Playing Rigoletto Up Front

By William Bender

Thrilling to hear, but not much to watch

This is the Metropolitan Opera's second season under the joint leadership of Music Director James Levine, 34, and Director of Production John Dexter, 52. They are men of skill and self-assurance, and when they succeed, as they did last winter with Berg's Lulu, they justify the Met's often advertised suggestion that to buy one of its tickets is to "strike a blow for civilization." When Levine and Dexter miss, they raise worries about the wisdom of dual artistic control. Last week's new production of Verdi's Rigoletto was about as splendid musically as it could be. Yet the onstage events ate at the very heart of the work, robbing it of too much essential contrast and believability.

For this Rigoletto's failings, Dexter must bear most of the blame. Yet Levine, despite the beauty and power of his conducting, cannot be totally absolved. It is the peculiar penchant of both to want to concentrate as much action as possible at the front of the stage. In Dexter's case the practice seems to have developed during a brilliant career on the legitimate stages of Broadway and London's West End. For Levine it seems to be a case of wanting to bring the singers closer to both the audience and his own podium. They do sound forth more gloriously, as 19th century operatic idols knew. But given the virtually endless depths of the Met stage, the approach seems not only nearsighted but also perverse and, in the end, dated.

Obviously the modern stage director has problems Verdi never anticipated. Dexter must work under the burden of the Met's ever-increasing operating deficit. He cannot build three or four different realistic sets; even with plywood, the expense would run a production close to $1 million. He must economize, but still make opera look grand. He should also take no more than a few seconds changing scenes within acts, the restless bottoms of Met patrons being what they are. Voil`a! the unit set, that occasional blessing and frequent curse of modern stagecraft.

A unit set can be a house or room or a neo-Bayreuthring that rotates on its axis to create changes of scene. The new Rigoletto (cost: close to $300,000, neither cheap nor extravagant) is built around a leaning tower that suggests not so much Pisa but Babel and, at times, the land of Hansel and Gretel. At the start it represents the palace of the Duke of Mantua. For the second scene it becomes the house where the jester Rigoletto has hidden, or so he thinks, his daughter Gilda from a menacing outside world. And so on. The tower is, alas, not a very arrest ing centerpiece, especially against Designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch's eye-of-the-hurricane backdrops. Worse, it is shoved too close to the apron. Events that take place in front of the tower seem cloaked in claustrophobia.

The opera's very first scene proves the point. Packed into a narrow strip of the front stage, the courtiers cannot gibe and carouse as they should. Instead, the revelry is carried out as a lacy, spineless pantomime by the chorus and dancers. What Verdi wanted to establish in the first scene was the tension and potential violence within the duke's court. Dexter sacrifices all that. He also eliminates the back ground against which Gilda's love and virginal purity are seen so poignantly in the subsequent scene. Gilda is, after all, the only decent person in the whole show.

And if her goodness is not properly established early on, her self-sacrifice for the duke in the last act loses its point.

This Rigoletto may look better when it is televised live this week to a nation wide audience (PBS). After a successful telecast last winter of La Boheme, the Met is stepping up its TV action this season:

Don Giovanni follows in March, and the twin bill of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci in April. That will help build up the Met's national following. But it is al ready clear that what one sees from a seat in the house is going to be influenced by the lure of the TV camera. Dexter's tight, up-front and somewhat staid groupings in Rigoletto were obviously conceived, at least in part, for the video closeup.

One thing is certain. This was one of the finest bella voce casts assembled by the Met in years. Tenor Placido Domingo (the duke) and Baritone Sherrill Milnes (Rigoletto) are both among the monarchs of the current operatic world. Domingo, whose blend of the lyric and dramatic is the most thrilling since that of the late Jussi Bjorling, sang with what seemed like new resilience and sweetness. Filling in on three days' notice for an ailing Cor nell MacNeil, Milnes touched the jester's heartache and warped psyche. He did not, however, manage to convey all of Rigoletto's grotesqueness: his smooth, vibrant voice, for example, seems incapable of a snarl.

Gilda, for years the property at the Metropolitan of light coloraturas like Ro berta Peters, was at last given to a lyric voice, as Verdi intended. Rumanian Soprano Ileana Cotrubas sang with a pure, soaring, instrumental quality that was supple and flawlessly on pitch. She created a believable Gilda, not through mock girlishness, but through her own unforced look of a naif who is both vulnerable and possessed of immense inner calm. Say this for Levine and Dexter: they know opera singers.

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