Rigoletto

Giuseppe Verdi was once asked, "Maestro, if your house was on fire, which of your works would you save?" Verdi thought about it for a while and then answered, "My hunchback." RIGOLETTO, composed in 1851, was Verdi's favorite title; on the one hand surely because of the memory of his bitter struggle with censorship to be able to bring it to the stage (the subject from which it is based, Victor Hugo's "Le Roi s'amuse," had been banned), and on the ...