Miguel del Arco, stage director, is known for being the director of the play Jauría, which inspired this new production. On this occasion, and to show this libretto of drama, passion, deceit and revenge, performed more than 300 times at the Teatro Real, the stage director will use the courtship and kidnapping of Gilda, the protagonist's daughter, to emphasise the helplessness of a woman in the face of a group of men in which society's concept of masculinity is discussed. With the great voices of Javier Camarena, Xabier Anduaga, Ludovic Tézier, Adela Zaharia and Julie Fuchs.

To elevate a jester to a tragic stature comparable of a Macbeth or a Lear is not an easy feat; even more so when it was the first time in the history of opera. The dramatic essence of Shakespeare runs in the veins of this Rigoletto, although, in reality, the story is based on the controversial Le roi s’amuse by Victor Hugo.

This opera was prohibited in France for more than fifty years, but the Austrian censors authorized it by demoting the king in the title to a duke to diminish the magnitude of the assassination - or in an attempt - which constitutes the crux of the plot.  However, they overlooked the crucial monologues of the jester —«Pari siamo» and «Cortigiani»—, transformed, thanks to the music of Verdi, in two unsuspected expressions of protest and social resentment.

Many-sided, as perhaps no other opera by Verdi - tender but also cruel, interspersed with remarkable strokes of black humour—, Rigoletto is also a heart-wrenching study about parent-child love: a fable about an overprotective father and filial emancipation resolved by the excessive gesturing of the Grand Guignol.

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