Rigoletto returns to open ROHM’s season with tragedy, beauty and timeless power

Fifteen years after the Royal Opera House Muscat first raised its curtain, the House opened its 2026–27 season with a work that seemed almost destined for the occasion: Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, in the final operatic staging conceived by the late Italian maestro Franco Zeffirelli.
First presented at ROHM in 2022, the production returned as both spectacle and remembrance. Zeffirelli’s relationship with the House began with Puccini’s Turandot in 2011 and, as ROHM Director General Umberto Fanni has noted, Rigoletto was later given to the House as an “extraordinary, unrepeatable artistic legacy”. Its return therefore carried the feeling of a circle closing and opening at once.

The first act erupted into the glittering court of the Duke of Mantua, where silk, movement and ceremony conceal a world governed by appetite and power. The Duke boasts of his pursuit of women, while his jester Rigoletto turns cruelty into entertainment. Yet Verdi allows the laughter to curdle. When Monterone arrives to denounce the Duke for dishonouring his daughter, the festive court suddenly feels claustrophobic. His curse upon Rigoletto becomes the first crack in the glittering façade.
Rigoletto himself is built from contradictions. Before the court, he is sharp-tongued and merciless; at home, he becomes a tender father protecting Gilda from the world he knows too well. Franco Vassallo gave this transformation considerable dramatic force, while Maria Kokareva’s Gilda brought a luminous innocence to the character. When the Duke deceives her by posing as a poor student and the courtiers later abduct her, the act closes with the laughter of the court giving way to a father’s horror.

That contrast between magnificence and darkness is where Zeffirelli’s production finds much of its power. The lavishness is never simply ornamental. Maurizio Millenotti’s sumptuous period costumes give the court its dazzling surface, making the corruption beneath it all the more visible, while Paolo Mazzon’s lighting gradually pushes the world from brilliance towards shadow.
The second act abandons much of the court’s theatrical exuberance for something far more intimate. Rigoletto enters the palace searching for his daughter and the man who once commanded laughter is reduced to pleading. His humiliation transforms the opera from a story of courtly excess into a study of power, vulnerability and a father’s desperate love.

When Gilda recounts her deception and abduction, her instinct is not revenge but forgiveness. Rigoletto chooses the opposite path. It is this emotional collision that gives the opera its enduring force: Verdi does not divide his characters neatly into innocent and guilty, but allows love, cruelty, weakness and vengeance to exist within the same people.
The production also places Omani performers within this centuries-old Italian tragedy. Thirty Omani extras appear alongside the international cast, while the Omani Opera Choir contributes to the performance, adding a local artistic presence to a production conceived on an international scale.

By the third act, the palace has vanished. At an inn outside Mantua, Verdi’s world becomes darker and more intimate as Rigoletto plots the Duke’s murder and Gilda, despite discovering his infidelity, chooses to sacrifice herself for him. Under Evelino Pidò, the Orchestra Teatro Regio Torino gave the score a restless dramatic pulse, allowing its melodies to move between seduction, tenderness and foreboding. The Camerata Musicale di Parma Choir and Leoncello Historical Dance Group further enriched the production’s musical and theatrical texture.
Then comes the silence after the storm. Rigoletto opens the sack expecting to find the Duke, only to discover Gilda dying inside. Her final plea for forgiveness transforms revenge into grief and the curse returns to its source.

More than 175 years after its Venetian premiere, Rigoletto remains devastating because its beauty never protects its characters from suffering. At ROHM, Zeffirelli’s vision, carried by the revival director Yamal Das Irmich, turns that contradiction into theatre: magnificent on the surface, wounded at its heart and haunting long after the curtain falls.