Gilda’s “given circumstances” aren’t all laid out neatly for you at the outset. Apart from discovering that you are the daughter of someone called Rigoletto, the only things we glean from the opera’s title page are the very general place-and-time designations for the work: ” . . . the city of Mantua and its environs. Period: the 16th Century.” ^(I)Not much, it would seem; yet these instructions tell you the first place your imagination must start its work—the atmosphere of a Northern Italian city in Renaissance times. For that, you need whatever in the way of background information, from any source, that will excite your imagination. But in an opera, the music often provides the richest clues, since it has a sensory impact. As with any role in any opera, your familiarity with the overall coloration of the score (its tinta, to use the standard Verdian term) is a prerequisite, beginning with the Prelude, which tells you in a succinct and powerful way that you are caught up in a dark, tense, and fateful story. As for atmospherics specific to your situation, with which Verdi was quite economical (he was an action man), you might search for moments like the brief, gloomy introduction to Act 1, Sc. 2. It isn’t strictly “your” music; it sets the dialogue between Rigoletto and Sparafucile. But there, in those few bars, is your house on a dead-end street, with its little walled-in courtyard, and there’s the night. (As you know from your close reading of the libretto, in the first scene the Duke has placed your house on “a distant street.” But this doesn’t mean it’s in a bad neighborhood. Across the street is the facade of a palazzo, which the set description tells us is that of the Ceprani, a family of the lower aristocracy. But you don’t know that, or at any rate attach no significance to it with respect to your father, the court, etc. You only pass by the facade on your weekly chaperoned excursions to church.)

We learn almost everything we will about Gilda’s circumstances, and about the passions that are driving her, in your first scene, that same Act 1, Sc. 2. These are all things you must carry inside you from the start, but which, for the sake of readers following us, we will encounter as they are revealed. It’s obvious from the eight bars of joyful allegro brillante on which you enter that you’ve been watching for your father’s return—at the sound of his key in the latch of the gate you have rushed into his arms. He’s home! “Daughter!” “My father!” ^(II) The first thing we learn of in the quick, effusive exchanges and snatches of duet is the intense love between you and your father. You feel a fierceness, a dependence, in his feeling for you, and behind that a sense of melancholy whose source you don’t understand. In a series of breathless little phrases marked by pleading crush notes, you press him about it. But he forcefully repels you. Even when you ask to know his name, he cuts off your exchange with “What does it matter to you?”