Then there are the thousand little points of disconnection between the creators’ text and the representation that are common to all time/place displacements, and over which we are not supposed to be so literal-minded (or so acquainted with the text) as to entertain an uneasiness  in the mental borderland between awareness and obliviousness. When Rigoletto commands Gilda to get a horse and depart for Verona, where he’ll join her on the morrow, we’re supposed to muffle that “huh?” The Met’s program listings no longer offer any time-place information (as in “The city of Mantua and its environs; epoch: the 16th Century,” as per the text, or “the city of Berlin in the 1920s,” as per the production), or of scene settings (Act 1: “Magnificent room in the ducal palace; doors at the rear giving onto other rooms,” etc.; or Act 2: “The deserted end of a dead-end street. On the left, Rigoletto’s modest house with enclosed garden; on the right, the garden wall of the Ceprano palace,” etc.). They also do not provide dramatis personnae information, such as “Rigoletto, court jester; Gilda, his daughter; Giovanna, her nurse,” etc., though in this instance there is one exception: “Duke of Mantua,” suggesting that the Duke (by the Weimar times only nominally such) and his entire Italian court, equally vestigial, are ensconced als Gäste for our entertainment (“Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!”) in post-WW1 Berlin. We are presumed to either understand and overlook, or to be ignorant and indifferent.

Beyond these suspension-of-belief details lies the removal of the drama from the conditions of belief and custom that render it plausible, which despite its 16th-Century setting belong to the world of high19th-Century melodrama—melodrama heightened to tragedy by the power of Verdi’s music. The farther we are led from that world and historical background, the less credible the opera’s circumstances, and therefore the actions of its characters, become.^(I) These circumstances have some weight even on the granular level, as with the distinctions of rank and class origin among the personages of the court, which have a logic for the character relationships. For instance: Borsa, with whom the Duke is chummily parleying as the opera begins, is a courtier, of aristocratic stock, while Marullo is a cavalier, of common birth and thus, for some commentators (and it makes perfect sense), the natural character for Rigoletto to turn to for sympathy in his Act 3 plea. That’s a nicety hard to make clear. But here Monterone, perpetrator of the father’s curse that is the psychological key to the tragedy, is not even identified as a Count; he’s just a scruffy old coot. And this anonymity connects to all the questions that lead to a broader disbelief in what we see and hear—the very existence of such a court, the weight of the curse and all that follows from it. The closer we come to Modernity (in this case, to a time and place that is often fingered as the Cradle of Modernity), the less apt we are to put stock in any of it.