World premiere: 9 February 1893, Teatro alla Scala, Milan
Premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre: 17 January 1894 (performed in Russian, translated by Nikolai Spassky)
Premiere of this production: 23 May 2018
Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes
The performance has one interval
Verdi nurtured the concept of this comic opera for almost forty years. Contemporaries imagined that Verdi did not possess the gift of comedy, the more so as the composer’s only attempt in the genre at the outset of his career had been the now forgotten Un giorno di regno which was a dismal failure.
Before the premiere of Falstaff the composer occasionally spoke and wrote of that “great sentence”, as he himself described it, with echoes of that selfsame mental anguish. And yet, after the successful premiere of Otello in 1887, and being aware of Verdi’s secret dream, his librettist and friend Arrigo Boito at last, decades later, produced a scenario based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and comic episodes from the Henry IV chronicles. Verdi decided to take a risk and ended up composing something unusual and unexpected. At the gala premiere of Falstaff in Milan in 1893 the public saw a different Verdi.
Falstaff is a grand musical and theatrical cocktail. It contains elements of Italian situation comedy (opera buffa), French comic opera and the fairy-tale opera, it has the pace and vibrancy of the dynamic finales of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and the warm intimacy typical of Rossini’s style.
The musical fabric of Falstaff ruthlessly combines elements of high genres: early church music, a love madrigal and “serious” instrumental music – just take the mocking “Amen” in the first scene, performed by servants as a canon, or the fugue in the finale – a rare visitor to the operatic stage (it is rumoured that Verdi had heard its somewhat “angular” theme in a child’s singing).
And there are sad notes in Verdi’s Falstaff. In the midst of the merriment you can just catch a barely perceptible trace of melancholy. This sadness appears openly only once, at the start of Act III, for a short time, when it becomes clear that Falstaff is suffering. It is not even so much that he is lonely but that his time has passed. Shakespeare’s play contains this idea too: however much of a scoundrel Falstaff may be, he is noble and in Henry IV he acts accordingly. In The Merry Wives of Windsor he is placed in a new and unfamiliar environment: a new ruling elite and middle-class bourgeois like Ford. Here, too, Falstaff is ridiculed and dragged through the mud. Like a big child he plays with the world but the world no longer has any need of him.
Perhaps this links Verdi himself to his character? Perhaps Falstaff was a farewell to theatre – after all, the elderly Verdi must surely have known that he would not, in all probability, complete any more grandiose operas. And, perhaps, this explains the great number of obscure citations and semi-hints at music of the past, particularly the theatre of the past and, especially, Verdi’s own past.
Daniil Shutko
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