Nina Wurtzel/MetOpera

I’ve noticed something interesting in Rigoletto productions recently: The titular hunchback is sometimes no longer a hunchback.

The choice to remove Rigoletto’s humpback does make some sense. Costuming up an able-bodied singer to make him look like he has a disability isn’t exactly politically correct; especially given the long-maligned reputation of spinal disabilities in fiction. But the jester’s disability is also an important part of the plot and his characterization. How are we meant to understand Rigoletto today, especially as disability rights campaigns become more mainstream?

In reality, many court jesters of the opera’s original setting were disabled, but they often had what we now recognize as cognitive disabilities. Called ‘natural fools’, their blunt speech and nonconformity made them entertaining to courts. Perhaps the conversation about Rigoletto and disability isn’t limited to physical appearance. What if we broaden the scope of what disability in this opera might look like?

While Verdi likely did not have cognitive disability in mind when he and Francesco Piave set about writing Rigoletto, the experiences of the title character feel distinctly neurodivergent: locked out of a communication network everyone else is tuned into, capable of love but browbeaten into cruelty. Just as there are queer or feminist readings of works not intended for those purposes, I think that Rigoletto can be analyzed through the lens of autism; not only for what it reveals about disability, but also for what it may tell us about the way we watch this opera and the people who watch it.

I was diagnosed with autism when I was 7. Autistic people like me often have special interests, or dedicated passions for certain topics. Opera has always been mine. I was first shown Rigoletto in elementary music class. I was thrilled to see it! Opera was one of the few things that made sense to me in an otherwise indecipherable world. My classmates lacked my enthusiasm, and many of them interrupted the viewing and made fun of my strange fascination. It was one of many things that made me weird.

Nina Wurtzel/Metropolitan Opera

Being autistic is a lot like being an improv actor in a play. Everyone else has a script to guide them, but you didn’t get one and don’t know what’s in it. You figure out what you’re supposed to do through trial and error. A joke someone else told is no longer funny when you tell it; everyone else is in on a plot you don’t understand. Sometimes you’re mocked to your face, but it’s often subtler, like people dumbing themselves down when they talk to you. Often they don’t realize you are autistic– they just know something about you seems wrong.

Before we meet Rigoletto himself, the opera bearing his name shows us what he is an outsider from the Duke of Mantua’s court. The courtiers are slick. They may have the compassion of middle-schoolers, but they are advanced communicators. Their Duke is little else than a figurehead. He is their society condensed into one being. Despite being among them at their party, Rigoletto is an outsider. To them, he’s a monster and a joke, and his actions are outside the “script” they all share. When Borsa and the Duke cheerfully disregard Count Ceprano, it’s funny. When Rigoletto joins in and jests about lopping Ceprano’s head off, he’s cloyingly reprimanded. Even Marullo, the one courtier who acts nice to Rigoletto, is the first to make fun of him behind his back.

It’s also interesting to note that Rigoletto’s ‘joking’ isn’t playful but rather cuttingly blunt, bearing resemblance to the ‘natural fools’ mentioned earlier. He also purposely plays up his obnoxiousness. In my experience, this is a common defense mechanism for autistic people: if everyone’s going to find me annoying anyway, I might as well do it on purpose so it doesn’t hurt as much.

But Rigoletto isn’t the only outsider in the opera. There’s others: his daughter Gilda and the assassin Sparafucile. These two characters also align with autistic experiences. Rigoletto identifies himself in Sparafucile when they meet, and they genuinely seem interested in one another’s company. Their conversation isn’t slick like the courtiers’ discussions, but there’s mutual understanding there.

Sparafucile’s odd mannerisms- his stilted dialogue, his contradictory-but-strict sense of morality, and his lack of interest in socialization- all make sense when considering him as autistic. Sparafucile is a mirror to Rigoletto, a fellow outsider in a world not built for them. Gilda is Rigoletto’s mirror too; she’s what he could have been. She remains unaware of the world’s cruelty but naively optimistic in the same way an autistic child is before they are bullied into shame and realize that they are considered unchangeably wrong.

Speaking of Gilda, Rigoletto’s home life with his daughter shows an entire other side to him. With the courtiers he may be obnoxiously brutish but with Gilda he’s poignant and caring. The music is gorgeously illustrative; there is this deep beauty there that nobody in the court suspects Rigoletto is capable of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gCRhUh0h0I

The flourishing strings Gilda rushes out onstage to are thematically linked to the carnivalesque music played when the Duke first mentions her at the top of the show. But where the top-of-show music is hollow and repeated until the audience scarcely notices it at all, Gilda’s strings are passionate and youthful, shining like sparklers. Gilda and Rigoletto do understand each other quite well, even though neither of them really think they do. Both the start of the duet and when Rigoletto begins telling Gilda about her mother, feature the characters matching each other’s melodies.

But then in both cases, Rigoletto’s fear about his daughter learning about the outer world overtakes him and from that point on, while they complement each other in the music, they aren’t matched. I also think Rigoletto’s real fear isn’t just Gilda getting hurt, but then her turning out bitter like him- so he reacts and pulls himself away when she starts to repeat him. Yet even as protected as she is, there are signs Gilda is already starting to mimic her old man. Note how her reaction to Rigoletto working himself up over her mother is to ask him to stop talking, hoping that will make him no longer think about it at all… the exact same logic Rigoletto uses to discourage her from the outer world.

But he doesn’t entirely notice her following his lead, and so he continues to keep her sheltered. If she’s in the inner world he has created, he thinks, she will be safe and nothing will ever happen to her.

Many autistic people have rich inner worlds separate from our outer experiences. The autistic mind lends itself well to rich imagination, deep passion, and a profound appreciation for beauty. The intensity by which we feel is a double-edged sword- it makes so much of the world unbearable, but our joy is exponentially greater. And that inner world is often incomprehensible to the outer world.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t explain what drew me to opera — I still can’t. My peers didn’t understand and made fun of my hobby, while my school’s administrators discouraged my interests- the logic being if I got used to it, I’d shut up and be “less autistic-acting” after a while. The hard lesson autistic people learn is that the inner world must be hidden, because most people will not understand, and those who are hostile to such things are too much of a risk for our safety. (Or even that we have to hide that we’re autistic at all- this process is called masking, which I suppose makes the comparison to the masked, blindfolded Rigoletto being tricked into helping kidnap his own child a little on-the-nose.)

Nina Wurtzel/Metropolitan Opera

But the tragedy for both Rigoletto and Gilda is that while the autistic inner world is beautiful, nobody can exist in isolation forever. They both desperately want to be part of the world around them. For Gilda, that desire leads to dangerous curiosity and her infatuation with the Duke. And for Rigoletto it leads to what we already have seen- paranoia, malice, self-hatred.

Autistic people are more likely to befriend abusive individuals- even ones they hate- because they are often so lonely they see them as their only option. According to the National Institute of Health, 90% of autistic people experience interpersonal abuse at some point in their lives. Gilda loves the Duke even after he sexually assaults her. Rigoletto is driven apart by his hatred of the Court and simultaneous need for belonging. This is what dooms him; not revenge, not rage. Both characters are struck with the struggle of being targeted by broader society and yet needing a society to call home.

In fact, the opera doesn’t treat revenge as inherently prone to failure- the courtiers’ revenge plan goes horribly right, and while Count Monterone’s curse on the Duke doesn’t stick, it does on Rigoletto. Revenge is a behavioral language that all the courtiers are in on that Rigoletto is excluded from. It’s when Rigoletto attempts to communicate in that same way that tragedy strikes; his ultimate flaw isn’t that he chooses revenge but that he gives in to the harmful structures that have always excluded him.

I’m not arguing that autism should be caricatured onstage in the same way that Rigoletto’s humpback has been. However, I am saying the opera makes sense when it’s read as a tragedy about the ways society ostracizes autistic people, and that this reading can lead to further revelations of the autistic experience. Rigoletto is one of the most nuanced depictions of internalized ableism I’ve seen, and I consider him to be a finer example of autistic characterization than many characters explicitly written as such.

Often, autistic characters abide by neurotypical conceptions of what autism looks like, be they savants or “quirky” comic relief. Not only does Rigoletto portray something besides these stereotypes, but he is also agonizingly human while he does so; his need for belonging can be understood by anyone. Considering Rigoletto through the lens of other disabilities can also expand our expectations of who can play the character.

I think of the recent Opera North production directed by Femi Elufowoju Jr. in which Rigoletto, Gilda, and Monterone are Black against a majority-White cast, allowing the dynamics of ostracization to stay in place without caricaturing disability. What would it mean to have an autistic singer play Rigoletto? What might it mean to depict autism onstage in the operatic world? It opens up so many fascinating avenues of expression and gives so many possibilities as to where to take the piece next.

And with the talk of reinterpretation, there is the eternal question: What did Verdi mean by all this to begin with? When confronted by censors, Verdi threatened to cancel the opera if the jester could not be disabled onstage, writing: “I find it very fine to represent this character outwardly deformed and ridiculous, but inwardly impassioned and full of love.” Rigoletto is cruel, controlling, and paranoid. He is also a gentle father capable of great kindness. He is only one because he can be the other. This really comes to a head in “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata”.

Here Rigoletto is perhaps at his most ragingly vicious in the entire opera- yet he is so out of righteousness, doing his damnedest to save his daughter first by force and then by desperate begging. Both of his aspects are illuminated and so interlocked it is impossible to separate one from another- and the result is terrifying, depressing, haunting; but also jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The opera embraces contradictions and ultimately argues the titular character is valuable because he is a human being; all his sides are part of him, and he would not be Rigoletto were any side of him removed.

All disabilities, too, embrace contradictions. Autism does so in a particularly observable way. It is technically an ‘invisible’ disability, but studies suggest the subconscious is able to immediately identify and discriminate against it. Autistic individuals can be incredibly gifted in some areas and deeply behind in others. How autism works genetically is undefined and intangible, and no two cases are the same. And it’s that uncertain contradiction that makes it so terrifying in the mind of the public imagination, to the point it’s become a bogeyman exploited by alt-right and antivax movements.

But through Rigoletto, Verdi argues that that uncertainty needs to be embraced. The ugly and the sublime are both given space in his music. Our contradictions, Verdi shows us, make us human. And maybe if we all take the time to accept uncertainty- accept contradiction, accept both the gift and the deficit, accept that all of us are at heart human beings- we will truly be able to see each other regardless of our neurotype. Maybe we will not only come to understand this opera better, but ourselves, too.