Anna Christy as Gilda and Roland Wood as Rigoletto in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Rigoletto in 2018.Michael Cooper/Canadian Opera Company/Supplied

Laurence B. Mussio is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Co-Founder and chair of the Long Run Institute.

Per il maestro, che non scrisse per i palchi ma per la platea in piedi (For the maestro, who wrote not for the box seats but for the standing room.)

I saw my first opera when I was seven – in 1972, at Lambton College in Sarnia. Not La Scala. Lambton College, in the heart of Chemical Valley. My father took me.

It was La Traviata – Verdi’s story of a Parisian courtesan dying of consumption, sacrificing her happiness for bourgeois respectability. I was seven. My main preoccupation that year was trading hockey cards; I remember the absurdity of surplus Ed Van Impe cards that nobody wanted. And yet, there I was, watching Violetta expire in the arms of Alfredo. Bewildering. Fascinating. Weird. But not ridiculous.

I will be thinking about Lambton College this evening at the Four Seasons Centre, where my wife and I are joining dear friends for the Canadian Opera Company’s opening night of Rigoletto. For more than 70 years, this company has insisted Canadians deserve opera of international calibre, rooted here. But while La Traviata is a story of noble sacrifice, Rigoletto offers a darker diagnostic. Violetta gives up her life to protect someone else’s future; Rigoletto sacrifices his daughter’s future to secure his own present.

The opera opens with a curse. Count Monterone, whose daughter has been seduced and discarded by the Duke of Mantua, bursts into court to denounce him. Rigoletto, the Duke’s hunchbacked jester, mocks the grieving father. Monterone turns: “Tu che d’un padre ridi al dolore, sii maledetto!” – “You who laugh at a father’s grief, be cursed!” The rest of the opera is that curse’s........

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