Le roi s'amuse

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Le roi s'amuse ( The King has fun) is a play written as a drama by Victor Hugo in 1832 . The premiere took place on November 22, 1832 in the Comédie-Française in Paris. While it describes the conditions at the absolutist court using the amorous escapades of the French King Francis I and the cabal of the court jester Triboulet, the censors of the time were of the opinion that it contained insulting allusions to King Louis-Philippe and was generally immoral.

The work forms the basis for Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto .

Plot of the play

The main character of the play is the court jester Triboulet, whose daughter Blanche is kidnapped to serve as the king's mistress , who wants to make use of the droit de seigneur . Another father, Monsieur de Saint-Vallier, whose daughter had also been molested by the king, had previously been mocked by Triboulet, whereupon the father cursed Triboulet. In the end, the curse is accidentally fulfilled on the jester's beloved daughter by his own hand.

Excerpt

Triboulet stands ready to murder the king because he has dishonored his daughter Blanche:

"What weather! Night of secrets! A storm in the sky! A murder on earth!
How big am I here! My fiery anger keeps pace with the wrath of God tonight.
Which king I kill! - One king on whom twenty others depend are, from his hands come war and peace!
He currently bears the burden of the whole world. When he no longer dwells on it, how will everything collapse!
If I throw down this support, the blow will be strong and terrible, and my hand who
pushes it will shake all weeping Europe for a long time,
which then has to seek its balance elsewhere!
[...]
Which arm makes you, earth, tremble as it pleases?
The earth replies in horror: Triboulet! -
Oh! you, common juggler, in your great pride.
The vengeance of a fool will shake the earth! "

(Note the allusion to the French Revolution of 1789.)

The author about his work

Victor Hugo's comment of November 23, 1832, after the author learned of the play's ban:

"The play is immoral? Do you think? Is that the essence? Here is the essence. Triboulet is misshapen; Triboulet is sick; Triboulet is the court jester; a triple misfortune that makes him angry. Triboulet hates the king because he is the King is, the lords because they are the lords, the people because they are not all humped. His only pastime is to incessantly turn the lords against one another against the king. He smashes the weakest the strongest. He makes the king to a bad person, [...] he lets go of all the nobles' families and incessantly shows him the wife to seduce, the sister to kidnap and the daughter to dishonor. In Triboulet's hands, the king is nothing but an all-powerful jumping jack, who breaks all the livelihoods in the midst of which the fool lets him play. [...] This father [de Saint-Vailler], from whom the king has taken his daughter, is mocked by triboulet and offended.

The father raises his arm and curses Triboulet. Hence the whole piece develops. The real subject is the curse of M. de Saint-Vailler. […] The same king that Triboulet drives to robbery will steal Triboulet's daughter […] He [Triboulet] wants to murder the king to avenge his daughter, but he murders his [own] daughter. […] Undoubtedly it is not up to us to decide whether we have an idea for a drama before us, but it is certainly a moral idea. […] So here is the play against which the ministry is trying to make so many accusations! This immorality, this indecency, here it is exposed! How pathetic! Power had its hidden reasons and we are about to expose them in order to create as much prejudice as possible against < Le Roi s'amuse >. She [the Power] would have liked the audience to go so far as to strangle the play without listening to it, because of an imaginary offense, like the way Othello strangles Desdemona. Honest Iago!

But, since it turns out that Othello did not strangle Desdemona, Iago unmasked himself and takes care of it himself. The day after the performance, the piece is banned by an order. "(Victor Hugo: Preface de << Le Roi s´amuse> >. In Œuvres Critiques Complétes. [Edited by Francis Bouvet])

Reception and historical situation

The play was banned after the premiere, ostensibly for reasons of immorality, more likely because it contained political explosives for the monarchy, and at the first performance it led to disputes between the royalist audience in the lodges and the bourgeois-democratic audience, the "young French" , came in the stands. At first the Marseillaise and Parisienne were sung, later the arguments turned into an open hall battle.

The July revolution of the bourgeoisie in France, which began on July 27, 1830, was crushed, and the monarchy was saved by the overthrow of the reactionary King Charles X, in whose place Louis-Philippe I took over, and in the year of the premiere in 1832, too the government of Louis-Philippe's democratic revolts was halted.

Against this background, Hugo's piece contained clear provocations against the renewed restoration of the monarchy. Victor Hugo, artistic representative of the democratic-revolutionary movement of the time, initiated a process to enable the piece to be performed. The poet lost the trial and the play was not shown in France for the next 50 years; Hugo, however, became famous as a defender of freedom of expression in France. Léo Delibes later wrote music to accompany the play.

Hugo's "Le Roi s'amuse" and Verdi's "Rigoletto"

The motif of the aristocrat, who libidinally penetrates the bourgeois world, and thereby ruins the living environment of his subjects, is for the age of the Enlightenment at least in Friedrich Schiller with " Kabale und Liebe " (originally "Luise Millerin", later also by Verdi as Opera “ Luisa Miller ” composed), and in 1831 “Le Bouffon du prince” (“The Fool of the Prince”) by D. Mélesville and X.-B. Saintine was a vaudeville play that essentially contained the plot of Hugo's play, albeit as a melodrama ; H. under the primacy of form and gesture over word and content, and finally with a “happy ending”, while Hugo leaned on contemporary popular theater and conceived “Le Roi s'amuse” as a “folk drama”.

Giuseppe Verdi and his librettist Francesco Maria Piave took from Hugo's piece the material for the opera Rigoletto . Verdi had already adapted Hugo's piece “Hernani” for the opera as “Ernani”. The famous aria La donna è mobile , among other things , was partly taken over directly by Hugo. This had the sentence attributed to King Francis I " Souvent femme varie. Bien fol est qui s'y fie  !" D. H. " The woman is often deceptive. A fool who trusts her! " Discovered during a visit to Chambord Castle .

With the exception of the aria "Ella mi fu rapita", "Rigoletto" contains a direct correspondence to Hugo's play in every song number, while conversely all appearances in the play except for two (third act, second scene, and fifth act, second scene) also appear at the same time in the "Rigoletto". Even the fool Triboulet was originally called Triboletto, later Rigoletto. Verdi himself also referred conceptually, as a representative of the Risorgimento , often to the "French revolutionary" (in the theater conceptual sense) Victor Hugo . He told an employee of the Fenice Theater in Venice about his project to implement Hugo's play: “I tell you in all friendship that - whether you weigh me in gold or throw me in prison - I cannot possibly set any other book to music than "Rigoletto". "

The Austro-Hungarian censorship authorities in Italy forced the composer to change the original name of the opera "La Maledizione" ("The Curse" of Monterone), to move the plot from France to Mantua , to make the king just a duke and the names of several Families change.

Literature and Sources

Web links