 |
Verdi's Last Opera
by Kathryn Bumpass |
Verdi's last opera, Falstaff, will be seen in an encore performance of the Met Live in HD, Sunday, January 12, 2014, at 2:00pm, at the Performing Arts Center on the Cal Poly campus. Tickets are still available for $27, including parking.
Falstaff is Verdi's only comic opera, except for the early Un giorno di regno, of 1840. It is based primarily on Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor with additional material from Henry IV, I and II.
Verdi probably never would have composed Falstaff were it not for the urging and collaboration of librettist Arrigo Boito. Boito's previous experience with Verdi included a revision of the libretto for Simon Boccanegro in 1857, and more importantly, the libretto for another Shakespearean drama, Verdi's masterful Otello.
Boito was a master librettist, a man of letters and a consummate man of the theater. He was also a composer, though not a particularly successful one. His best known work was the opera Mefistofele, which met with a lukewarm reception in its own time, but is enjoying something of a revival today. Boito's experience as a composer and a writer gave him unusual insight into what was required in a libretto, in what would work effectively on stage.
Verdi himself played no small role in the libretto. He was, in fact, accustomed to taking a major role in the creation of his opera libretti. His intrusions grew more frequent and more substantive as his career advanced. He and Boito were real partners in the forging of the libretti for Otello and Falstaff, and his respect for Boito played no small part in his willingness to do another opera after Otello.
Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor is a farcical play with a great deal of broad humor, even slapstick. Verdi said of the central character, "Falstaff is a scoundrel who commits all sorts of malicious deeds . . . but in an entertaining manner." His considerable girth is an outward sign of his indulgence: food, drink, womanizing, sloth, irresponsibility. Verdi scholar Gerald A. Mendelsohn says of the old knight, "He is a child who will not bow to reality . . ."
Falstaff is a major comic character in the history of literature, and like most comic heroes has many faults. In addition to various kinds of indulgence, he's vain and easily flattered into believing that Alice Ford and Meg Page are in love with him, a preposterous notion. He makes amorous advances to them, especially Alice, in hopes of getting money from their wealthy husbands through them.
The "merry wives of Windsor" are too shrewd for this scheme, though, and in their turn plot to punish Falstaff. Alice invites Falstaff to a rendezvous in her home, telling Falstaff her husband will be gone. Master Ford returns unexpectedly and there ensues a frantic effort to hide the old knight. At last he is concealed in a laundry basket, suffocating under the dirty, smelly contents, while Ford and his men search the premises. When Ford moves out of sight for the moment, Alice orders the servants to haul the laundry basket to the window and empty it into the Thames, with Falstaff still in it.
Soaked but philosophical, Falstaff later muses on his situation. He is lured by the women once again to Windsor Forest, supposedly for a tryst with Alice, but again the women have prepared a surprise for him. Most of the characters in the opera disguise themselves as fairies and other supernatural forest creatures, then set themselves on Falstaff, terrifying him and pinching him. He at last recognizes one of his servants through his disguise, and proclaims the obvious, that he has been an ass.
Apart from Falstaff, Verdi considered Alice Ford the most important character in the opera. She is the most fully developed, and the most closely related to Verdi's previous heroines. Like many of those heroines, she is falsely accused of wrong-doing – in this case infidelity – but unlike them is not passive. Mendelsohn says "she is a self-possessed and knowing woman. . .it is she who controls the action and it is she who teaches the men the lessons they need to learn."
Falstaff differs significantly in style from all Verdi's previous operas, in an emphasis on the words and delivery of text by individual characters. Musicologist James Hepokoski has discovered in Verdi's correspondence of 1892, when he was deep in work on Falstaff, numerous "references to the implicit subordination of musical to dramatic values. The sweeping lyricism and traditional stylized exaggerations of earlier comic operas were to be sacrificed in favor of a more natural delivery" of the words.
The new value Verdi placed on the words themselves is reflected in his requirements for the singers. In the part of Mistress Quickly, for instance, which he considered the "most characteristic and original part" among the female characters, Verdi required "both voice and acting, much stage presence, and the right accent on the proper syllable."
You will not want to miss the Met's broadcast of Falstaff on January 12, at 2pm, at the PAC. This year the Met offers a new production by Robert Carsen. Ambrogio Maestri leads the cast in the title role, with Angela Meade as Alice Ford, Stephanie Blythe as Mistress Quickly, Jennifer Johnson Cano as Meg Page, Franco Vassallo as Master Ford, Lisette Oropesa as Nannetta, and Paolo Fanale as Fenton. |
