In August, Verdi and Piave retired to Busseto, Verdi's hometown, to prepare a defensive scheme as they continued work on the opera. He was wrong, and rumours began to spread in early summer that the production would be forbidden. As Verdi wrote in a letter to Piave: "Use four legs, run through the town and find me an influential person who can obtain the permission for making Le Roi s'amuse." Guglielmo Brenna, secretary of La Fenice, promised the duo that they would not have problems with the censors.
The play had been banned in France following its premiere nearly twenty years earlier (not to be staged again until 1882) now it was to come before the Austrian Board of Censors (as Austria at that time directly controlled much of Northern Italy.)įrom the beginning, both composer and librettist knew this step would not be easy. Verdi later explained that "The subject is grand, immense, and there is a character that is one of the greatest creations that the theatre can boast of, in any country and in all history." However, Hugo's depiction of a venal, cynical, womanizing king ( Francis I of France) was considered unacceptably scandalous. That came in the form of Victor Hugo's controversial five-act play Le roi s'amuse ("The king amuses himself"). He initially asked Francesco Maria Piave (with whom he had already created Ernani, I due Foscari, Macbeth, Il corsaro and Stiffelio) to examine the play Kean by Alexandre Dumas, père, but soon came to believe that they needed to find a more energetic subject.
He was prominent enough by this time to enjoy some freedom in choosing texts to set to music. La Fenice of Venice commissioned Verdi in 1850 to compose a new opera. The curse comes to fruition when Gilda falls in love with the Duke and sacrifices her life to save him from the assassin hired by her father. The opera's original title, La maledizione (The Curse), refers to a curse placed on both the Duke and Rigoletto by a courtier whose daughter the Duke has seduced with Rigoletto's encouragement. Its tragic story revolves around the licentious Duke of Mantua, his hunch-backed court jester Rigoletto, and Rigoletto's daughter Gilda. The work, Verdi's sixteenth in the genre, is widely considered to be the first of the operatic masterpieces of Verdi's middle-to-late career. Despite serious initial problems with the Austrian censors who had control over northern Italian theatres at the time, the opera had a triumphant premiere at La Fenice in Venice on 11 March 1851. The Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the 1832 play Le roi s'amuse by Victor Hugo. director Robert Wilson as an actress.Rigoletto is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. She returned again to San Francisco in 1980.Īfter she retired from opera, she moved to the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, where she worked with U.S. Others followed, including Azucena in "Il trovatore" and Dame Quickly in “Falstaff” by Giuseppe Verdi, Herodias in “Salome” by Richard Strauss, Mother Goose in “The Rake’s Progress” by Igor Stravisnky and many others. In 1962, Červená started her 11-year regular cooperation with the San Francisco Opera in the title role of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, her trademark character. She performed with conductors such as Rafael Kubelik, Herbert von Karajan, Pierre Boulez, Charles Mackerras and Francesco Molinari Pradelli. In the West, Červená was based at the Frankfurt Opera, but she became known for her guest performances in numerous opera house in Europe and the United States, including in Vienna, Milan, Paris, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Chicago and festivals at Bayreuth and Glyndebourne and many others. The Iron Curtain kept her outside her country for 30 years. “I couldn’t live and sing without freedom,” she once told the Czech public radio. 9, 1925 in Prague, Červená was as a guest singer at the Unter den Linden opera and the Berlin State Opera in the Soviet-controlled part of Berlin when she emigrated to West Berlin in January 1962 through the last opened crossing in the newly built Berlin Wall. Červená died Sunday at a hospital in the Czech capital where she was being treated for an unspecified illness, the National Theater in Prague said.īorn Sept. PRAGUE - Soňa Červená, a Czech opera singer who became known for playing Carmen and more than 110 roles in San Francisco and other opera houses behind the Iron Curtain, has died.
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