“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals and our banks destroy our economy.”
That such words could be uttered by a man of the Left -- Chris Hedges -- yet be eagerly taken up as a rallying cry of the Right tells us that the perils of our time transcend politics and extend deeper to the very source of our culture. A major tributary of the wellspring of the West, from which we take our sustenance, has been poisoned. The ground on which we stand has been overturned and shaken to the bedrock with corruption. The institutional framework is rotten to the core.
The question on everyone’s mind as we await the denouement of this 4th Turning: what happens next? The answer from both history and mythology is that a hero will emerge to lay bare the root causes of our dilemma and indicate a path forward. This is a task that is well suited to an artistic, dramatic format. A story that speaks to the whole of man; that captures the head and heart; the mind, soul, and spirit of the audience. The ancient Athenians discovered this back in their 5th century BC time of troubles when Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides created the tragic drama to address the problems of the polis in that epoch.
I believe a similar occurrence happened for our times in a riveting recent production of Guiseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto by the Los Angeles Opera. Many of the bedrock issues that assail us in our present anomie were explored in this powerful drama.
To counter the prevailing phoniness and unreality of the times -- the lack of gravitas and consequence in our discourse -- right out of the blocks Verdi, in a mere 2 minutes and 45 seconds, delivered an overture that shook the earth with its overwhelming intensity. This was a holocaust of sonic fury that set the stage for a grand reckoning as the spotlight revealed an anguished Rigoletto clutching his slain daughter in his trembling arms. Something wicked this way comes and there will be a horrible reckoning. In all the western canon there is no more gripping example of the superhuman power of music to lift us into the realm of the transcendent and place us in the presence of the gods. This is no mere trifle that we will be witnessing, but an epic confrontation of elemental forces. There will be consequences for this murderous action. Score one for the return of reality.
Next we have Rigoletto himself, sung with magisterial power and finesse by the incomparable baritone Quinn Kelsey. This is a signature performance that has electrified audiences around the world and marked Kelsey as a multi-generational talent. That an artist of such stature can emerge in these fallen times is a testament to the enduring power of the heroic human spirit. Score one for a conservatism that preserves what is best in our heritage and breathes new life into it for our times.
As the curtain lifted on Act I, the source point for corruption in the drama -- a tyrannical state dedicated to the concupiscent pleasures of the flesh -- was laid bare in masterstrokes of stage design and costume. A phalanx of some 35 swells in black evening dress ominously filled the entire breadth of the stage, all of them disfigured by grotesque masks from the Weimar atelier of expressionist painter Georg Grosz. A praetorian guard of Harvey Weinstein/Jeffrey Epstein/Diddy Combs wannabes. This was the court assembled by the play’s villainous Duke of Mantua, whose life was filled with the omnivorous pursuit and violation of a seemingly endless stream of women, married or not. The set was a massive rotating cube fronting a mammoth temple in the fascist architecture of Mussolini, with a gigantic fresco of a satyr at its center, a corollary of our own craven times. A marriage made in hell from the bastard offspring of Apollo and Dionysus. A grim epitaph on the 60s countercultural promises of sexual liberation. In this play the sexual revolution truly does eat its children and corrupts everything it touches.
Into this tableau, Rigoletto is revealed as both lead agent and tragic hero. For he’s the duke’s catspaw and court jester; a verbal lance who frequently and mercilessly mocks the duke’s courtiers and victims. Yet we identify with him as we learn that he privately despises the court and is obsessively protective of his daughter, even keeping her presence a secret to avoid her being corrupted by them. I couldn’t help but compare his heroic, feral desire to protect the moral integrity of his daughter from the ravages of society’s sexual predators to the acquiescence of so many contemporary parents to the ghoulish mutilation of their offspring under the grotesque rubric of “gender-affirming care.’
And the tragic flaw of Rigoletto lies at the center of our own cultural unraveling. In a key soliloquy condemning the corrupt society that has in turn corrupted him, Rigoletto admits his complicity in that order, but then proudly proclaims that society is to blame for his shortcomings. In essence, he commits the cardinal sin of abnegating his individual responsibility to claim the moral exemption of the victim. This proves to be his undoing, as his murderous, unbounded rage against the duke for violating his own daughter leads him to unwittingly kill her himself. This abandonment of the expectation of moral agency for the anointed ‘victim’ -- an outgrowth of Rousseau’s idolatry of the noble savage -- is the poisonous snake that has turned the Left increasingly rabid and depraved and is the greatest of the clear and present dangers facing our civilization. Strange how the recent riots in Los Angeles from such anointed victims are playing out at the same time Rigoletto is performed no more than half a mile up the hill from this real-world dysfunction.
Finally, at the play’s end, as Rigoletto is left broken by his tragedy, a way forward is shown by his daughter Gilda. In a Christ-like gesture of self-sacrificial love, she forgives the duke for betraying her and literally gives her life to save him. At the end of this play’s staging the tranquil spirit of Gilda passes across the stage and reassures her broken father that she will pray for and be reunited with him in heaven. She’s the one character in the opera who remains uncorrupted and embodies an overtly Christian presence for us to contemplate.
Some variation of the themes uncovered in this searing opera -- what we are warned against and what we should aspire towards -- are the lodestar to a restoration of our western culture. Let’s see how it plays out in our emerging drama and how closely life can imitate art.
Image: Florida Grand Opera
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