'Whether you know a word of Italian or not,' Berger says, 'it's barkingly apparent that there are some issues going on in this relationship.' Verdi crafted a purposefully plain melodic line for Rigoletto. And Rigoletto's paranoia in the first act triggers one of Verdi's specialties - the father-daughter duet, with music that goes far beyond the words. He overprotects his daughter Gilda, and he will lose her when his underhanded plot to save her backfires horrifically. In fact, Rigoletto is too good as a father. He's going to be the best father on Earth.' 'We've all known this guy - or known of him - the really mean guy at work, the corporate trader who destroys companies and people's livelihoods, who makes it OK because at home he's a good family man. I feel that there are some sort of biorhythms in all of us that Verdi understood the key to. Berger says he could just be that guy in the office next to you. And, for a high-spirited comedian, he's pretty twisted. He's a hunchback who works as a court jester for a prince who's very depraved. Take the title character in Verdi's Rigoletto, for example. 'I'm talking about stories that really show how people work.' 'I don't mean it's a plot about who did what to whom,' Berger says.

But William Berger, author of the book Verdi With a Vengeance, says the way Verdi intersects with our lives goes much deeper than Doritos. His natural habitat is the opera house, but over the years Verdi's music has taken up residence in some surprising places, from the Marx Brothers' 1935 spoof of Il trovatore in A Night at the Opera, to last month when Renee Fleming sang the Top 10 list on Letterman to the pulsing drive of his Requiem in a Doritos ad.ДЄnd we could go on. And, whether we recognize it or not, on the bicentennial of his birth, Giuseppe Verdi is still vital. Two hundred years ago today, in a small northern Italian village, a couple named Verdi - tavern owners by trade - welcomed the birth of a baby boy who would later change the face of opera forever. Leemage/Universal Images Group/Getty Images (Verdi had been asked to compose an ode for the opening of the Canal, but declined on the grounds that he did not write 'occasional pieces'.Giuseppe Verdi's operas have an uncanny ability to probe into our contemporary psyche. Contrary to popular belief, the opera was not written to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, nor that of the Khedivial Opera House (which opened with Verdi's Rigoletto) in the same year. Metastasio's libretto Nitteti (1756) was a major source of the plot. One scholar has argued that the scenario was written by Temistocle Solera and not by Auguste Mariette.

Isma'il Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, commissioned Verdi to write the opera for performance in January 1871, paying him 150,000 francs, but the premiere was delayed because of the Franco-Prussian War. Aida was first performed at the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo on 24 December 1871, conducted by Giovanni Bottesini. Aida (pronouncedВ ) sometimes spelled AГЇda, is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, based on a scenario written by French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette.

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