I spent a lot of my childhood listening to Italian opera on Saturday afternoons, because my Italian mother loved it, and now I love it, passionately. I’m a sucker for La Traviata, but the aria everyone in the world knows is from Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, which premiered in 1851 in Venice.

Verdi knew that la donna è mobile, composed for the beginning of Act 3, was catchy. The opera was rehearsed under tight secrecy, and the tenor wasn’t shown that aria until two days before the premiere, because Verdi didn’t want it to be overheard and sung by the gondoliers.*

Here’s tenor Enrico Caruso singing that aria, in a restored version of his 1909 performance. I have listened to this a lot. (Sorry about the ad you have to slog through first.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvV5go3kSSw

For the record—every kid in my carpool knows every line of the quartet from Act Three. It features 1) Rigoletto, 2) his beloved daughter Gilda, who loves the slime-ball duke despite overwhelming evidence that he’s a slimeball, 3) the slimeball duke, and 4) Maddalena, a canny female who knows the duke is trying to seduce her.

You can hear Gilda’s broken sobs high above, the duke doing his oily best to seduce Maddalena, Maddalena’s “ha! ha! you don’t fool me!” and Rigoletto down low, singing I told you so’s about the wicked, unfaithful man to his heartbroken but defiant daughter.

Here’s Pavarotti as the duke, Isola Jones as Maddalena, Joan Sutherland as Gilda, and Leo Nucci as Rigoletto. Isola Jones is rather distractingly spilling out of the top of her bodice, but . . . her voice! And you kind of have to close your eyes to imagine Joan Sutherland is a teenaged naïf, but . . . her voice!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4UdG9CXz1I

Humor me and listen to it if you don’t know it. My carpool was converted, and it was a bunch of middle school boys. It’s worth waiting for Joan’s high C#.

*Opera News http://tinyurl.com/n6xpc2s