whether such visual effects fit with a contemporary evening at the opera, along with other sometimes heavy-handed devices such as lightning flashing in the background at every crescendo of the storm in the final scene.

“To copy the truth can be a good thing. But to invent the truth is better, much better,” Verdi once said. Today’s directors may sometimes go too far in efforts to inject freshness into classic operas. Miklos Szinetár and Mária Harangi seem to have gone to the other extreme in effects that are too predictable and a scenic presentation that is lush in detail but fails to add a new dimension to an old opera.