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Sir John Falstaff, the most compelling characters: aging, vain, dishonest, a bit crass, prodigiously self-indulgent—but also curiously philosophical.
50 years earlier, Falstaff’s supremely well-crafted score shows that the composer was continuing to grow as an artist even as he entered the ninth decade of his life. It is an astounding work and among the greatest operatic comedies of all time.
The Setting
The current Met production places the action in mid–20th-century England, after the Second World War—an era when longestablished social norms were rapidly changing and the aristocracy lost much of their wealth and influence.
what makes Falstaff unique is the abundance of lyricism within a structure that almost completely avoids traditional arias.
Several brief but notable vocal solos stand out, among them the title character’s playfully comic recollection of his youth in Act II and his melancholy soliloquy on aging in Act III, as well as the young Fenton’s serenade in the last scene.
But the bulk of the singing happens in ensembles that, despite their highly sophisticated musical structure, seem as natural as speech and adhere perfectly to the lines of the text.
The complex counterrhythms of the ensemble that ends Act I are both funny and the perfect depiction of people at cross-purposes. The opera’s celebrated finale is a fugue in which all the characters take part, each one both a perpetrator and the butt of the “great joke of life” that Falstaff evokes in his final words.
Verdi, for his part, had long harbored a desire to prove that the scope of his art extended beyond the dramas of gloomy passion with which he had built his reputation.
Falstaff dispenses entirely with any hint of a prelude or choral scene setting. Instead, he launches the opera in a metrically tripping scherzo mode that almost immediately gives voice to the rapid patter of dialogue—a strategy from which Puccini, for one, would learn much.
Think of the brief pockets of lyricism introduced by the young pair of lovers, Nannetta and Fenton, which Boito suggested would be more effective when “sprinkled” throughout the opera, “like powdered sugar on a cake,” in contrast to a standard drawn-out duet.
Or take the rhetoric of the revenge aria in which Ford momentarily channels a hint of the jealous Moor. The climactic comic frenzy of the second act’s finale resembles a mashup of the most dazzling moment of Rossinian “organized chaos” with a sturdily constructed Mozartean ensemble.
Verdi’s music distils and juxtaposes the divergent perspectives that comprise the opera: the idealistic young lovers, the farcical plot set in motion by Alice (Verdi describes her role as “stirring the porridge”), the dramatic conflict introduced by her husband, Ford, who conspires with Dr. Caius, and the self-serving natural force embodied by Falstaff himself, omnipresent throughout the opera—even when Sir John is off stage.
In the third act, in which the comic momentum of the first two yields to a more ritualistic atmosphere for the final scene, Verdi counters the graphic “realism” of his prismatic orchestration with something new: a miraculous evocation of the numinous world that surrounds that society and Falstaff alike. His music for the fearful specters that are summoned to Herne’s Oak and then comically revealed pays tribute to the sources of early Romanticism and its penchant for midsummer magic. But as in the finale of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, the long night’s comedy of errors serves as the prelude to a reconciliation: The fat knight’s “lesson” prepares the way for the young generation to be recognized and securely united in love. Verdi then gathers all the riotous energy of what has preceded and reconfigures it as a fugue, that emblem of strictly organized discipline—his greatest joke of all.
—Thomas May
https://www.metopera.org/season/2022-23-season/falstaff/
Met
Giuseppe Verdi
Falstaf
conductor
Daniele Rustioni
dr. caius
Carlo Bosi
conductor
Daniele Rustioni
sir john falstaff
Michael Volle
meg page
Jennifer Johnson Cano*
alice ford
Ailyn Pérez
mistress quickly
Marie-Nicole Lemieux
nannet ta
Hera Hyesang Park*
fenton
Bogdan Volkov
ford
Christopher Maltman
