Opera Australia’s Rigoletto: The Weight of What Cannot Be Undone.

Certain operas survive because they are beloved. Rigoletto survives because it refuses to loosen its grip. Nearly 175 years after its premiere, Verdi’s drama remains disconcertingly resistant to becoming a period piece. Its costumes, courts and conventions may belong elsewhere, but its moral landscape feels perpetually contemporary. Opera Australia’s revival, opening on the seventieth anniversary of the company’s first performance on 21 July 1956, is a reminder that some masterpieces are not preserved by time; they are sharpened by it.

Elijah Moshinsky’s production, first seen in 1991, has long occupied a special place in Opera Australia’s repertoire. What is striking, however, is not its longevity but its refusal to become merely “classic”. It still possesses the confidence of a production that trusts Verdi above theatrical novelty. There is no attempt to modernise the work through conceptual intervention. Instead, it reveals how modern the work already is.

Michael Yeargan’s revolving set remains one of Australian opera’s most eloquent visual ideas. Its movement is almost imperceptible, yet psychologically relentless. Rooms rotate into view before quietly disappearing again, as though memory itself were being rearranged before our eyes. The audience becomes less an observer than an unwilling witness, privy to moments that should perhaps have remained behind closed doors. By the final act, the set no longer appears to be moving around the characters; it feels as though the characters are moving helplessly within it.

Relocating the drama to the Italy of the late 1950s and early 1960s continues to prove remarkably astute. The polished tailoring, glittering receptions and the now-famous Fiat 500 evoke an age synonymous with optimism and sophistication, yet beneath the immaculate surfaces lies a society whose moral foundations have quietly eroded. It recalls Italo Calvino’s observation that “hell is not something that awaits us, but something we create together.” The court is not simply decadent. It has normalised its own decadence.

When your family drama comes with a full orchestra, a revolving mansion and a 75-year-old grudge. Verdi really did understand that some group chats deserve a tragedy.

Dalibor Jenis inhabits Rigoletto with impressive psychological subtlety. Too often the role is played as a succession of emotional extremes. Jenis instead constructs the character through accumulation. Every slight, every compromise and every act of self-preservation leaves an almost imperceptible mark until the man standing before us appears exhausted by the sheer effort of surviving his own contradictions. His baritone possesses both gravitas and warmth, but it is the intelligence behind the phrasing that gives the performance its authority.

Kang Wang offers a Duke of Mantua whose greatest danger lies in his complete absence of self-awareness. There is no moustache-twirling villain here. Instead, Wang presents a man so accustomed to privilege that he mistakes appetite for entitlement. His luminous tenor is effortlessly persuasive, making La donna è mobile sound exactly as it should: intoxicating enough to explain why everyone keeps believing him, unsettling enough to remind us why they should not.

The evening’s emotional compass is Gemma Nha, whose Sydney Opera House debut as Gilda is distinguished by uncommon sincerity. Her soprano combines crystalline clarity with remarkable ease across the role’s demanding range, yet technical accomplishment never overshadows dramatic truth. She resists portraying Gilda as merely innocent. Instead, she embodies someone who believes that goodness is the natural state of the world. Watching that belief unravel is infinitely more heartbreaking than watching innocence simply disappear.

Making his Australian debut, conductor Sesto Quatrini leads the Opera Australia Orchestra with an instinctive sense of dramatic architecture. Verdi’s score unfolds with impressive inevitability, each scene seeming to grow organically from the last. Familiar melodies emerge not as isolated highlights but as emotional consequences. The celebrated quartet, Bella figlia dell’amore, becomes less a showcase than a study in simultaneous realities, each character inhabiting a different emotional universe while sharing the same music.

The Opera Australia Chorus deserves equal acclaim. Whether inhabiting the Duke’s glittering court or the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of the final act, the chorus functions as more than a collective voice. It becomes the opera’s moral climate, embodying a society in which cruelty has become so habitual that it scarcely registers as cruelty at all.

The enduring brilliance of Rigoletto lies in its refusal to offer easy explanations. Is Monterone’s curse real, or is it simply the name given to consequences that were always inevitable? Verdi never settles the question. The ambiguity is precisely the point. The catastrophe unfolds not because fate intervenes, but because every character mistakes desire for freedom, vengeance for justice, or power for permanence.

There is an unexpected parallel here with the Japanese aesthetic of kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired with gold, allowing fractures to become part of an object’s history rather than something concealed. Verdi offers no such consolation. In Rigoletto, nothing truly broken.

The season at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, runs from 21 July to 21 August.

---

Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Opera Australia.