We went to the opera house! It was one in London though I forget what its name was now (it wasn’t the Royal one)! We watched ‘Rigoletto’, which was written by a man by the name of Giuseppe Verdi, a composer and opera writer.
Verdi was born in Italy. He composed instrumental songs, but he discovered his love for operas. He wrote the music for ‘Rigoletto’ in 1851. One opera actually opened with that famous play.
‘Rigoletto’ was about a court jester by that name, who had a beautiful daughter called Gilda. Nobody but he and the maid knew that she was his daughter, or even that she lived in his house. This one was visually set in New York and included the Duke as a member of the Maffia. The storyline was (the part that I understood, anyway) about the Duke seeing Gilda and falling in love with her, pretending that he was a poor student and not a wealthy man.
Soon after this, Gilda realised his treason against her, and old Rigoletto, who had had a curse set on him before and thought this part of it a bad omen, realised that the Duke and his daughter were in love. He sent his friend (actually another member of the Maffia) to go and kill the Duke, despite his daughter’s cries for his mercy. The assassin used his beautiful sister to lure the man into the clutches of his inn, before attempting to murder him. The assassin’s sister couldn’t help really loving the Duke, and before long she and her brother made an agreement which Gilda heard: if some one came to the door of the inn for a drink, they would murder them instead, stuff the body into a sack, and then throw it in the river before Rigoletto could see.
As I said, Gilda heard this, and she dressed as a boy herself, and knocked on the door. When Rigoletto opened the sack, instead of finding the nasty Duke, who had been unfaithful and doted on everybody, he found his poor dying Gilda.
I was quite excited about the opera and was a little disappointed to find how long it dragged on for. However, I thought the actors and actresses were very, very good at singing – and this isn’t just showing how much I hate her, but it made me laugh to try and see Katy Perry singing quite so high and so greatly! The only other thing wrong with it was that I think Gilda accidentally hit the wrong note when she was going really, really high, which made everyone clamp their hands to their ears!
That was the verdict – but there was also some vomit. Tilly, almost the whole way through, had a hot flush, and she would have been fine had the opera not been the most boiling place in the world for somebody having a hot flush. At first, she had some headaches and that sort of thing, but then it moved on to her stretching out on three seats and going to sleep and shaking her head in it and panting like she was having a nightmare – poor, poor Tilly! The last bit was worse though. Suddenly she sat up, and murmured, ‘Mummy, I feel really, properly sick,’ and before we could whisk her off to the bathroom she leant over and belched onto the floor. Between each spurt she said, ‘Vinia, move your – bleugh – shoes!’ I tried to do so but each time I moved your hand forward a spurt of vomit landed on it, so all I could do was leave them! Somebody next to us went to get somebody, and by the time they came Tilly had stopped throwing up. She said she felt much better after that.
The staff were really, really kind to us. They got together some buckets and stuff and cleaned up the area. Unfortunately we both stood in it when getting up, and trailed most of it round the whole house from the soles of our tights. We had to take them off and put them in the bin, of course! Luckily Tilly felt much better and the staff were so very kind to us. I think she really claimed her point.
And to add onto that – we’re going again next week!
Afterwards we went to the Art Gallery and saw a few paintings and sketches, but by that time Tilly wanted to go home and warm up on the sofa, so we caught the train and did so.