Royal Opera’s Rigoletto: your disbelief may wobble but your excitement won’t

One of the greatest tests of how an opera house is functioning is the quality of its revivals. Both the Royal Opera and the English National Opera score highly in that respect. You can go to the Met, to Munich, to the Vienna State Opera and see pathetically run-down performances, the cast thrown on to the stage and told to get on with it. That never happens at the two London houses.

The latest revival of Rigoletto at the Royal Opera is, in most ways, fresher than the first run in 2001. It’s the production with the split-second full-frontal male nude in the opening scene, now prolonged to two split seconds. Actually, the opening scene, revealing the Duke of Mantua’s court in all its libidinous squalor, is the least convincing part of the proceedings. Granted that the Mantuan courtiers may well be enjoying themselves less than they are pretending to, the performers themselves are a pretty unenthusiastic crew. Their simulated copulations and assorted gropings lack any of the brio we hear in the music. It’s only in the second scene, with the marvellous music for Sparafucile, that things get gripping, and they remain tense and absorbing for the rest of the evening. Nothing, really, can make the abduction of Gilda seem less than the most foolish episode in any opera, but by then Verdi’s inspiration is so vital that disbelief, already wobbling severely, is willingly abandoned.

Maurizio Benini is now a permanent fixture at the Royal Opera as director of Italian operas, and a welcome one. He’s the old-fashioned, Serafin-type conductor, concerned to support his singers, never spectacular but never disappointing. The evening I went, when the performance was being shown countrywide on screens, had some changes of cast from the earlier performances, but I suspect they were all for the better.