In Scene 2, Sher and Yeargan disclose the interior of Rigoletto’s house (a large ground-floor parlor with a staircase and landing above, doors to other rooms), rather than the walled-in garden. Depending on one’s priorities, this can be counted a small gain in making Gilda’s abduction from the upper floor clearer than usual. (It is a mark of the faux-realist director that everything must be shown, demonstrated for the eye). But it loses the intermediate space in which the crucial duets between Rigoletto and Gilda, Gilda and the Duke, are meant to take place. Those are given the alternatives of the street and the parlor. Above all, it deprives the immured Gilda of her little patch of beauty and fragrance, the romantic atmosphere in which her fantasies and, psychologically, her seduction can unfold. Acts 2 and 3 bring major design-related staging excrescences. In Act 2, in another show-and-tell, the revolve grinds around to reveal the Duke’s female below-stairs staff helping Gilda make herself ready for his attentions, primping and shedding her dress for a classier one, while the Duke, down front, is singing his aria’s cabaletta, “Possente amor mi chiama” (both verses, complete with choral interjections), to a house neither watching nor listening to him.^(I) Act 3 brings a level-of-reality leap. When Gilda returns in boyish attire for her Berlin-to-Verona ride, Sparafucile’s downstairs barroom is bathed in a lurid red hue (“Willkommen, Fräulein!“) and she steps into the scene to present Sparafucile with the fatal dagger. The storm’s lightning flashes are blinks of white neon that frame the tavern. Then we’re back to “reality,” in a featureless surround—just as there wasn’t a garden in Act 1, Scene 2, so there’s no river here.

All these Regie decisions bespeak a fundamental misunderstanding of the artform. They are as destructive of our attempts at emotional engagement with this masterpiece as any auteurial concept could be, despite the thin coat of representational shellac with which they try to keep up appearances.

At the production premiere, the title role had been taken by Quinn Kelsey. In amplitude and quality, his is certainly the voice most capable of the major Verdi baritone roles today, at least among those we’ve had at the Met, or that I’ve caught up with on recordings. I was eager to hear him take this on. However, by the second performance (Jan. 4), he had tested positive for Covid-19, and he was replaced by Michael Chioldi, a well-traveled pro who has hitherto sung on the “big roles in small places, small roles in big places” circuit. He has a sturdy, dark voice, produced securely if not with ideal freedom and suppleness, that encompasses the range and sustains the tessitura of this demanding part. (He sang the written E instead of the interpolated G in the “Pari siamo!,” leading me to wonder if we were in for a mini-Muti Rigoletto, but then took all the traditional high options the rest of the way.) He seemed well assured with the staging peculiarities. (This Rigoletto doesn’t just bait Ceprano, he gives him a solid thwack upside the head. Shortly thereafter, Ceprano (punching down, I guess) flings his wife to the floor. Emphasis on the “faux” here.) There was a prolonged, appreciative ovation after the “Cortigiani” which, with a light old-time touch, Chioldi modestly acknowledged—a warm moment.