Revisiting Verdi at the Opera House

Yesterday afternoon my wife and I returned to the War Memorial Opera House for a second encounter with the San Francisco Opera (SFO) production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, this time on our subscription tickets. We were subscribers long before I began this writing gig. Our box seats are so satisfying that we have never wanted to lose them.

One of the things I like about the vantage point is that my view of the conductor leading the orchestra is as satisfying as that of the stage. I particularly enjoy watching Music Director Eun Sun Kim on the podium with her command of both the vocalists and the musicians. Indeed, there was much to enjoy just off the podium with a rapturous solo by Principal Cello Sunny Yang at the beginning of the second act and the engaging flute performance for “Caro Nome” by Susan Kang in the first. After all, opera is not just about how the narrative is staged; it is also about how the music informs the listener of what is happening!

Both the narrative and the staging have become more than familiar over the course of my visits to the Opera House. Many readers probably know by now that Verdi is far from my favorite composer. Nevertheless, I appreciate his impact on opera: In the context of his predecessors, he knew how to transform flimsy melodrama into dramatic narratives in which the music and text drive the attentive listener to anticipate how the plot will reveal itself. Mind you, Richard Wagner would subsequently endow his narratives with even further substance; but it would probably be fair to say that Verdi started the wheels rolling in the right direction! (After all, that direction eventually led to operatic settings of the plays of William Shakespeare!)

Tenor Yongzhao Yu as the Duke of Mantua looking forward to his tryst with Maddalena (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

At this point readers may wonder that the only names I have called out have been musicians. The fact is that there was too much of a sense of the routine in the staging of the narrative. The climax comes in the quartet in which the Duke of Mantua (tenor Yongzhao Yu) is embarking on his latest conquest, Maddalena (mezzo J’Nai Bridges), while Rigoletto (baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat) is showing his daughter Gilda (soprano Adela Zaharia) the Duke’s “true colors.” The musical delivery could not have been better, but the staging never quite captured the tension that Verdi expressed so eloquently in his counterpoint.

Mind you, this is a narrative that never ascends beyond melodrama; so perhaps it is just as well that the music communicates more than the staging!