Dunkel ist die Nacht, Rigoletto!

“Make me laugh, fool!” Rigoletto obeys this command daily and with great success. Yet internally, he is torn apart by the strain of spreading cheer where there is no joy, showering the unfortunate with biting mockery, and ridiculing legitimate grievances—all to make the carefree, despotic Duke’s life as pleasant as possible. The fear grows ever deeper within Rigoletto that the injustices he has aligned himself with will one day come back to haunt him. For he harbors a secret: he obsessively keeps his daughter, Gilda, hidden. She, pure and innocent, must never come into contact with the corrupt world where the deformed jester ekes out his existence. But one night, Rigoletto’s worst nightmare becomes reality.
When Giuseppe Verdi read Victor Hugo’s scandalous Le roi s’amuse in 1850—banned in France after its premiere—he was struck “like a bolt of lightning, a sudden revelation.” He realized that this deformed, tragic fool, brimming with self-loathing, misanthropy, and fatherly love, was “worthy of Shakespeare’s imagination.” So profound was his inspiration that Verdi even put aside his long-cherished (but never realized) plan to compose an opera about King Lear to devote himself to Rigoletto.
Building on Verdi’s masterpiece and incorporating texts by William Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, Theater Bielefeld has developed a new music theater production that casts the emotional depths of its tragic title character in a new (musical) light.