By Kelly Dean Hansen

"Rigoletto," Giuseppe's 1851 score based on a play by Victor Hugo, is the quintessential 19th century Italian opera. It has so many elements associated with the genre at its finest that even Verdi never again quite achieved such a synthesis.

Its musical and dramatic scope set a new standard for the composer and for the art form. Only a few of his pre-"Rigoletto" operas are regularly performed today, but virtually everything Verdi wrote in the next half-century, all the way through "Falstaff" in 1983, is a standard of the operatic stage.

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