Concert Paraphrase of Rigoletto

Liszt had good taste in opera. His favourite composers, at least for operatic transcription purposes, were Wagner and Verdi, and he devoted surprisingly little energy to works which, though they might have been wildly popular in his day, have since proved to have no lasting value. His interest in Wagner’s operas extended as far as Parsifal and it is unfortunate that he didn’t live long enough to observe Verdi’s development after Aida and deliver his creative thoughts on Otello and Falstaff. Nothing would have been too difficult for him.

His Concert Paraphrase of Rigoletto, one of the three Verdi pieces written for Hans von Bülow in 1859, concentrates on the most dramatic and one of the most complex passages in the whole opera - the quartet in Act III, where the Duke turns his melodic charm on the not unwilling Maddelena while Rigoletto and the broken-hearted Gilda listen in secret outside. He did not attempt the impossibile, however. Unlike Verdi, he could not split the stage - tenor and mezzo one one side, bass and soprano on the other - and, although he surely could have reproduced the four-part counterpoint of the original, he avoided what might well have sounded more like a technical ecercise than a passionate operatic memory. His solution to the problem was to focus on the main melodic interest of the two sides in turn.

So, after a virtuoso introduction with a Maddelena motif prominent in the left hand and a Gilda motif in the right, he presents an embellished, slightly altered version of the Duke’s seductive Bella figlia dell’amore. When he introduces the more agitated line of Gilda’s first entry he leaves out the contributions made by the Duke and Rigoletto at this point in the original but includes Maddelena’s decorative interjections. Her staccato figuration suits the piano very well, in fact, and Liszt builds a cadenza on it before incorporating it in a voluptuous repeat of Bella figlia dell’amore, the other two parts in the quartet being replaced by legato arpeggios and delicate chromatic runs. He then turns his attention back to the unhappy Gilda, omitting the tenor and mezzo lines but, as her anguish reaches a climax of intensity, demonstrating Rigoletto’s anger in fierce left-hand octaves. The even more thunderous double octaves in the coda are derived first from Maddelena’s part and then, less incongruously, from Rigoletto’s.