The production of Rigoletto envisioned by Mario Martone in 2022 tended to tap into the violence that Verdi had in mind when transposing the intricate affair imagined by Victor Hugo into music. The figure of the deformed jester caught between the brutal jeers of the noble court and the fatherly love for his daughter, mixing tenderness with a desire for control, stands at the interface between the sumptuousness of the Duke’s residence and the degraded realm of the dispossessed: contrasting faces of the splendid rotating stage set designed by Margherita Palli. These unmediated social poles are the realm of an inevitable but blinded revolt, not unlike that in Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite. The opera is newly staged with a splendid cast in the care of Marco Armiliato.