VERDI RIGOLETTO Maria Callas Tito Gobbi Giuseppe di Stefano Coro e Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala di Milano TULLIO SERAFIN THE HOME OF OPERA Callas and Rigoletto Central to the series of EMI recordings of operas with Maria Callas, Rigoletto brought together the whole “resident” team, with Serafin to conduct, Legge to produce, and Callas, di Stefano and Gobbi as the principal singers with full La Scala forces. It also brings into particularly keen focus the collaboration of Callas and Gobbi. Today they stand pre-eminent in any retrospect of Italian opera in the post-war era. With them, singing and acting were virtually inseparable. Both had voices of distinctive, unmistakable timbre, and beauty of a special kind was to be found in both. Neither of them offered the kind of unflawed vocalism with which, at their best, singers such as Elisabeth Rethberg and Giuseppe de Luca had provided an earlier generation. To compensate, there was the gift of being memorable in small things as in great. Scarcely anything that they touched but bore the imprint of their strongly individual art, the refining virtue of which lay in its devotion to the greater art it served. Theirs was certainly one of the great partnerships in the opera singing of our century. Yet it belongs as much to the history of the recording studio as to that of the operatic stage. Their work together in the theatre began in an isolated performance of La traviata at São Paulo in 1951. They met again for La traviata in 1954 at Chicago, and then two years later came one of Callas’s few excursions into comedy, Il barbiere di Siviglia at La Scala, Milan. The most celebrated triumph of their collaboration was in Tosca, most notably at Covent Garden in 1964, with performances the following year in Paris and New York and a regrettably final occasion in London. On records they sing together in seven operas, eight recordings in all: Aida (1955), Un ballo in maschera (1956), II barbiere di Siviglia (1957), Lucia di Lammermoor (1953), 1 Pagliacci (1954), Rigoletto (1955) and Tosca (1953 and 1964). Their scenes together are highlights in each, and a collected edition of the duets would be almost too rich a feast. Even so, there is only one of these in which the relationship runs as a principal theme throughout the whole opera, and that is Rigoletto. This relationship develops in three duets, widely spaced. As a preface to the first, Rigoletto’s monologue (Pari siamo) tells of the contrast between his public and private life. The flute, rising with a pastoral sweetness above the calmly sustained strings, introduces a phrase of ineffable tenderness: Ma in altr’uomo qui mi cangio (“But here I become another person”). The affection in Gobbi’s voice and the caressing gesture of his way with each pair of descending notes identifies the phrase in one’s mind with his singing of it. It is so later in Callas’s way with the solo Tutte le feste al tempio which introduces the second duet. Meanwhile Gilda’s first phrases are given with virginal simplicity, Callas lightening her voice as she does in her singing of Amina in La sonnambula. Ingenuousness is not the limit of her portrayal at this stage. The depth of this warm-hearted girl’s sincerity is suggested as she reciprocates Rigoletto’s devotion: Ah, se può lieto rendervi, gioia è Il vita mia (“Life is joyful to me if I can make you happy”). The fullness of heart, life and voice enlarges in the second duet, after Gilda has been abducted and seduced. With Callas, the solo Tutt le feste feels its way towards complete confession when, the mind in the grip of its frightful memory, the voice rises in feverish triplets to a fortissimo high A which in its dramatic quality and emotional intensity means more than all the higher notes sung in the previous act. As Rigoletto, affectionately and in the softest of tones as Gobbi sings the phrases, welcomes her tears, Callas’s fine 2 use of diminuendo and portamento reflects the comfort of his words. Then, in the “vengeance” duet, the urgency of her pleas for mercy (Perdonate) prepares for the Gilda of the last act, where love for the worthless man so heroically proves itself. By this time the girl is a woman. The voice which makes its last confession (V’’ho ingannato) is mature and full, its regret expressed with a movingly tender generosity. While Rigoletto was a role central to Gobbi’s stage repertoire – a magnificent portrayal as we saw in his Covent Garden performances of 1956 – Callas’s Gilda was seen first in her Mexican season of 1952 and never again. To some who heard her, the performance was a revelation of what the role held within it. There was criticism, however, and Callas herself, who had been reluctant to sing the part, was unhappy, probably disproportionately so, about her reception. In The Callas Legacy John Ardoin gives an eloquent and detailed account of that performance. When he comes to the EMI recording made three years later, he finds it essentially the same though finer in detail and deeper in characterisation. He laments the loss which her renunciation of the role involved. All the greater, we have to reflect, is our gain through the recording. Ꭿ JOHN STEANE, 1986 3 Verdi’s Rigoletto, which was first produced at the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, on 11 March 1851, is the first of three operas in which the composer achieved his full stature – the others being Il trovatore and La traviata, both of which had their premieres in 1853. In the words of Ernest Newman, Verdi was head over ears in love with the subject of Rigoletto, and did not mind very much whether people found his music beautiful or ugly, so long as it was true to the character and situation of the moment. At the same time, he saw no reason why a repulsive and ridiculous hunchback should not sing as melodiously as the next man. The librettist, Francesco Piave, based the book of the opera on a not very successful play by Victor Hugo – Le Roi s’amuse – which had as its setting the sixteenth-century French Court of Francis I. The King, though not one of France’s most illustrious monarchs, provides in the events of his life and in the characters who peopled his world, enough material for a dozen operas as colourful as Rigoletto. Francis’s succession to the French throne was improbable for he was no more than a collateral princeling of the House of Valois, but the event was foretold by no less a person than St Francis of Paul. Titian has left us a portrait of Francis which hangs in the Louvre; but this Francis is not our idea of a handsome man, though he conveys a sense of athletic prowess that no doubt extended from the hunting field to the bed- chamber. Francis has too many historic associations, however, to be dismissed as just another royal lecher. In the first year of his unexpected reign, the twenty-one year old king was knighted on the victorious field of Marignano by the great paladin Bayard, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche of his age. Five years later, Francis was flirting diplomatically with Henry VIII of England at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, when 4 the blond majesty of England tried a wrestling fall with the black majesty of France, and found himself flat on his astonished back. Fortunately it was time for supper and the incident passed off without the expected outburst of Tudor rage. Five years later still, at the battle of Pavia, Francis was taken prisoner by the Emperor Charles V and lodged in the Alcazar at Madrid, from which duress he escaped by offering his two small sons as hostages in exchange for his own liberty. Francis was clearly not a very estimable character, but he had the good taste to enjoy the genius of men greater than himself, and sometimes even gave them his help and patronage. He was the great-nephew of the poet Charles d’Orléans, the brother of Marguerite de Navarre, the father-in-law of Catherine de Medici and the lover of Diane de Poitiers – he consorted and fought and argued with such colourful figures as Cesare Borgia, Savonarola, Machiavelli, Martin Luther and John Calvin – he was the patron of Benvenuto Cellini, of Leonardo da Vinci and of Titian, and amongst the poets who adorned his capital, if not his Court, were Rabelais, Ronsard, Villon and Clément Marot, who appears in Verdi’s opera, italianised into Marullo. Another actual person in the cast of Rigoletto is Monsieur de Saint-Vallier, who is translated into the defiant Monterone. Hugo said that the real subject of his drama was the curse of Monsieur de Saint- Vallier, but the occasion when he denounces the King for seducing his daughter, Diane de Poitiers, is not quite such a black-and-white affair as Monterone’s scene in Rigoletto, because the flighty and probably not over-virtuous Diane had been married off by her father to a fat old gentleman much less likely to appeal to her than the dashing, dissolute king. The jester in Hugo’s play, Triboulet – Verdi’s opera was first called Triboletto – is the child of the dramatist’s imagination; a man like other men, except that he is physically deformed and follows the 5 ignoble calling of a court buffoon. He has become soured by these handicaps into a misanthropic hatred of the human race in general and the King and his Court in particular.