As you end your careful inquiry with the words “my mother,” a floodgate opens, and while you must have assumed since first awareness—and perhaps have been told by Giovanna?—that she was dead, you now hear the story from your father, and experience the well of lonely grief from which he constantly draws. And unless your soul has turned to stone, there is nothing that you, the singing actress, must do here but listen to the mournful eloquence of “Deh, non parlare al misero,” as your father pours out his heart about the angel who, out of compassion for his lonely, deformed, poverty-stricken self loved him, but then died, leaving him with you only, for which (in tones of almost desperate thankfulness), may God be praised and praised again! These words remind us of another central fact that we haven’t mentioned yet: Rigoletto is a gobbo, a hunchback. While when very young we all receive our own circumstances as the norm, you have surely come to at least dimly recognize what this deformity means for your father’s standing in the world. That must always color the bond you feel with him.^(I)

Now, as your father repeats everything he has just told you, you sing in agitated, high-lying phrases, strewn with accents and culminating in staccato repetitions, of your empathetic sadness, and plead with him to calm himself—seeing him this way lacerates you. Note that you are taking the dominant musical line. You are driving the movement (a continuation of the andante of his solo), and this continues when the duet passage ends: at a quickened tempo launched by an insistent buzzing in the violins, you, feeling that your father is opening up to you, again ask for his own name and that of the sorrow that so afflicts him. Again he repels you: “What use is that? I’m your father, that’s enough,” and he mutters something about being detested in the outside world, and of others perhaps cursing him. But you can’t let up now. Doesn’t he have country, family, friends? He echoes those words bitterly, then bursts forth with the declaration that you are all those things to him; ^(II) his whole universe is in you. One can conceive of more than one reaction to this—a fear of his possessiveness and need, for instance. But that is not your response. Instead, you leap impetuously (again, strong accents, and a dotted rhythm) into an assurance that to bring him some happiness would be the joy of your life, and there is another short duet passage in which you take the lead and he repeats the sentiments he has just expressed. You still don’t have answers to your questions, but by prodding you’ve found an emotional entry to him. You’ve laid some claim to him.