Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Britten by Albright Daniel

Author:Albright, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Falstaff

Otello was a great success at its première in 1887, some 16 years after the première of Verdi’s previous opera, Aida. Verdi was of course pleased, though evidently a little vexed that the public seemed more drawn by the lead tenor, Francesco Tamagno, than by the opera; when anyone else sang the role, fewer people bought tickets. (Verdi considered that Tamagno, thrilling in loud sustained high notes, didn’t sing the love duet with any great steadiness of voice.) Not long after the premiere, Boito started thinking about ways to extract yet another opera out of the septuagenarian composer: Boito wrote to a friend that he was ‘eager to make that bronze colossus resound one more time.’36

Boito now played on two points where Verdi seemed manipulable: first, his continuing love of Shakespeare; and second, his irritability concerning his presumed lack of talent for comedy. Verdi’s one and only comedy, his second opera Un giorno di regno, had been a failure; and Rossini had been one of many who said out loud that Verdi’s genius was restricted to the tragic mode. There were comic scenes in some of Verdi’s operas, such as La forza del destino, where the grumpy Fra Melitone keeps spouting laboured puns; and, from the point of view of the Duke, Rigoletto is a comedy, maybe all the funnier in that the hunchbacked jester winds up hiring someone to murder his own daughter. But Verdi’s audiences, in 1887, might be forgiven for thinking that elegant sparkle was not his strength.

The gestation of Falstaff was not as slow as that of Otello, but Verdi took his time. On 3 December 1890, Verdi wrote to a friend,

For forty years I’ve wanted to write a comic opera, and for fifty years I’ve known The Merry Wives of Windsor … Now Boito has taken away all my buts, and has made for me a lyric comedy like none other … Falstaff is a sad man who commits every sort of wicked deed … but in a delightful way [forma divertente]. He’s a type! Types are so various! The opera is completely comical. Amen.37

A comedy about a sad bad man who amuses the audience, then, is what Verdi first had in mind. Phrased in this way, Verdi’s letter seems to posit Falstaff as the successor to Rigoletto, a professional comedian and amateur villain, full of inner pain about his concealed daughter; and something of the glare, the artificial frenzy, the forced laughter, of the opening of Rigoletto will be heard in the Falstaff music. At the end of Rigoletto, the jester, about to throw into the river a sack containing a body, opens the sack and discovers his dying daughter; 40 years later, Verdi (so to speak) opens the same sack and discovers Falstaff, shivering and loudly wretched after being tossed into the Thames. Falstaff is the gaily promiscuous Duke and the deformed clown Rigoletto in one; and, as an occasional singer of falsetto (‘Io son di Sir John Falstaff’ – ‘I am Sir

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.