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Fugal Folly in a World out of Joint

Stray Thoughts on the Comedy of Verdi’s “Falstaff”

Whenever there is talk – half rapturous, half puzzled – of the later Verdi, I I find myself asking the question: would the great man, then nearly eighty, have been able to compose “Falstaff” with its flighty, coarse hero – egocentrically short-sighted, indeed, but with an ear keenly tuned to the heartbeat of the bourgeois-aristocratic world, – if he had not a few years before composed his tragic and sanguinary “Othello”?

Immortal

Only a few days ago when I was in Parma on the jury of a Liszt piano competition with literary connexions of a similarly tragic-histrionic character – appropriately, close to Verdi’s birthplace, Le Roncole (Bussetto) – the idea recurred in our deliberations. For, what else is “Falstaff”, this operatic project suggested, nay, craftily contrived by Arrigo Boito but a vital, joyous variation on that theme of jealousy which in “Othello” was raised to a pitch of white-hot intensity and annihilation?
Verdi could well have stopped with that sombre drama. He was old and tired. He was doubtful of his creative powers. And, he was at the pinnacle of his fame. He was respected, venerated even. Grand, enigmatic, a social pedagogue of large and liberal views, a lonely figure in a cultural and political landscape riddled with selfishness, Verdi had in his own lifetime achieved the status of an immortal.
Boito’s tempting – in the best sense of the word, crafty – letters had reminded Verdi of Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives of Windsor”. He did not appear to be disinclined to join forces with Boito and to place his trust again in his incomparable gifts of poetic compression and librettistic responsibility. Still, he hesitated. Perhaps it was an unsettled account of older days which tipped the balance and made him decide once more – indubitably for the last time – to devote himself to the comedy, to the folly of a world socially and morally out of joint.
He had suffered a painful defeat in 1840 with his lively comic opera “Un giorno di regno” and had since avoided this slippery ground. Now, after his grim “Othello”, one could imagine that the ambition stirred in him to surprise, pleasurably, the watchful world of art and music by showing how an old master could prove, with complete musical independence, to be an audacious portraitist of character, a caricaturist, and, at the same time, a rigorous polyphonist of the soul to the point of a strictly fugal structuring of the cosmic wisdom of the finale.

Photos of the technical rehearsal for the male chorus in Falstaff; the costumes were designed by Andrea Schmidt-Futterer. Photos: Hildegard Jöris, Denise Duits, Harald Descho

Indomitable

In the history of operatic composition I know of no comparable case of an indomitable old man inventing in his last great work a style completely new both in regard to his own previous work and the genre as a whole. Verdi’s music moves towards the final fugue with a lively elasticity, where necessary even with an athletic ingenuity such as – in its airiness, verbal and syllabic effectiveness – had not been conceived of before. It is world literature transformed into music without any pandering to solo virtuosity or the conceit of vocalists – save for one moment of quasi-ironic return to the style of his ‘middle period’ (Alice: ‘…il viso tuo se me risplendera’). But here the ensemble is the soloist!

Photo of the stage set model for Falstaff designed by Nick Ormerod.

As such it is incorporated into the music, a speaking concord of instruments. As a result it does not surprise that Verdi writes to Boito in 1891: ‘The conductor must be independent of the theatrical direction; he alone must bear complete musical responsibility.’ And, even more precisely: ‘Choose a good choirmaster who will be under the conductor and does not simply rehearse the parts but participates in the production as a whole, following the instructions of the director… And select a principal director who in turn will himself be under the conductor’. Is such a thing even imaginable nowadays?