SFO Begins 2025–26 Season with Verdi Favorite

Amartuvshin Enkhbat in the title role of Rigoletto (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera (SFO) followed up on its opening weekend festivities by getting back down to business with the remaining seven performances of the first opera in the current season, Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, staged by Jose Maria Condemi. The title role was sung by Mongolian baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat joined by Romanian soprano Adela Zaharia in the role of Gilda. Tenor Yongzhao Yu made his SFO debut in the role of the Duke of Mantua.

SFO performances of this opera go all the way back to the days of founder Gaetano Merola, who first conducted it in 1923 with one of the leading tenors in history, Beniamino Gigli, singing the Duke of Mantua. This is a challenging undertaking, since, for all of his polish, the Duke is little more than a hedonistic scoundrel. Rigoletto is keenly aware of this in his role as the Duke’s jester. He is consistently belittled by the Duke and the cronies in his court; but, as they say, “It’s a living” and the only means he has to support his daughter Gilda, whose mother is no longer alive.

The Duke is Verdi’s version of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He views women as “conquests” and is always on the lookout for the next one. When he first sees Gilda in church, he knows who “the next one” will be. He disguises himself as a poor student named Gaultier Maldè, and Gilda falls for him. Meanwhile, those cronies encounter her on the street and abduct her (assisted, unknowingly, by Rigoletto), assuming she will make a nice “present” for the Duke. Ironically, even after she finds out who the Duke really is, she still loves him. (That is the way narratives unfold in opera. Ask Anna Russell about it!) Needless to say, she does not last long, leaving her father distraught over her death at the end of the opera.

All this, of course, is melodrama unto an extreme. It took a composer like Verdi to breathe life into these cardboard characters. It would be fair to say that every gesture in his music plays its own significant role in fleshing out the traits of each of the diverse personalities in the narrative. All of those personalities came to life in last night’s performance. The production was conducted by Music Director Eun Sun Kim, and she knew exactly how to shape the performance in the orchestra pit around the diversity of those character traits and the narrative episodes they confront. Thus, however familiar this opera may have been to many (most?) in the audience, this was a vibrant performance in which every gesture of the music was complemented by advancing the flow of the narrative on the stage.