A bitter, cursed comedian waits under cover of darkness in a rowboat on the water beneath a roadside inn. He’s paid the innkeeper to murder the comedian’s employer, a privileged womanizer whose wandering eye noticed the comedian’s daughter.

Finally, without a word, a sack drops through the floor and into the boat. Before dumping the the cadaver of his despised lord in the river, the allows himself one last look at the face of the man. There, he discovers not the face of the man, but of his own daughter. Now finally does the comedian understand the nature of his curse.

That’s the end of Rigoletto. It never fails to make my skin crawl.