Editing Rigoletto (section)

== Critical reception ==
Although immensely successful with audiences from the beginning, many critics in various countries condemned the work for its dark and bitterly tragic plot combined with a succession of mere popular tunes, as they thought of the music. After the first performance in Venice in 1851 the ''Gazzetta ufficiale di Venezia'' deplored the fact that in his opinion the libretto was inspired by "the Satanic school" and Verdi and Piave had sought beauty from the "deformed and repulsive".<ref name=Brandenburg/>

Typical of critical reaction in Britain, Austria and Germany was the review in the ''Frankfurter Nachrichten'' of July 24, 1859: "It is well known that this shoddy work presents all the vices and virtues of Verdi's music: light music, pleasant dance rhythms for frightful scenes; that death and corruption are represented as in all the works of this composer by [[galop]]s and party favours."<ref>{{cite book|last1=Engler|first1=Günter|title=Über Verdi|year=2000|publisher=Reclam|location=Ditzingen|language=de|isbn=978-3-15-018090-7}}</ref>

In the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, ''Rigoletto'' has received high praise even from [[avant-garde]] and experimental composers such as [[Luigi Dallapiccola]], [[Luciano Berio]] and [[Ernst Krenek]].<ref name=Brandenburg/> [[Igor Stravinsky]] wrote "I say that in the aria 'La donna è mobile', for example, which the elite thinks only brilliant and superficial, there is more substance and feeling than in the whole of [[Richard Wagner|Wagner]]'s [[Der Ring des Nibelungen|''Ring'' cycle]]."<ref name=Brandenburg/>