Dimitri Platanias as Rigoletto
Bitter and Twisted
Rigoletto, opera in three acts, music by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, after Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse, director David McVicar, orchestra conducted by Alexander Joel, Royal Opera, 14th December 2017, reviewed by LESLIE JONES
Giuseppe Verdi, like several other composers, passionately admired Shakespeare. As Susan Rutherford notes in the official programme (‘Attempting New Things’), in 1849, he drew up a list of plays that he thought could be made into operas. It included King Lear, Hamlet, The Tempest but also Victor Hugo’s verse drama Le Roi s’amuse. In the event, only the last idea came to fruition.
For Verdi, Rigoletto was his finest work. He regarded Hugo’s characterisation of Triboulet, the prototype of Rigoletto, as “one of the greatest creations that the theatre in any country or period could boast”. As in ancient Greek tragedy, Rigoletto is the play thing of the gods and by virtue of his character defects, instrumental in his own undoing. For as he himself acknowledges, there are divergent sides to his personality. Once at home, the cynical, world weary court jester gives way to the doting, over-protective father (of Gilda, played here by the technically gifted soprano Sofia Fomina). He considers the “vile, cursed race of courtiers” responsible for his moral failings and for his goading of Count Monterone, which elicits the latter’s fateful curse. Continue reading
Oakeshott’s World View, Part 3
Michael Oakeshott
Oakeshott’s World View, Part 3
Noel O’Sullivan (ed), The Place of Michael Oakeshott in Contemporary Western and Non-western Thought, Imprint Academic, 2017; £19.95; pbk; 197 pages, reviewed in three parts by ALLAN POND
[This collection includes some of the papers given at the 2015 conference of the Michael Oakeshott Association held at Hull University plus some papers not presented to the conference but on the same theme of the conference which also lends its title to the book.]
Whence Oakeshott’s growing appeal? Clearly he speaks ‘to our condition’. Yet there are many thinkers who don’t speak ‘to our condition’ (such as Filmer, Bossuet, Albert the Great) who are studied and whose writings are still available to us, the first two at least in modern paperback editions; and there are writers who try to speak to us but do so in such technical or obscure language that they have little broad appeal. Continue reading →
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