Ticket Sarasota
From tomato paste to Doritos: "Rigoletto" aria a popular refrain
By Carrie Seidman , Herald-Tribune
It has been used in a Super Bowl ad for Doritos, as a plug for Leggo's tomato sauce and as the jingle in a Foamguys Scrubbing Bubbles commercial with an animated bubble singing some unlikely lyrics.
It was the backdrop for a Viennese waltz on "Dancing with the Stars," the score for a "Prince of Pizza" commercial in the Prairie Home Companion movie, and the soundtrack for the Grand Theft Auto computer game.
It has been recorded by most of the greatest tenors of the world — and also by Alvin and the Chipmunks. And if you still haven't heard enough of it, you can sing along with the karaoke version or order it up as your ringtone from the iTunes store.
Baritone Marco Nistico as the jester Rigoletto and soprano Eleni Carlenos as his daughter Gilda in the Sarasota Opera's production of "Rigoletto." / Photo by Rod Millington
We're talking about "La donna e mobile," perhaps one of the most familiar arias in all of opera. A canzone about the fickleness of women, it is sung by the lascivious Duke of Mantua in the third act of Giuseppe Verdi's "Rigoletto," the opera that will open the Sarasota Opera's season on Oct. 26. But it also appears — out of context but with pedestrian regularity — in pretty much every form of popular culture today.
"It's so catchy, so facile to the ear," says Victor DeRenzi, the opera's artistic director and resident Verdi scholar. "Musically, it's so natural, you start singing it without even realizing it. Verdi made his melodies so accessible, they feel like they must always have been there."
That explains the song's popularity. But does it also explain the crossover from the performance stage to popular entertainment?
That's something that started long ago, not long after "Rigoletto" premiered in 1851 in Italy, says DeRenzi. This was a time before recordings, so popular arias were often pulled out of opera scores and sheet music made available for everything from solo piano to string quartets. People often considered opera just a series of marvelous excerpts and the songs became the parlor entertainment in people's homes.
"La donna e mobile," for example, became a "barrel organ staple" sung to new words like "Over the summer seas," according to George Martin, a Verdi specialist who has written four books on the composer.
Today, of course, the excerpts have moved from the parlor to television, movies and the Internet, often in completely foreign contexts. Whether that is beneficial or detrimental to opera is a matter of opinion.
"I don't think anybody watching the Super Bowl and hearing that tune is going to say, 'I have to go see 'Rigoletto,'" DeRenzi says.
An animated bubble sings "La donna e mobile" from Verdi's "Rigoletto," just one of many irreverent uses of the familiar aria in commercials and pop culture.
"Does it cheapen it? I don't know. It doesn't bother me if it's used in a lot of different places, but it bothers me if it's taken out of context and a single connection becomes so strong it is always identified with it."
For example, he says, the William Tell Overture became, for an entire generation, indelibly identified with "The Lone Ranger," as did "La Gioconda" with the Disney movie, "Fantasia."
"That does put this extremely strong image in your head and it's hard to get out of your mind," says DeRenzi.
Marco Nistico, the Italian-born baritone who will sing the role of Rigoletto, says things are no different in the land where opera was born.
"We do the same thing in Italy," he says. "It's not held as sacred. But it only bothers me when I hear an opera in a commercial where, for example, they use 'Carmen' and make it a vulgar stereotype. That cheapens it a little. On the other hand, it also keeps the music in people's heads."
It's not only commercials that have built audience recognition. From the advent of recordings, in the late 1800s, the renowned tenors of the time recorded self-styled versions of "La donna e mobile." The most famous, from the early 1900s, by Enrico Caruso, features a high note at the end (a B natural) that is not in the score. Yet that remains, to this day, one of the most familiar and circulated versions.
"He was so idolized that everyone now tends to do it the way Caruso did," says DeRenzi, with polite disdain.
After a pause he adds: "We are not doing it that way."
An opera singer can sense a change in the audience just before a popular aria like "La donna e mobile" begins says Hak Soo Kim, the tenor who will sing the familiar canzone as the Duke of Mantua in the Sarasota Opera's production of "Rigoletto." / Photo by Rod Millington
"I don't think I sang two phrases and he immediately stopped me," Kim says, "and said 'No! I want you to breathe here, not there, there, not here.'"
DeRenzi's intention is to present the aria not as it may have come to be known, but as it was intended in Verdi's time, says Kim.
"He would like the experience to be as close as possible to the night it opened," Kim says. "I'm not trying to ignore what other great singers have done, but I'm trying to stay true to the critical edition and what Verdi meant."
That includes leaving out that bravura ending that has come to be expected by audience members accustomed to recordings like Caruso's.
"That's what everyone's waiting for," says Kim. "And if you don't sing it, they think it's because you can't."
Nistico says such preconceived notions of a favorite aria can be a bit of a dilemma for a performer. He recalls feeling those expectations when he sang Figaro in "The Barber of Seville" which has a famous entrance "everyone knows, mostly from a Bugs Bunny cartoon."
"On one hand, there is some measure of pressure because of what it means to all those people," Nistico says. "On the other hand, people are lenient because they like it so much, they are just happy to hear it. And, of course, if you do a really good job, they love you even more because you sang that thing well."
Both singers say the extended rehearsal periods at the Sarasota Opera provide a rare opportunity to return to a close reading of the original score and to ignore popular ornamentations that have accumulated over the years.
Still, Kim says it is "difficult to do, really," to approach an aria so eagerly awaited by an audience. He remembers his own first experience hearing "La donna e mobile," at a performance by the Chicago Lyric Opera while he was in college and his own anticipation.
"I had never seen 'Rigoletto' and I was just waiting, waiting, waiting..." he remembers. "And then, it came out of nowhere and it was like, 'There it is!'"
DeRenzi worries that such instant recognition can "take people out of what's going on" and away from how a song derives from within the personality of a particular character.
"They're cheating themselves of really feeling it," he says. "I respect their wanting to show appreciation, but to me it says, 'Are you really listening?'"
But both Nistico and Kim say that, as performers, it's almost impossible to avoid the audience buildup to a favorite. They say they can actually detect a change in the hall just before a well-known aria like "La donna e mobile" begins.
"All of a sudden, you hear people inhale — you can really hear the air sucked in and there's a noise, a little rustle, and people are sitting up a little straighter in their seats," Kim says.
"It does make me nervous. But it can fire me up too. It's like: 'Here it comes...you're going to love it!'"