Photo By Philip Groshong

Andrzej Dobber (left) as Rigoletto, Frank Lopardo as the Duke of Mantua.

Set this Cincinnati Opera season’s Rigoletto and La Bohème side by side and you’re looking at a primo fortissimo demo of what opera was vs. what opera can be — a posed, static, concert in costume, sung splendidly but in front of the plot, even against the plot, versus a fully integrated music drama, sung just as splendidly, but sung — and acted — inside the story by flesh-and-blood characters. You can guess which is more theatrically persuasive. For all its elaborate production values, borrowed from Seattle Opera, the July 21 performance Rigoletto, repeating July 23, was about as old school — and creaky — as opera can get. And the differences abide more in the productions, less in the raw material.

Yes, it’s a half-century older, 1851 vs. 1896, but Rigoletto’s plot is not a lot sillier than that of Bohème: A hunchbacked court jester mocks his ducal, libertine master and the duke’s circle of arrogant airhead friends. They kidnap and the duke seduces Rigoletto’s daughter who, foolishly, falls in love with him. Outraged, the father arranges for the duke to be assassinated, but the daughter substitutes herself and dies, still loving the man who betrayed her. (That’s as opposed to the anti-Establishment antics of and romantic tangles among denizens of a lost, long ago Bohemian demimonde.)

Novelist Victor Hugo created the Rigoletto story as Le roi s’amuse . Yes, Giuseppe Verdi’s music for Rigoletto is darker, more sonorous and more muscular than Giacomo Puccini’s bright, lilting lyricism for Bohème, but it’s no less romantic in texture. However, stage director Linda Brovsky turned Rigoletto’s singing outward, toward the audience while conductor Edoardo Müller shaped the score into a series of perfectly tuned, vocally toned set pieces, not into a flow of dramatic dialogue.

Even when Rigoletto’s arms were wrapped around his beloved daughter, Gilda, in the score’s three huge, doomed duets, Polish baritone Andrzej Dobber (making his Cincinnati Opera debut) and Russian soprano Dina Kuznetsova directed their emotion outward, to and for the audience, not to or for each other. When the taunted, threatened Rigoletto turned on the crowd of mocking, drunken noblemen, his anger was directed out, across the footlights with only a few over the shoulder glances at his tormentors.

There might have been some high and caustic irony in the Duke’s last scene. He sings of the fickleness of women in the score’s most famous aria, “La donna e mobile,” even as he forgets his idle, toying conquest of the beautiful Gilda and moves on to his seduction either of or by the hot-eyed, much-seduced Maddalena. But Brovsky staged the sequence and Metropolitan Opera tenor Frank Lopardo sang it as a brilliant, bloodless concert piece with little bite or context.

An audience of 2972 saw — and many roundly applauded — Rigoletto on July 21. Those who came for the singing got their money’s worth in fine Cincinnati Opera fashion — particularly from the soloists mentioned and from Eric Owens as the alarming assassin and a sizzling Tracie Luck as Maddalena — though the choral work seemed less robust than should be expected from a stage full of men, and the orchestra lacked some of the fiery drive that Bohème conductor Xian Zhang extracted from it.

Those of the 2972 who came to see integrated music drama were less well rewarded.

Seattle Opera’s production — designed by Robert Dahlstrom, lit here by Thomas C. Hase and costumed by Marie Anne Chiment — transports Rigoletto’s action from the usual pseudo-medieval court of Mantua to a highly politicized 1936. It turns the doubleted, velveteened courtiers into black-shirted fascisti and accents the action with the clink of cocktail glasses. Tormented Count Monterone (Kenneth Shaw), who lays a fatal curse upon the house of Mantua and all its denizens, is played as a Jew subjected to the jack-boot anti-Semitism of Mussolini’s Italy. All that might serve as an apt illumination, even an enlargement of the opera’s material. Certainly the court of Mantua can be presented as a cesspool of indolent excess in whichever period. But, as staged by Brovsky, these ideas remained decorative, un-integrated, even irrelevant to the content. And, as lit by Hase a bit too much for their architectural elegance, the looming sets more dwarf the drama than frame it.

RIGOLETTO, presented by Cincinnati Opera at Music Hall in Over-the-Rhine, repeats on July 23. For tickets: 513-241-2742.