In Giuseppe Verdis "Rigoletto" from 1851 the aria of the duke "La donna è mobile" is of outstanding importance: just this popular song marks the central dramatic place of the opera, just the easy and flighty of its sounding signals the disaster. However, not only the aria as a whole, also already its first text line is ambiguous, because "mobile" is to be grasped not precisely (movable, flexibly, unstably, pliable, fluorescent, erratically, fickly, unpredictable, adaptably or unsteadily?).
Because in my piece of listening La Donna mono-thematically this term and no one else is articulated over and over again it itself becomes movable, fluctuating, restlessly, indefatigable, precipitously, delusively and changes therefore into an ambiguous sound material. This melts with fragments of the popular song itself, with instrumental courses developed from it (the temporal stretch of the Verdi-harmonization generates its new quality!), with nature sounds (their width and simultaneously their security!) and with train and railway station noises (their eroticism, dynamism and simultaneously their threateningness!) to a new one in which musical and everyday sounds penetrate theirselves mutually lighting up and the sufficiently well-known steps strangely before our ear.
La Donna takes about 27 minutes and is divided in seven parts: