https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csk48UNJGcA

 What happens if Verdi's not played as an opera? What happens when you play Verdi with the integrity performers bring to Beethoven? What happens if you take out all the gratuitous high notes, the sobs, the slides, the interpolated dotted figures? What happens if you take Verdi's scores at their word. What happens, in other words, when the Verdi tradition disappears?

Riccardo Muti has a whole spiel he goes through over and over again about how Verdi is constantly vulgarized by singers and the things singers do to Verdi nobody would ever tolerate in Mozart. True enough. Then he does tempi that absolutely brutalize Verdi to a point well past any maestro di cappella, which draws complete attention to the terrified orchestra's staggering execution of Muti's impossible demands. He finally mellowed as an old man, but it took him a half century to do what he claimed to do as a young man.

Look at Rigoletto. For the most part, the tempo markings are shockingly slow. Like... you wouldn't believe some of them if you looked at them, but there they are. How many conductors have ever followed them? Well, I've checked tempi, Giulini is pretty good for the first two acts, but not even he can keep himself steady in Act III. For Act III, I always switched to Fricsay's German version. Between the two of them, they've generally kept me pretty happy in Rigoletto for twenty years. Not necessarily because of the tempi, but because of the general dramatic sense that goes with it: sometimes understated, sometimes overstated as in Giulini's 1960s live version with Pavarotti, Scotto and Kostas Paskalis where every... single... note... is... held..., but always involving because the singers have time to breathe. I like the versions from Pavarotti and the young Riccardo Chailly. I wish we had a full Toscanini but his Act III (called Act IV in the recording) is magnificent on a level past just about everybody, though even he doesn't do the storm at Verdi's stated speed. And then there are the originals: Sabajno and Molajoli and their La Scala second stringers (except Riccardo Stracciari). and you can hear the traditions formed as they adapted to practical use before everything became mannerisms: more about the singer than the ensemble. These recordings were made in the interregnum between Toscanini's second era and the de Sabata era: not a golden age for Italian opera, but a golden age for Italian opera performance. I doubt there was ever better coordination between the pit, the singers, the staging, and the line readings. If the second and third stringers sound like that, it must have been something magnificent to behold. Nothing yet has truly curdled into mannerism or decadence yet: nothing is so fast that it's absurdly garbled, no high note is spun out for eternity, but Verdi, like every composer, is nipped and tucked to cover up his flaws and better demonstrate his strengths. The tradition is as in place as it would ever be: the practical wisdom of four generations of singers and conductors accumulates and distills the very things that made Verdi conquer the world.

It's never the best idea in the world to do exactly what the composer wanted. Even perfect visions are flawed, and however Mozart wanted Figaro or Don Giovanni performed, I think I would rather hear them done by Fritz Busch and Carl Ebert in Glyndebourne who'd accumulated so much practical experience in the theater than by Mozart himself, who clearly had trouble figuring out how to make his music a hit. I'd want to hear Mozart's opinion, I'd want his input in forming the resulting production, I'd desperately want to hear him accompany singers in his music on the piano, but once it's in the theater, it can't just be the property of a man who knows how to write for the theater, it has to be the property of people who know how to mount theater, because everything changes in the space, everything changes in front of an audience. Even the best Broadway composers knew to give their stuff to Jerome Robbins, Hal Prince, George Abbott, because they knew how to put on the shows which Sondheim and Hammerstein wrote so spectacularly.

So look at this performance here: an extremely literal performance of the score and an 'a-literal' performance of the text. It's La Monnaie, Gerard Mortier's theater, so you know what to expect... This is such a common kind of production in contemporary opera and bespeaks the ultimate decadence: complete fidelity in the music, complete departure in the staging. The staging and the music have exact opposite intentions: no wonder nobody goes. It's art by committee. Don't worry about the staging for now: as far as modern stagings go it's a... 7/10 outrageous. Nothing truly shocking, and a little bit incoherent, but we've all seen worse.

But look who's conducting! Vladimir Jurowski, all of 27 years old, two years away from inheriting Glyndebourne, ten years away from conquering London, and every bit as literal minded in his score observance as he would later be, perhaps even moreso. The hair is shorter, and he has the beard of his father. He clearly wants to look ten years older than he is ('pulling a Chailly' as it were), but the world's greatest stick technique is already there, and he is already a fiery puritan of the baton, ready to speak as the voice of Verdi with a prophet's brimstone.

The prelude is not particularly remarkable, it's basically the same tempo everybody does, maybe a little slower than Verdi's but only a couple ticks, the brass a little better balanced and tuned than usual, and unfortunately we can't really tell the dynamics because the sound's so compressed, and he adds some interesting accents in the tremolos, but it's fundamentally the prelude we know. But it's good enough that it should tell us something that nobody ever thinks of. Verdi always thinks onomatopoetically, he is always trying to capture the physical gesture of his characters in music. In the beginning of Rigoletto's prelude, we hear Rigoletto's limp. Ba-duuuh, Ba-duhhh, Ba-DUUUUHHHHH, we hear physical awkwardness, and we hear the horrific pain it causes him, perhaps even a physical pain. We hear a premonition the rain and the storm music, and most importantly, we hear C-Minor presentiments of Monterone's denunciation and his absolution of the Duke without absolving Rigoletto.

But then we get to the opening scene, and it is SO SLOW compared to what we're used to. Italians would actively be mad at a conductor if they saw this live in a regional opera house. But then, look at the score, it says 112 to the half: this is pretty much on the dot. Maybe it's 108, maybe 110, but this is exactly the idea Verdi is going for. It's incredibly oompa-oompa, it sounds incredibly hollow, like a party nobody wants to go to, and more than anything, it is at the speed of pompous, fake laughter: the kind that when you hear it, you know they don't mean it. More importantly, it's a speed the dancers can dance to, and it's a speed that when the text is sung, it doesn't sound like a garble. If we speak Italian, we'd be able to hear exactly what's being said on the first hearing.

Between every line at the party is a slight pause, and we've all been to this party. The kind of official party that nobody wants to go to, even the person throwing it, but everybody is observing the entertainment and making snide comments over the music as they occur to them.

But of course, very quickly we get to that first hit: Questa'o Quella, that little Cavatina (brief introductory aria), which is usually made briefer by conductors and soloists who jumble it into an outright tarantella. But a tarantella (or 'spider dance') is a very peasant-like dance, and it has a peasant's rough and tumble. This is an aristocratic song of seduction and ease. Listen to how much slower Caruso does it. He probably takes more rubato than Verdi would be comfortable with, but he is taking his time just as any aristocrat accustomed to authority would. This is not a tarantella, it is a 'corrente', or 'courante' to use the term we often find in Bach. A medium tempo aristocratic dance of Europe's southern courts.

Then comes that minuet when the Duke seduces Countess Ciprano. For decades it's been taken very slowly for two reasons: 1. because the music is beautiful and it seems to evoke erotic comfort, 2. because the Duke's text is extremely difficult to enunciate at that speed. Yet that doesn't stop performers from doing everything before that too quickly. The fact is, it's a generic minuet, it's supposed to be a generic minuet, it is keeping exactly in the surroundings of this very plush, banal court. We shouldn't just hear the smoothness of the Duke's operations with women, we should hear the dances of the court going on itself as one gigantic organism: an organism designed to keep the desires of its sovereign satiated.

And finally we get to the main action when Chevalier Marullo comes in and reports to everyone that ugly old Rigoletto has a mistress: everybody starts plotting against Rigoletto, everybody starts plotting against Rigoletto, meanwhile Rigoletto and the Duke are talking about their own plots, seemingly oblivious to everyone else's. Onstage it usually happens as a blur. You wouldn't possibly be able to hear everything going on if it were your first Rigoletto rodeo. But think of it at this tempo, not only to you hear everything going on, but for the first time, you feel as though there is action: you become complicit in it precisely because you're just a very little bit bored by the lack of action onstage, just as the characters are. These are aristocrats always looking for intrigue because their lives are empty, and suddenly they're filled with purpose.

And then comes il conte, Monterone. In the strings, we once again get that spider-like limp from Rigoletto, but this time it sounds a mixture of sinister and fun, as though he is stalking a piece of prey in his comic web. And then he starts singing, and the limp rhythm turns into a series of awkward laughs, as though the people in the court are trying to suppress their instinct to laugh against all known bounds of propriety. We are seeing Rigoletto in full element, where he gets to mock a person who has been dishonored in the crudest, most humiliating possible manner. I've always thought that little scene needs the world's greatest, most imaginative conductor: a Kleiber, a Fricsay, a Fischer, a Bernstein, who would not read the notes completely literally but weave a sonic web in which every note limps and no note has completely equal value. I know that Verdi keeps writing 'a tempo' over and over again in the score, I don't care. This is too good a moment to pass over everything in strict time.

Then comes the curse scene, which scared the crap out of me from the first time I heard it as a kid. For the first time, Jurowski is too slow, but too often, we see Rigoletto and the court laughing. Nothing about this music is laughing. This is Rigoletto's first truly sublime moment where Monterone summons forces from the ether, and everybody onstage seems to know something has been conjured, horrific and uncanny. Monterone knows what he's doing is treason, he comes there to go to his death, he means to die, and he means to bring Rigoletto and the Duke with him.

Incidentally, there is always an ignored fermata on 'ma' in 'maledette', Verdi wants us to know exactly what is happening, and the one moment Verdi wants a fermata nobody gives him one.

Then there's that weird spectral, sotto voce funeral march that ends the scene. The courtiers sound almost as though they're in a trance, and it's always done a little too slowly. It doesn't really matter what they say, we just need their rhythmic energy because all our focus is on Rigoletto and his basically silent horror as he mutters to himself over and over again 'Orrore'. From the first time I heard that as a kid, I knew I that Verdi, whatever else he was, was something more than melodrama.

Maybe I'll do Scene II later... but the basic point is this. Verdi is as precise a dramatic engineer as has ever existed. Shakespeare is everything magnificent, but an engineer he is not. When you have gifts as splendid as Shakespeare you can spray your abundance everywhere and every scene will work. Verdi, for all his veneration of Shakespeare, is as precise as Sophocles or Ibsen, and we don't understand that because we've long since stopped caring about Verdi's pacing and his extremely careful details of character.

Do we have to in order to make Verdi come to life? Well, clearly not, but now that the tradition is dying, what else is there? We need to find a new way to play this composer who should be ever new. Verdi used to be the people's music, and as I've said many times, he is now the soundtrack of the aristocrats and corporate overclass that goes to opera houses like the Met and Covent Garden that no one can afford but they.

There has to be a new way of doing Verdi. If the singing is not what it was, then we have to rely on the drama, and no musician was better at constructing drama than Verdi. I use the word 'construct' very deliberately. He didn't just create drama or set drama, he built it. It wasn't organic like Mozart, it wasn't grown in a laboratory like Wagner, it was built like a mason: brick by brick, laying down a foundation of high theater from the most basic popular means.