Now, I’m not against applause. It’s the full-blooded devotee’s natural participation in a hot Verdi evening, and it’s not going to ruin the show. But it’s up to the staging and the acting (physical and vocal) to sustain the intended continuity and underline the intended shocks—to control the shape and pace of the situation for the sake of dramatic coherence. This continuity is not “cinematic flow.” It’s almost its opposite. For the ear, it’s a sequence of sharply delineated episodes tightly bonded by the musical structure, which the singers and players must indelibly mark. For the eye, it is a fixed environment in an enclosed space wherein the characters have no way to avoid collision, and in which the characters’ highly charged actions are in full accordance with what the ear is telling us. We’re at the opera, not the movies.
In Rigoletto there is, I think, one juncture where the revolve can come in handy. That is the change of scene in Act 1. The score indicates a fall of the curtain “for a moment” to accommodate the change of scene. In our technically weaponized theatre, the turntable can shorten this moment, and Rigoletto, his performing self wiped away since Monterone’s curse, can walk numbly out of the brilliant ducal hall directly onto his dark, remote, deserted street over those marvelously gloomy opening bars, his mutterings of “Orrore!” morphing by extension into “Quel vecchio maledivami!” (I)Other than this scene-changing use, though (and the Met has other means of doing that), the revolve is a distracting nuisance, smudging the work’s pulse and displacing our sensory reception of it not only from ear to eye, but, within the eye’s purview, from character action to tech merveilleux. If you set the merry-go-round in motion, our attention will roll toward that that, ahead of other things.
Footnotes
| ↑I | At the Met, Rigoletto is given with only a single intermission. So the transition between Acts 2 and 3, superficially similar to the temperature change between the scenes of Act 1, is given another turn of the Lazy Susan. But the score has it right. Act 1’s compact opening scene, though action-packed, is by way of set-up—almost a prologue—and is too short for a complete act, though often it used to be taken as such for practical reasons. (This is not a “light” to “heavy” set situation, but one requiring two full-depth sets. And in many productions, the roles of Monterone and Sparafucile were doubled, so time was needed for that singer’s change of costume and makeup.) But further: Act 2 is of full length, and unlike Scene 1, which is not a “big sing” for anyone, is a stretch of intense, heavy-duty vocalizing for the principals, leading to another such in Act 3. The performers can use a breather. So can the audience, not because of an overlong sit, but because the drama has reached its peak, and it’s good to settle the system down and absorb that before going on to the tragic ending. This isn’t like Fliegende Holländer or Madama Butterfly, where a case can be argued for sweeping us through in a single take, and music has been written to make that happen. That is almost cinematic—for a cinema of the ear. |
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