Falstaff (opera)

• 1. Introduction

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  Falstaff, the last opera Giuseppe Verdi ever wrote, began with a letter. In early July 1889, Verdi received a draft libretto from his collaborator Arrigo Boito, and what he read sent him into a state of barely contained joy. "Benissimo! Benissimo!" he wrote back. "No one could have done better than you." He was approaching eighty years old. He had written operas for more than half a century. And yet here he was, embarking on the most technically ambitious comic work of his life.

  The questions the opera raises are not simple ones. How does a composer who built his reputation on grand tragedy and sweeping melody reinvent himself at the very end? Why did Falstaff struggle to find its audience after a premiere that was celebrated across Europe? And why did it take decades, and the fierce advocacy of a handful of conductors, for the work to earn its place in the standard repertoire?

• 2. A Comedy Long Denied

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  Verdi's fellow composer Rossini once remarked that he admired Verdi greatly but thought him incapable of writing a comedy. Verdi took that judgment personally. He maintained that he longed to write another light-hearted opera, but that nobody would give him the chance. His only previous comedy, Un giorno di regno, had been staged unsuccessfully in 1840, and for decades afterward he channelled whatever comic instincts he had into the margins of tragic works such as Un ballo in maschera and La forza del destino.

  For a potential comic subject he considered Don Quixote by Cervantes, and plays by Goldoni, Molière and Labiche, but found none of them wholly suitable. The singer Victor Maurel sent him a French libretto based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Verdi liked it but declined, suggesting it needed a Rossini or a Donizetti to do it justice. After Otello succeeded in 1887, Verdi confided his ambition to Boito: "After having relentlessly massacred so many heroes and heroines, I have at last the right to laugh a little."

  Boito said nothing at the time, but he secretly began work on a libretto drawn from The Merry Wives of Windsor with additional material taken from Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. He was attracted to the subject partly because the Falstaff story had roots in Trecento Italian literature, including Il Pecorone by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino and Boccaccio's Decameron. He adopted a deliberately archaic form of Italian, hoping to lead Shakespeare's farce back to what he called its "clear Tuscan source". He trimmed the cast, halved the number of characters from the original play, and used dozens of passages from Henry IV to give Falstaff himself greater psychological weight.

• 3. Writing in Secret

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  On the 10th of July 1889, Verdi wrote Boito a letter underscoring the word "secrecy" three times. No one must know anything about it. The composer was terrified that the project would come to nothing, that his age would defeat him before the score was complete. "If I were not to finish the music?" he wrote. He worried too about distracting the younger Boito from his own opera, which would eventually become Nerone.

  The collaboration moved fitfully. Boito delivered the completed first act in November 1889, along with a second act still under construction: "That act has the devil on its back," he told Verdi. "When you touch it, it burns." The first act was finished by March 1890, and from there the opera was not composed in chronological order, a departure from Verdi's usual practice. The musicologist Roger Parker suggests this piecemeal approach may reflect the relative independence of the individual scenes.

  Progress was slowed by Verdi's depression and by the deaths of close friends, among them the conductors Franco Faccio and Emanuele Muzio. In December 1890, after Muzio died that November, Verdi wrote: "Will I finish it? Or will I not finish it? Who knows! I am writing without any aim, without a goal, just to pass a few hours of the day." He gave the unfinished opera a nickname, "pancione" or "the Big Belly", and in mid-1891 described it in terms that mixed exasperation with affection: "There are some days when he does not move, he sleeps, and is in a bad humour. At other times he shouts, runs, jumps, and tears the place apart."

  The casting of the title role caused a separate crisis. For the baritone part Verdi wanted Victor Maurel, who had sung Iago in Otello. Maurel's contractual demands were, in Verdi's words, "so outrageous, exorbitant, and incredible that there was nothing else to do but stop the entire project". They eventually reached agreement. By September 1892 Verdi had confirmed in writing to his publisher Casa Ricordi that La Scala could present the premiere during the 1892-93 season, on condition that he retained control over every aspect of the production and could withdraw the opera even after the dress rehearsal.

• 4. The Premiere and Its Aftermath

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  On the 9th of February 1893, nearly six years after Verdi's previous premiere, Falstaff opened at La Scala in Milan. Official ticket prices were thirty times greater than usual. Royalty, aristocracy, critics and leading figures from the arts across Europe were present. The conductor was Edoardo Mascheroni. Numbers were encored, and at the end the applause for Verdi and the cast lasted an hour.

  Over the next two months the work was given twenty-two performances in Milan, then taken by the original company to Genoa, Rome, Venice, Trieste and Vienna, and without Maurel, to Berlin. At the Rome performance in April, King Umberto I introduced Verdi to the audience from the Royal Box, which the composer's biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz describes as "a national recognition and apotheosis of Verdi that had never been tendered him before". The Berlin premiere so moved Ferruccio Busoni that he wrote to Verdi calling him "Italy's leading composer" and "one of the noblest persons of our time", and stating that Falstaff had provoked in him "such a revolution of spirit" that he dated from it the beginning of a new epoch in his artistic life.

  Yet audiences quickly diminished after the initial excitement. Operagoers were accustomed to big arias and grand choruses, and Falstaff offered neither in the expected way. A contemporary critic captured the bafflement: "'Is this our Verdi?' they asked themselves. 'But where is the motive; where are the broad melodies... where are the usual ensembles; the finales?'" By the time of Verdi's death in 1901 the work had fallen out of the international repertoire.

• 5. Saved by Toscanini

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  Arturo Toscanini became musical director of La Scala from 1898 and of the Metropolitan Opera from 1908, and he programmed Falstaff from the start of each tenure. The music critic Richard Aldrich of The New York Times wrote that Toscanini's revival at the Met "ought to be marked in red letters in the record of the season", noting that Falstaff had been heard there only half a dozen times across its first two seasons and then disappeared entirely. Aldrich added that though the general public might have struggled with the work, "to connoisseurs it was an unending delight".

  Sir Thomas Beecham revived the opera in Britain in 1919, but recalled in his memoirs that the public stayed away. He argued that the opera lacked tunes of a broad and impressive character, the kind of melody found in pieces such as "O Mia Regina" or "Ora per sempre addio". Toscanini recognised that view was widely held but rejected it. He said, "I believe it will take years and years before the general public understand this masterpiece, but when they really know it they will run to hear it like they do now for Rigoletto and La traviata."

  Toscanini returned to La Scala in 1921 and stayed until 1929, presenting Falstaff in every season. He took the work to Germany and Austria in the late 1920s and 1930s, conducting it at three successive Salzburg Festivals. Among those who served as his répétiteurs at Salzburg were Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti, who would become two of Falstaff's most dedicated advocates in the following generation. When Karajan gained his own company at Aachen in 1941, Falstaff was among the first works he added to the repertoire. Toscanini's younger colleague Tullio Serafin continued to present the work in Germany and Austria after Toscanini refused to perform there because of his opposition to the Nazi regime.

• 6. A New Musical Language

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  Falstaff is through-composed, meaning there are no separate numbered pieces in the published full score. The score also has no overture: just seven bars for the orchestra before the first voice enters. The writer Russ McDonald, in a 2009 study, observed that most of the musical expression is concentrated in the dialogue and that there is only one traditional aria. The effect, in McDonald's view, is of "stylistic economy - more sophisticated, more challenging than he had employed before".

  McDonald argues that consciously or unconsciously, Verdi was developing an idiom that would come to dominate the music of the twentieth century: "the lyricism is abbreviated, glanced at rather than indulged. Melodies bloom suddenly and then vanish, replaced by contrasting tempo or an unexpected phrase that introduces another character or idea." In 1952 Imogen Holst, musical assistant to Benjamin Britten, wrote after hearing a performance of Falstaff that she "realised for the first time how much Ben owes to Verdi". She pointed to orchestral passages that struck her as directly parallel to the comic instrumental writing in Britten's Albert Herring.

  Verdi scholars including Julian Budden have analysed the score in symphonic terms, identifying the opening section as a compact sonata movement and the final scene as a fugue. Verdi himself had suggested to Boito in August 1889 that he was writing a fugue: "Yes, Sir! A fugue... and a buffa fugue." The ending of that fugue, in which the entire company repeats Falstaff's proclamation that all the world is folly in a ten-voice ensemble, was Verdi's own invention. The libretto had originally ended the last act with the marriage of the young lovers.

• 7. Shakespeare Through Italian Eyes

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  Verdi was clear that he did not want a conventional Italian buffo character. He wrote: "My Falstaff is not merely the hero of The Merry Wives of Windsor, who is simply a buffoon, and allows himself to be tricked by the women, but also the Falstaff of the two parts of Henry IV. Boito has written the libretto in accordance." Boito had incorporated dozens of passages from Henry IV specifically to give the character that added dimension, and an English critic writing shortly after the premiere, R A Streatfeith, identified the key to how Verdi captured it: the fat knight's "sublime self-conceit", the quality that transforms him from a vulgar fool into something approaching a hero.

  The question of whether Falstaff is an English or an Italian work has occupied critics ever since. The soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf believed there was nothing English or Shakespearian about the comedy: "it was all done through the music". Writing in The Observer in 1961, Peter Heyworth put it plainly: "the opera is no more English than Aida is Egyptian. Boito and Verdi between them transformed the fat knight into one of the archetypes of opera buffa." Yet Falstaff had been staged in many previous versions by other composers, none of which secured a lasting place in the repertoire. Among them were settings by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf in 1796, Antonio Salieri in 1799, Michael William Balfe in 1835 and Adolphe Adam in 1856. The first version to achieve repertoire status was Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1849, though its success was largely confined to German opera houses. None of these predecessors had Boito's strategy of fusing the Trecento Italian sources with the Shakespearian material to create something that felt native to both traditions, and the critical debate about where Falstaff ultimately belongs has never been fully resolved.

• 8. Legacy and the Recording Trail

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  The first complete recording of Falstaff was made in March and April 1932 by Italian Columbia, conducted by Lorenzo Molajoli with the chorus and orchestra of La Scala, and a cast that included Giacomo Rimini as Falstaff and Pia Tassinari as Alice. The next studio recording came from Toscanini himself, conducted for an NBC radio broadcast in 1950 and released on disc by RCA Victor. Herbert von Karajan made the first stereophonic recording for EMI in 1956.

  The title role has attracted a long line of notable interpreters. Victor Maurel, the original Falstaff, made a recording of the short arietta "Quand'ero paggio" in 1907; Antonio Pini Corsi, who had played Ford at the premiere, had recorded the same piece in 1904. Conductors who have shaped the work's modern reputation include Karajan, Solti and Leonard Bernstein, all of whom conducted the opera at leading houses and on record. Among the productions that Hepokoski singles out as particularly notable are three separate stagings by Franco Zeffirelli, for the Holland Festival in 1956, Covent Garden in 1961 and the Metropolitan Opera in 1964, as well as Luchino Visconti's 1966 version in Vienna. Bryn Terfel took the title role at Covent Garden in 1999, conducted by Bernard Haitink, and at the Metropolitan Opera in 2006 in the Zeffirelli production conducted by James Levine.

  A view persists, articulated by the critic John von Rhein in 1985, that Falstaff will likely always remain a connoisseur's opera rather than a popular favorite on the order of La traviata or Aida. But the work Verdi wrote to pass a few hours of the day, with no commission and no target theatre, has outlasted every prediction of its limits.