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of a derelict inn, while the Duke, again in disguise, first sings the famous aria `La donna e mobile' ('womankind is fickle'), then receives Maddalena, the sister of the Duke's resident paid assassin Sparafucile. Rigoletto tells Gilda to go home and put on a male disguise, so that when he has finished with the Duke, they can escape together to Verona. Sparafucile is unaware of the disguised Duke's true identity, and Rigoletto bribes the assassin to kill him, saying he will come back at midnight to collect the body. Maddalena begs her brother not to kill her handsome young wooer, but Sparafucile only agrees so long as a substitute victim can be found before midnight, to provide him with a corpse. This turns out, of course, to be Gilda, when she returns at the height of a great storm, disguised as a man. Sparafucile stabs her and places her body in a sack which, when Rigoletto returns as midnight strikes, is presented to him. Rigoletto drags his prize to a nearby riverbank, triumphantly imagining he is about to get rid of the hated Tyrant forever, when he hears the Duke's mocking voice singing `La donna e mobile'. In horror Rigoletto opens the sack and discovers his daughter who, with her dying breath, declares that she still loves the Duke. Recalling again the fatal curse, the jester collapses over her body.

Everything about this story is deliberately made so dark that it contains no element of redemption at all. The anima has been slain. The `dark masculine' is triumphant. The dissolute remains unpunished. Every misunderstanding and disguise, instead of helping ultimately to lead to the revelation of the truth, as it would in Comedy, is used simply to push the plot further downwards towards its black conclusion.

We see similarly convoluted plots in one Verdi opera after another, usually ending likewise in the violent or painful death of the hapless heroine. In La Traviata ('The Frail One', 1853), when the consumptive heroine Violetta seems to reject her beloved Alfredo, he has no idea she has done this only to pave the way selflessly for his sister's happiness; but when, after further misunderstandings, they are finally reunited, this is only to provide a cue for her to expire from her dreadful disease. La Forza del Destino (1862) begins with the hero Alvaro deciding to elope with his beloved Leonore, because her `unrelenting father' will not consent to the match. But, by mistake, Alvaro kills the father, launching her brother Don Carlos on a lifelong Quest for vengeance. After being separated on their flight and going through many adventures, the hero ends up as a monk, the heroine as an anchorite living alone in a remote hermitage. Finally the `Dark Rival' Carlos tracks down Alvaro and tries to kill him in a wild, rocky landscape, but is mortally wounded in return. The hero calls for help at a nearby hermitage where he is astonished to find Leonore. She hurries to aid her dying brother who manages to stab her, so that no sooner has she been reunited with her lover than she is dying in his arms.

At the end of Il Trovatore (1853) the heroine Leonora takes poison, thinking that, by surrendering to the advances of the evil Count, she has at least bought the release of her beloved Manrico. Entering the dungeon where he is imprisoned, she dies in his arms. But then the Count orders Manrico's execution, only to find too late that he has murdered his own brother. At the end of The Sicilian Vespers (1855), when the hero dies with his father, resisting their enemies, the heroine, not to be left alone, stabs herself. At the end of Aida (1871), when the hero Radames is buried alive in a dungeon, he welcomes death, because he thinks at least his beloved Aida has escaped their deadly enemies; but at the last minute she slips into the prison to die in his arms. It was perhaps not surprising that Verdi should eventually have been drawn to produce his own version of that original dark comedyturned-tragedy, Otello (1887), where the hero suffocates the heroine before plunging a dagger into his own heart.

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