A man alone on a stage

Rigoletto begins in a crowded room and ends with a solitary figure framed by the darkness of an empty stage; during the course of the opera’s three acts, Verdi and the librettist Francesco Maria Piave strip away all of the unnecessary characters – Monterone, Marullo, the Cepranos – until the vise-grips of the tragedy have room enough only for the title character. As a dramatic structure, it played well to the strengths of the Deutsche Oper’s new production, which suffered in the larger, more complex scenes, but experienced pronounced gains in clarity and intensity the fewer people were on stage. Verdi and Piave, when adapting Victor Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse, decided to set the action in the then-defunct duchy of Mantua, simply because the censors of the day would not have allowed it to take place in the french court. The switch of location…