Wagner - Das Rheingold

Composed: 1854

Length: c. 150 minutes

Orchestration: piccolo, 3 flutes, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 8 horns (5th and 6th=tenor Wagner tubas, 7th and 8th=bass Wagner tubas), 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, bass trombone, contrabass trombone, tuba, 2 timpani, percussion (anvils, cymbals, hammer, tam-tam, triangle), 7 harps, strings, and vocal soloists

https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/6767/das-rheingold

Verdi's opera Falstaff

Study of Verdi’s Falstaff

Starting to gather information and study Giuseppe Verdi’s Comic Opera ‘Falstaff’.  You might want to tag along and check it out. 

COMPOSER Giuseppe Verdi
LIBRETTIST Arrigo Boito

from the play The Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, by William Shakespeare.

World Premiere: Teatro alla Scala, Milan, 1893.

Synopsis: link to the Met Opera

Libretto in Italian

Libretto in English

Listening to an interview with the Italian Conductor Daniel Gatti.  Verdi composed three Operas based on Shakespeare: Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff.  He considers Falstaff to be “a great Italian Opera masterpiece, written for musicians, not for the audience in a way… a very sophisticated opera.” 

Story of a man at the sunset of his life. No friend, completely alone. “I’m very fond of the first scene, the monologue…so sad, so dark, so pessimistic in a way…but it is not a monologue of a man at his end of life, but a monologue of a man that has to start his last part of his life….maybe because I am not so far from this age….it’s an opera that is growing every time, because I think I am growing as a human being.”  

“...after [writing] the three or four operas, he began the study of human being. And this is the greatness of the theatre of Verdi, it is not the melodies, not the arias, no, it is how he developed the character.  And sometimes it is very uncomfortable to listen to Verdi opera, because he shows the human being misery…Verdi is all the time, very modern, because he talks about all the problem that we have nowadays… and by going there you may see yourself, in Falsestaff, in Othello, Trovatore, and Rigoletto.”

At nearly 76 years old, Verdi loved the libretto on Sir John Falstaff, written by Boito. Verdi originally wrote to Boito how he was too old to write another large scale opera, but eventually decided to write the piece. Took him four years to complete.  Boito’s libretto for Falstaff is undoubtedly his finest work, and among the finest libretti ever written. Boito was odd, and frankly terrified of editing, altering, and adapting the play, by the man, Shakespeare, on an Italian opera stage. Verdi complained how he was not able to write productively as he once did when he was younger.