Rigoletto, the hunchbacked jester at the Duke of Mantua’s corrupt court, mocks an old nobleman whose daughter the Duke has ruined, and is cursed for it. The curse finds Gilda, the daughter Rigoletto has hidden from the world. She has already fallen in love with the Duke, believing him to be a poor student. When the courtiers abduct her for him, Rigoletto hires an assassin to kill the Duke. Gilda, still naively in love, is killed instead of the Duke, and the curse results in a father holding his daughter’s lifeless body.

Verdi considered this his most revolutionary opera, and its force comes from how tightly music and drama are fused. He wrote almost no set-piece choruses, letting scenes run continuously, so that a character can turn in a handful of bars. The curse itself has a musical shape: a bare, hammering figure that opens the prelude and returns whenever Rigoletto recalls it.

The Duke’s swaggering ‘Questa o quella’ and ‘La donna è mobile’ are deliberately whimsical and irresistible: charm as a façade masking moral emptiness. Gilda’s ‘Caro nome’ traces first love in hesitant, decorated phrases, while ‘Cortigiani, vil razza dannata’ carries Rigoletto from explosive fury to broken pleading in a single scene. Sparafucile, the assassin, is introduced over a duet for muted cello and double bass; his arrival suggests a sinister presence.

The great Act Three quartet holds four characters expressing simultaneous, opposite emotions, and in the storm that follows, the offstage chorus turns the weather into dread. This is Italian opera at its most compact and merciless.