At first glance Rigoletto, Giuseppe Verdi’s 1851 opera about a hunchbacked clown whose daughter is abducted by a lecherous duke, doesn’t seem to have much of a connection to modern political turmoil. But for Tomer Zvulun, The Atlanta Opera’s general manager and artistic director, the pain and anguish of the titular character served as a quiet allegory for his own distress at the unfolding events in Israel.
“There’s nothing about Rigoletto or the production that has anything to do with the current conflict in the Middle East,” says Zvulun of the show, which premieres Saturday at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre with performances through November 12. “But in the story there are themes and elements that reflect what can happen to society when it loses its human image.”
The life trajectory that would lead Zvulun to his role as artistic director began in Israel, where members of his family still reside. In his youth, he was fascinated with cinema and dreamed of being a director. That interest was sidelined following his service as a paramedic in the Israeli Defense Force, an experience that put him on track to becoming a doctor. After finishing his military service, Zvulun returned to civilian life in Tel Aviv, where his love of opera soon developed.
“When I encountered that art form, it included all of the things that I absolutely love, from storytelling to theater to music, design, lighting, literature — all of them were there,” he recalls. That newly emergent love of opera led him to study as a visiting scholar at Boston University.
“I realized that my path to becoming a director is through studying languages, music and theater,and really actually doing it,” he says. That doing took the form of apprenticeships with prestigious opera companies. “I assisted great stage directors at the Seattle Opera and then the Metropolitan Opera and then got to direct my own stuff.”
The cultivation of his directorial skills would eventually lead Zvulun to his current position with The Atlanta Opera, a once floundering organization that has thrived under his leadership. That unique capacity to put a fresh face on a well-worn property informed his work on Rigoletto, a piece he has already mounted numerous times.
“There’s a saying that no man steps in the same river twice because it is not the same river, and he is not the same man,” he says. “So coming back to Rigoletto, I feel that it is not the same world, and I’m not the same person as an artist.”
For Zvulun, that new personhood was found in commencing work on Rigoletto following the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas. “Starting rehearsals the day after the massacre was very emotional and personal,” he says.
The long-brewing turmoil in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians is fraught with decades of conflict and strife, but Zvulun is adamant that the recent conflict emerged first and foremost as an act of antisemitism. “There’s no question about that cruelty,” he says. “There is no question about the evilness of burning babies in front of their parents, of shooting parents in front of their children, of raping women. It’s unconscionable. It’s been a very disturbing and scarring event.”
Zvulun is devastated by what has happened to the Israeli people but is quick to add that he is just as horrified by the amount of hate that is unfolding all over the world as a result. He cites the recent hate crime stabbing death of 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoumi, a Muslim child, in Illinois as a prime example. “The degree of hate we see in the world is extremely unsettling,” he says. “Now, more than ever, we need compassion. We need to remind each other of our humanity.”
His thoughts on the matter run deep and go to the heart of human nature. “There’s a saying in the Bible in the first chapter of Genesis: God created man in his own image. The Hebrew term for it is b’tzelem. The behavior that we’ve seen on October 7 was a loss of that b’tzelem. How do we deal with this as human beings? How do we dig ourselves out of that hole?” he asked.
For Zvulun, the answer lies in the reflective power of the arts. “I feel like it puts a mirror in front of our faces and lets us see what we look like sometimes and maybe allow us to transform back into human beings.”
It is here that he draws a parallel with the conflict in Israel. “In Rigoletto, there is a society that is literally so violent and heartless that they steal the title character’s daughter and get her to be a hostage,” he says. “And in the climax the father comes to beg for the life of his daughter. He’s sharing his heart and begging to get back the person he loves. And you can’t do that show without thinking about what happens in another part of the world where fathers and mothers are devastated by losing their children.”
Such comparisons weigh heavily on Zvulun’s mind and permeate his directorial process. “There are some shows where you go to see something that will get you to forget about everything and just be amused,” he says. “I’m not interested in those shows. I’m interested in theater and stories that tell us something deep about our humanity.”
Ultimately, Zvulun says, Rigoletto is a story about masks. The costume of a clown is a mask that allows both the wearer and the world at large to detach from the reality of the clown’s humanity. “I think that atrocities across history are committed when a society puts on a mask and forgets its humanity. That mask can be Nazi uniforms, it can be fascist clothing, it can be Hamas scarves — whatever they put on themselves to forget that they’re human beings.
Zvulun says he takes solace from a favorite quote from Leonard Bernstein: “Art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed because people are changed by art — enriched, ennobled, encouraged — they then act in a way that may affect the course of events . . . by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.”
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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.
