Rigoletto – listening guide is a project by Borgo Piave ETC aps and the musical association “A. Miari” by Stefano Emmi and Maria Grazia Feltre to bring the public closer to opera by narrating the plot, the characters, the roles, and personally performing the most famous arias of the opera.

Borgo Piave ETC aps, along with the musical association “A. Miari” of Stefano Emmi and Maria Grazia Feltre, will lead us, with the listening guide, on a journey to discover Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi, together with Maestro Carlo De Battista and Dheborah Bordignon, Lucio De Cassan, Alessandra Giacobbi, Francesca Meneghesso, Alessandra Pugliese, Virginia Riccardi, Giulia Signoretto, and Giorgio Zatta.

The listening guide is a project that Stefano and Maria Grazia have been developing for several years, aiming to engage the audience with opera through a storytelling of the plot, the characters, the locations, interspersed with live performances of the most famous arias from the chosen opera.

Rigoletto is a melodrama in three acts with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on the historical play by Victor Hugo, Le Roi s’amuse. The opera reached the stage after a series of vicissitudes related to censorship bans, which deemed the negative role assigned to a sovereign unacceptable, found the subject indecorous, and the curse blasphemous.

But Verdi was enthusiastic about Hugo’s pièce – “it is the greatest subject and perhaps the greatest drama of modern times. Tribolet is a creation worthy of Shakespeare!” – and he managed to bring the work to the stage, quickly winning the favor of the audience, although not that of the critics, who were bewildered by the eccentricity of the text.

The first opera of the so-called ‘popular trilogy’ along with Il Trovatore and La Traviata, both addressed in previous listening guides proposed by the same association, the opera marks a turning point in Verdi’s artistic evolution.

The very character of Rigoletto, a jester but sad, resentful and provocative but painfully afflicted, portrayed by Verdi in all the tragic depth of his human condition, represents a striking exception in an operatic landscape that distinguished much more rigorously between wretched abjection and immaculate virtue.

From the need to enhance the characterization of the main character comes the renewal operated by Verdi’s dramaturgy around rooted conventions: “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata” is the memorable example that marks the birth of a new voice for the Italian melodrama, that ‘pushed’ baritone style of Verdi, with its powerful declamation.

The event is sponsored by the La Fenice theater in Venice.

Limited places, reservation is recommended at segreteria@borgopiaveetc.it.

Minimum voluntary contribution of 5 euros per person.