(Photo by Todd Rosenberg Photography)

Lyric Opera of Chicago’s first season without erstwhile General Director Anthony Freud began as his last concluded: with Verdi. Lyric opened 2024-25 and John Mangum’s tenure far more successfully than last season’s dispiriting staging of “Aida,” with Verdi’s indestructible mid-career masterpiece “Rigoletto.”

On opening nights, Lyric usually mounts either a new production or one new-to-Chicago, but this time they revived Stefano Vizioli’s handsome 2006 staging, refreshed intelligently by Director Mary Birnbaum in her company debut. As much as the libretto will allow, Birnbaum made the opera Gilda-driven, in tandem with the star turn of another Lyric debutante, soprano Mané Galoyan as the heroine.

Given Verdi’s music for Gilda, that centering proves less of an uphill climb than one might first think. Yes, the jester gets the title role, perhaps the finest for a baritone in all Italian opera. But like his operatic Mount Rushmore-mates Mozart and Wagner, Verdi often uses his scores to portray women more winningly than the loutish dimensions of the setting and plot summary may first seem to admit. Alone among the characters, Gilda’s purity of line positions her as the font of truthfulness and integrity, buffeted by choppy, staccato, dishonest actors.

In “Verdi, Opera, Women” (2013), Susan Rutherford encourages us to regard the composer’s sopranos and mezzos not with the second-wave feminist disavowal of the whole misogynistic operatic enterprise familiar from writers like Catherine Clément. Instead she perceives the roles as celebrations of women and elegies to those lost to premature death, such as Verdi’s first wife, Margherita Barezzi. Verdi was composing in a time when female life expectancy barely cleared the early thirties. More than any other relationship he depicted, Verdi wrote father-daughter and surrogate father-daughter dyads with complete love. Enduring reverence for Verdi’s masterwork has often focused on his jester. Though often subject to misreadings as a limited ditz, no less a towering achievement of the theater is the jester’s daughter Gilda.

Fate ch’io sappia la madre mia

Birnbaum’s director’s notes identified the current absence of Gilda’s mother, letters from whom, presumably, Gilda spent the prelude reading after removing them from a box pulled from a trapdoor in the stage. A mute actor representing ‘Mom’ appeared in the doorway as the timpani that close the prelude roared. Letters convey information, identified by Birnbaum as Gilda’s “core need” and expressed in the first act duet with Rigoletto, who puts her off when she asks about her mother and about their family. The mere question so pains Rigoletto that Verdi gives him an arioso within the through-composed, thirteen minute duet, “Deh non parlare al misero.” Gilda does not even know her surname.

The Gilda-centered reading of the opera led to perhaps the only truly controversial decision in the staging: having Gilda enter Sparafucile’s tavern with sword drawn. Birnbaum reports, “For inspiration in staging the bodies within the storm, I looked to Caravaggio, and, possibly more importantly, the great seventeenth century artist Artemisia Gentileschi, a sexual assault victim who took matters into her own storytelling hands both by painting her rapist and calling him out in legal proceedings. I felt that Gilda, even if denied this full agency by her death, deserves her own story, and I have tried to let her tell it.” Birnbaum’s interpretation makes sense. Sparafucile and Maddalena, more than anyone else in opera’s standard rep, seem to issue from Caravaggio’s central casting department. Gilda may not know her way around swordplay, but it is refreshing to watch her not passively submit to a stabbing as she strides through the door.

As for Gentileschi, one of her most famous paintings, “Susannah and the Elders“ (1610) depicts a great teller of truth, Susannah, under the onslaught of the male gaze. A century before Carlisle Floyd’s American masterpiece based on that story, Gilda calmly and directly related that same truth in her second great duet with her father, “Tutte le feste al tempio / Si vendetta.” The censors’ pressure and Verdi and Piave’s discretion leave us without an account of precisely what happens in the Duke’s bedroom—Gilda speaks of the courtiers’ abduction and her desire for the handsome stranger she met at church. Rigoletto then flies into rage over her violated chastity, as his mirror character, Monterone, is hauled to the executioner for contesting a similar violation. Asks Birnbaum, “Is a woman a priceless treasure worth stealing, or a worthless and interchangeable commodity (Questa o quella”)?” In the economy of the Duke, the courtiers, Sparafucile, and—excluding his daughter—Rigoletto, both. But Verdi’s score has the final word. Gilda’s bel canto purity communicates her truthfulness, not her virginity.

Ciel, dammi coraggio!

With a Gilda-centered reading and a Gilda-centered production, you need a fantastic Gilda, and Lyric delivered, with the debut performances of Mané Galoyan. Adorable from her first [vocal] appearance, appearing in a simple brown dress, she gave the right mix of genuinely comforting her father and feeling entrapped by him in their first duet. From their body language, you could tell they’d had the conversation about the family name before. Galoyan probably slots as a full lyric, but her strong technique carried her voice well into the Civic Opera House’s overlarge auditorium. Like Violetta in “La Traviata,” Gilda fachs up a slot mid-opera, and coloraturas struggle with act three. Galoyan gave a preview of how she’d handle the later music when she handled her father’s anxiety about her safety, flowers growing about a grizzled tree trunk.

With generous spin and a quick vibrato, she approached the duet with Javier Camarena’s Duke with repeated instances of an insuppressible float. Marianna Kulikova’s Giovanna, with a motherly character’s mezzo sound, made Galoyan sound even more buoyant by comparison. She and Camarena stood on opposite sides of Rigoletto’s front door until “È il sol dell’anima” began. By the end of the duet, she was crawling on him and gave him a ribbon from her hair. Still feeling her hair where the ribbon wasn’t, she began “Caro nome” with multiple blooms per minute, dictating a letter to herself as she wrote, with a clear, golden timbre like extra virgin olive oil, never testing its smoke point. A delicate pianissimo G# accented “e fin l’ultimo sospir,” and warm chest voice preceded the ascent to “a te volerà.” That last hummingbirdish cadenza before the courtiers set up shop outside the dwelling, on “tuo sarà,” gave the sense of a finger passing through a flame without singeing. The last E♮ finishing “Gualtier Maldè” emerged delicately and weightlessly. Galoyan aced the big test.

Bello e fatale un giovine offriasi al guardo mio

Upon her father’s completion of his impotent tantrum towards the courtiers, Galoyan’s Gilda emerged from the Duke’s quarters looking the complete opposite of dishevelled, as though no assault had there occurred, and her narrative located her trauma in the previous act’s abduction. Her petition to heaven for courage seemed to involve dealing with her father. For much of the duet, they stood a dozen yards apart. Her voice’s insuppressible buoyancy worked like the truth she tells, rising and rising again, her register whole and complete. Igor Golovatenko’s Rigoletto broke his cane over his femur in rage; Galoyan gathered the fragments as she fielded his we-ride-at-dawn energy in “Si vendetta.”

In Act Three, the façade of Rigoletto’s cottage repurposed to form the exterior of Sparafucille’s dive, Galoyan glided atop the quartet and the heavier orchestration of the trio, contrasted firmly by mezzo-soprano Zoie Reams’ crimson-timbred Maddalena. With a warm, attractive sound, Reams received the Duke skeptically, and displayed a nearly maternal concern for him, not an erotic one. Her subsequent protestations to her brother about loving the Duke seemed insincere—she just did not want him dead. Not to be outdone by the five distinct mobile phones that rang in the first act, yet two more spoiled the reprise of “La donna è mobile,” and even more damagingly, two entire minutes leading into “V’ho ingannato” (audience behavior at Lyric deteriorates by the season). Mercifully, Galoyan received a respite from ambient noise, making her sound morendo as her character died, with resplendent spin over Mazzola’s ponderous tempi. She arose from her death sack to cross to the wings with ‘Ghost Mommy,’ who wore slightly comical dorsal angel wings. But in every respect, Galoyan’s performance bolstered as feminist a case as one can make for “Rigoletto.”

Possente amor mi chiama

Tenor Javier Camarena played Gilda’s lousy seducer nonchalantly, with a graceful voice too small for the cavernous auditorium at least, if not the lirico-spinto-adjacent role itself. Galoyan’s superior vocal production made her voice seem bigger in the duet; even lyric debutante, soprano Adia Evans, performed the same feat as Countess Ceprano in their first-act minuet, making the most of her brief appearance. As Rigoletto’s dwelling turntabled away to reveal the court, Camarena’s Duke, already clearly tipsy at the party for “Questa o quella,” offered a pleasant timbre and received a smattering of applause as the orchestra segued to the minuet. His party room featured gargantuan banquet tables fit for the male characters’ prancing atop them, where Sankara Harouna’s Marullo stood making the “tracts of land” gesture to simulate Gilda’s bosom as he related the discovery of Rigoletto’s secret “mistress.” Dominating the visuals and stretching over the banquet hung an oversized replica of Agostino Carracci’s Glaucus and Scylla (1597), one of those myths in which a romantically spurned mortal man gets mixed up with an amorous goddess who’s jealous of the woman who doesn’t want him. Beyond depicting grabby male desire, I couldn’t make it fit “Rigoletto.”

By “È il sol dell’anima,” Camarena had warmed up more, and he blended nicely with Galoyan. But he struggled with the Duke’s legato passages, which Verdi deploys to indicate moments where the character might actually mean something he’s saying, as in “Parmi veder le lagrime.” Thirty six years ago, Richard Leech confided to Beverly Sills on a City Opera telecast of “Rigoletto” that, earlier in his career, he would audition “La donna è mobile” because “‘Parmi’ scared the hell out of me.” Camarena dropped a particular dry E♭ with “ma ne avrò vendetta.” He sat in a big bed to listen to the courtiers serenade him with news of their abduction of Gilda, crawling over a sea of accent pillows. The men’s choristers at Lyric never disappoint, and they backed up Harouna’s sturdy Marullo and tenor Travon Walker’s playful Borsa. Mazzola’s oft-breakneck tempi gave the sense of a wooden horse carousel bobbing up and down as Camarena gave both verses of “Possente amor.”

Though his character came across anhedonically, Camarena navigated “La donna è mobile” better than “Parmi,” but the dry sound returned in the quartet. He resorted to pushing most of the time; your reviewer hasn’t had a chance to hear him sing the role in a more appropriately-sized house, where the role might work better for his voice.

Voi tutti, a me contro

Igor Golovatenko sings everywhere these days, emerging as a real Verdi baritone. Two years ago at Lyric, he might have sounded a smidge light as Rodrigue in “Don Carlo,” but his Rigoletto warranted no such reservations as his voice has further developed in the interim. “Quel vecchio maledivami” sounded like he occupied an amplifying stone chamber. He vocally outclassed Soloman Howard’s Sparafucile in their duet, who sounded a bit hollow and a tad wobbly, though he did stick the low G. Rigoletto’s mirror character, Monterone, featured baritone Andrew Manea, another singer who sounds great in smaller venues but got swallowed a bit by the orchestra and the house. Golovatenko took us on a multi-stop journey in “Pari siamo,” from perplexity, to concern, to rage, ending that section with a gorgeous “pianto,” and then finally to envy of and loathing for the Duke, whose voice he didn’t really mimic with “fach’io rida buffone.” As his skillfully shaped “Pari siamo” approached conclusion, Gilda could be seen fussing with her mother’s letterbox again. Golovatenko still qualifies as a young-ish Rigoletto, and communicated a youthful gentleness towards his daughter, with reasonably Italianate sound. He managed the nearly unstageable blindfold ruse as realistically as one can, and defeated, found Gilda’s “caro nome” letter after her abduction.

The courtiers froze as if in tableau for his monumental scena, “La ra, la, ra…Cortigiani, vil razza.” He played “La ra” more subdued, but snapped after soprano Gemma Nha’s Page cross-examined the courtiers about the Duke’s whereabouts. A fiery “Cortiginai” reached its apex with a ringing high E♭ with “difende l’onor!” He addressed “miei signori” to the courtiers’ backs, arching a beautiful legato line in the final section. Golovatenko’s acting can appear stiff, but his vocalism throughout the performance, especially in “pieta signori,” communicated everything needed. He paced himself well, retaining vocal power for the final scene, as he discovered Sparafucile’s double-cross and bid his dying daughter farewell. Mazzola’s often peppy tempi became ponderous in the finale.

“Rigoletto” still works in the #metoo era; you just have to do the right things with it. Mary Birnbaum’s well-considered refresh of this nearly two-decade old production managed that admirably, and Galoyan and Golovatenko will delight listeners of Verdi at other houses. This remains one of the utterly indispensable operas.