Or how the hunchback gave his only daughter to die for our sins
with a full cast of dwarfs, hunchbacks and puppets, the portrait
of Mr Dorian Grey
and supported by the Thêatre Grand Guignol de
Montmartre
revised version, 20th March 2001
11: The Year 1851 and a Lost Key14: Rigoletto: How Evil do you want me?
16: Last Orders at a Disreputable Inn
Hugo's politics were never separable from personal ambition though, carried away by his own rhetoric, he could alienate his supporters by displays of independence. By the end of 1851, Louis Napoleon had dissolved the National Assembly and made himself Prince-President. Hugo joined the resistance which was swiftly put down. The faithful Juliette smuggled him out of Paris under a false identity and they fled to Brussels. His exile from France would last nineteen years, mostly to be spent on the Island of Jersey. Exactly how radical Hugo's politics appeared outside France is hard to say but Verdi's proposed opera on Le Roi s'amuse, even after twenty years, clearly alarmed the Austro-Hungarian authorities in Venice.
Verdi, perennially postponing King Lear, a score so dear to him that he could never bear to write it, saw at once the parallels in Le Roi s'amuse and Piavé assured the composer that the authorities would not object. He was completely wrong. Word came from the censor's office that the subject was an impossible one and the letter went so far as to forbid any further discussion. By then, Verdi had totally committed himself to the project, so new approaches were made. The regicidal plot of Le Roi s'amuse would hardly have gladdened the hearts of the authorities, yet there is reason to think the play was regarded as genuinely disgusting and amoral. The absolute ban followed by the nearly complete capitulation to the composer's wishes suggests that the initial reaction was an individual's gut reaction to the drama. The events of the play are indeed too peculiar to be effective political propaganda. Its very lack of a redemptive or moral agenda made it unlikely to inspire political action. Its corrupt world, like that of an evil demi-urge cannot be reformed and is only to be escaped in death.
The one scene the censor still insisted was not set and which does not appear in the opera is one in which Blanche, brought before the King, recognizes her supposed student-lover and runs away. She takes refuge in the King's bedroom and he follows her in, locking the door. The censors took umbrage at the key, recognizing its symbolism. The scene's suppression is not a disaster: it means we do not see Gilda at the palace until she emerges from her ordeal.
Otherwise, by the standards of the time, the opera is a very faithful adaptation of the play. Piavé slightly mitigates the poisonous atmosphere of the court. Hugo's jester is an evil figure, a misanthrope who corrupts and brutalizes the King. The dissolute court, including the King, is seen to be his puppet-show and the King's amours are instigated by his jester who directs him this way and that to see him mired in depravity. Triboulet is responsible for this very young man's sexual initiation and the King is psychologically dependent on him. Piavé's libretto does not disguise the jester's mischief-making but paints his rôle in the court as more monkey than organ-grinder. The Duke seems more than capable of arranging his own amours, leaving Rigoletto to add insults to the injuries he inflicts. Piavé's jester still rubs salt into wounds but he is seen as a symptom of the corruption rather than its origin.
The forty days Verdi spent writing down Rigoletto seem leisurely compared to the four day period Hugo is said to have spent writing the play and it seems to have called on the deepest and darkest levels of Verdi's creative personality. He puts flesh and blood onto Hugo's gibbering skeletons, preventing the alienation and nausea they might otherwise provoke. Instead,we are plunged from one emotion to another and kept in the world of feeling. It is only when we pause to think about any of the characters that our sympathy is withdrawn. The music demands our human sympathies for Gilda and Rigoletto himself. Even the Duke is allowed his moments of emotional warmth, as he savours the new sensation of love and his cynical philosophy is sweetened by his excellent tunes, one of them probably the best known of all arias. As a succession of pretexts for song Rigoletto measures up handsomely, yet it is impossible not to feel that the composer was inspired by a creative misunderstanding of the drama. Opera is an art capable of redeeming the alienated world by infusing it with feeling. Verdi found in the libretto exactly what he wanted and ended with a prayer not a post-mortem.
The notion of a beautiful girl mysteriously sprung from the loins of an outcast figure is very familiar from The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta. In each case the daughter is equated with a miser's hoard, like gold unhealthily kept from circulation. Somehow to involve the outcast figure with the liberation of his own goods appears to be the highest goal in this kind of blood-sport. But is Gilda really Rigoletto's daughter? We have only his word for it. The child may have been foisted on him as a joke by some previous dissolute court. If he does treat her as a daughter, could it be that he is impotent? Her chaperone is happy to be bribed when the Duke craves entry, so we may even wonder if the father-daughter scenario is a special game which Gilda is ready to play for the hunchback. A taste for perverse sex is awakened or deepened by her rape. If she is raped by the Duke. She speaks of a dishonour which implies it.
Whatever happens in the bedroom, she is curiously empowered by something she calls Love and is prepared to dress as a man and be annihilated in a sordid house of assignation for the sake of it. As Rigoletto plans to move on, we sense that it will not be for the first time. Gilda's origin may lie in disguised identities as surely as her fate is to be murdered in travesty. Rounded at both ends in mystery, her life has a sublime uncertainty. The obscure origins of a heroine are conventionally a sign that aristocratic lineage will be revealed in the last act for a good marriage to be possible. There is no such happy ending for Gilda, though she finds her way back into a womb of sorts, in the shape of the sack. Verdi instinctively felt he needed the sack for verisimilitude and it was one of the details he fought for with the censor.
We are so accustomed to operatic heroines being put through their vocal paces in a mixed banquet of arias illustrative of extreme states of mind that to ask for a centre to the personality may seem irrelevant. Can Gilda ever be anything more than a succession of arias and ensembles? We do not ask the same question of the Duke or Rigoletto or Sparafucile as their music covers a range of feelings which delineates a personality. Gilda's supposed rape and self-sacrifice are events which are not fully explored in her music. To a large extent the off-scene rape derives its power from its musical denial in Rigoletto's pretended good-humour and the indifference of the court. This is a scene of genius but it leaves Gilda unsupported in every sense.
Rigoletto, especially clothed in Verdi's sympathetic music, may be the evil creature who fools us all, including his creators. Is it far-fetched to view him as a totally evil and a consummate puppet-master who allows the courtiers to think they have fooled him? His house, guarded by an easily-corrupted chaperone, is a honey-trap he has baited well. Gilda, like many a kept woman may be uncertain of her own identity and happy to play any rôle she is assigned, even daughter to a hunchback, if it pleases him. She is even happier to welcome a potent young man into her garden. Her month-long affair with the Duke may have reduced Rigoletto's own grasp on them both temporarily but showing Gilda how she is being already betrayed may focus her mind on more material matters. If it doesn't, there will be other tools. If Rigoletto's blindfold does not really blind him then the final contents of the sack cannot entirely surprise him. If he is acting throughout, we may, by a diabolical twist, see his apparent despair as laughter and the whole opera as the most diabolical of true comedies.
The curse does not properly belong to Christianity but is a form of superstition, and a symptom of the breakdown of a system of belief. For this reason curses are wild cards with a tendency to rebound and spread without real moral meaning. Diabolic powers have been invoked and will not be constrained by any human intentions. Typically what a man holds most sacred will be violated by the demonic force let out of the bottle. It is the nature of a curse to reveal the unbounded nature of a man's unacknowledged appetites. The curses in Rigoletto are made by living men and take effect after they are dead.
Monterone's curse in act I is directed equally at the Duke and his jester. In act III, Sparafucile and his sister argue over which of them is to be killed. The death of the Duke will satisfy the assassin's professional sense of honour but violate his sister's aesthetics. In their casual life and death debate, these evil spirits resort to a game of chance. In the event it is not by dice or cards but by an Old Testament way of testing providence: they will see if God or Fate will provide a substitute victim. The story of Abraham & Isaac marks a turn towards symbolic sacrifice but in this diabolic variant, the father, acting through an agent, will kill his own daughter. Sparafucile does not know he has been hired to commit regicide but he has little concept of any order beyond that of the contract. The curse of Monterone has no effect on the Duke. What appears to be accursed is the state of fatherhood itself and the Duke has no conception of it.
In Rigoletto, Verdi begins to play with the conventions of the number-opera to suggest actions breaking in on actions, as in the abduction scene. The wordless choral voices in the storm were a startling innovation in 1851, serve to throw a tertium quid into the gap between pure music and song. If the figures in an apocalypse are reduced to their elements, the elements themselves strain towards human shape. In contrast, the Duke's show-stopping number "La donna è mobile" is treated as an artifact, cut and pasted like an object, unchanged and incapable of change, to signal his survival. He is too light to be pulverized. It is on hearing the sound of this reprised aria that Rigoletto is compelled to open the sack to gaze on the supposed Duke in much the same way as Salome satisfies herself with the head of John the Baptist. As in Salome, the once-human prize has been the subject of some hard bargaining. Yet Rigoletto does not get the dish he ordered from this disreputable inn. The universe is in turmoil and murder is just another process by which the human becomes an object. In this finale even a corpse can't be relied on to be itself.
Piavé's libretto is much less stark at the end than Hugo's play where a doctor subjects Blanche's corpse to a bathetic post-mortem as a crowd of morbid onlookers gathers around. This Büchner-like scene would have been impossible for a nineteenth century composer to even consider setting to music. Piavé ends instead with the duet, which allows the pious hope that a loving Father in Heaven may wipe away all tears. The irony of this coda added to an opera that has flayed patriarchy to the bone, despite the composer's evident sympathies, is a special bitter pleasure that has developed in the bottle over the years and which could never have been anticipated in 1851. In Rigoletto, the full awfulness of the story is mitigated by the sympathy the music prompts from the composer. Or we could turn it about and say that the music serves as a highly efficient delivery-system for the playwright's unpalatable ideas. Though he initially resisted the idea of his work being turned into an opera, Victor Hugo had the honesty to admit that Verdi had, in many respects, improved on the drama .
We know that Sparafucile is Rigoletto's shadow-self, he acknowledges it himself in Pari siamo! His tongue and the assassin's dagger are related weapons. Similarly, Maddelena is a reflection of Gilda: highly-sexed and capable of taking the initiative, after an initial display of coyness. The pretended family relationship between the Burgundian Sparafucile and his Gypsy sister reflects the relationship of Rigoletto to his daughter which may be equally questionable. There is nothing to suggest that Hugo, Piave or Verdi himself entertained this interpretation. To Hugo, Triboulet's parental protection was the equal and opposite reaction to his poisonous influence at court. He needs to keep the world ugly to maintain his daughter's dependence. She is even kept as ignorant of his profession as she is of his double nature: the after-rape scene should carry this further insult to her injury, that for the first time she sees her father in his jester's costume. The intention, I think is that Gilda's over-protection has inflamed her libidinous imagination. The hall of mirrors murder does play itself out, however, in keeping with a sexual motive that the authors may well have chosen not to acknowledge. If Gilda is stabbed by Sparafucile, her father's representative and Gilda is standing for the Duke, then the murder stands for some suppressed desire by the jester for an unmediated experience of his master's vice.
From Richard III to Mr Punch, there would seem to be a psychological connection between the idea of a hunchback and ideas of infanticide and murder. A misbegotten thing himself, the hunchback carries on his shoulders a mockery of the fertile womb. A suspicion that the hump may be a sack concealing a crime seems to lurk behind the vile events of the last act of Rigoletto.
Hugo was an instinctive rather than intellectual writer and in describing Le roi s'amuse as a critique of patriarchy, I am not suggesting that Hugo had any such explicit agenda. His hatred of tyranny was real enough but stemmed from an ego that would acknowledge no law but its own. Neither he nor Verdi were the likeliest critics of patriarchy, both establishing what were effectively industries in their own names. Yet the power of Rigoletto stems from an authentic collision of the Evil Kingdom with the Blessed Home, or private virtue and public squalor.
The Roman Saturnalia was the season governed by the baleful planet. Under Saturn, the world was turned upside down, masters would wait on their servants and a Lord of Misrule would be elected from among them. Like the Jewish Festival of Purim, or the Christian election of the Boy Bishops, these seasons of the fool served as releases from a world otherwise strictly bound by laws and observances. The madness of the season served to make the normal rules appear necessary and natural. Triboulet-Rigoletto is the malign Falstaff who has not been thrown off and whose season of misrule has continued beyond Twelfth Night. Justice has been suspended indefinitely and the conclusion does not restore order, keeping us tied entirely to a world ruled not by a deity but by the ricocheting vengeance of curses.
During his exile in Jersey, Victor Hugo and his circle were much affected by the craze for table-turning and spirit writing which swept Europe and America in the middle of the nineteenth century. At their sittings, the spirit of Shakespeare told how Hugo's latest writings were received in Heaven, where he read them aloud to an audience of angels. Along with these insights into the doings of the departed and the revelation that French was now the Bard's preferred language, some more sustained productions were relayed back to earth, including a most remarkable play.
Opening with a Faustian wager between Heaven and Hell, as to whether the wickedest of all men could be redeemed, the action centres on a King, here Louis XV, who abducts a maiden, the delightfully named Nihila on her wedding day. "Thirsty for human sap" the King is no longer roused by "rather old" fifteen year olds but his appetite is reawakened at the prospect of drinking "husband and the wife in one brimming glass".
Under a thin coating of symbolism, the play manages to be relentlessly obscene but is probably most remarkable for its bedchamber scene in which furniture, ceiling, lilies, bed, lamp and alcove converse and the final scene in which the dead King debates with worms and coffin nails. Probably Colette's scenario for L'Enfant et les sortilèges comes closest to it in earthly literature, but there is nothing to suggest that Hugo's circle thought they were writing a whimsical comedy.
Victor Hugo deliberately absented himself from the sittings which produced the play when he recognized echoes of an earlier poem in the Prologue. His son Charles, who did participate, was known to reproduce his father's style mediumistically but never as himself. The presiding spirit, however, was clearly the author of Le Roi s'amuse and the whole episode serves to illustrate the peculiar magnetism of a creative personality which could speak through others.
© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001
December 2000
revised version, 20th March, 2001