Falstaff Revived

...Perhaps we would not be so conscious of the shortcomings of Verdi's method if we were not often reminded of those powers he deliberately curbed in his high-minded renunciation of the florid Italian vocal style...

...but it is naive, I suppose, to confuse the art of mime with that of conducting...

...Unable and unwilling to employ the conventional formulas of his early works (still discernable in the occasional arias, duets and regular ensembles of Otello), Verdi adopted the method, first employed by Wagner, of confining his vocal invention to a straight declamation of the text, while throwing most of his musical ideas into the orchestra...

...practically the whole of the scene in which Falstaff is pinched and rolled on the ground was lost in this way...

...But these powers and their related habits of composition keep breaking through to tease expectation...

...These reflections are inspired, of course, by the recent revival of Falstaff at the Metropolitan Opera as well as by the appearance of a brilliant new RCA recording with a different cast and conductor (LSC-6163...

...For with this kind of opera the critical question is how the composer is going to develop his orchestrally articulated ideas to musically satisfying proportions without losing contact with the text...

...But having gotten this far toward a solution of the problem of music drama, Verdi stopped short and, in effect, simply evaded the real difficulty...

...Consequently, in place of the rich thematic weave of Wagner's orchestral polyphony, we have the curt, arresting gestures of an orchestra that seems to be improvising a point-by-point accompaniment to the action, like a vamping piano player watching a silent movie...

...In a more fully composed opera, these various stylistic elements might have been harmonized successfully...

...This old flesh of yours can still squeeze out a little sweetness for you...

...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Falstaff Revived IN Falstaff, Verdi confronted for the second and final time in his career that problem of music drama which has exercised the mind and imagination of virtually every opera composer since the time of Wagner and the breakdown of the traditional form of Italian opera: the sequence of arias, duets, ensembles and choruses strung together with recitatives...

...Miss Resnick has a dark, ample mezzo' voice and a genuine flair for comic acting...

...There, however, Leonard Bernstein, a rear-view Chaplin, performed brilliantly, leaping into the air on a sforzando, sabering his way through a staccato, reeling back from a shot in the tympany or flirting gayly with the violins...

...The leitmotifs, the musical symbols that can be altered and combined in symphonic developments while at the same time they are serving to illustrate and interpret the unfolding dramatic action, play no part in Falstaff...

...In fact, almost everything of genuine musical value in Falstaff occurs during these regressive moments, including the lovely snatches of song exchanged by Fenton and Nannetta, the swelling vocal phrases of Ford's jealousy monologue, Fenton's last-act romanza, and the long, ravishingly beautiful lines of Nannetta's fairy song, with their apt but utterly conventional harp arpeggios...

...The only outstanding performances were those of Regina Resnick as Dame Quickly and Andrea Velis as Bardolofo...

...Velis is a nimble zany who should be removed from the cast at once, for he makes all the other men look like stuffed dolls...

...Anselmo Colzani, a man who had never sung Falstaff before, proved to be a poor actor and an unimpressive singer...

...After years of suffering from the Nacht und Nebel school of scene design, I experienced a sense of welcome relief when the lights went up on the cavernous, archaically timbered tavern of Act I, where the fat knight sat cozily ensconced in a great basket chair carved from a wine cask surrounded by wooden and pewter symbols of inebriety...

...But the most impressive effects were reserved for the forest scene in the last act...

...Go along, old John, go your way...

...Bing would have made sure of a great baritone for Falstaff...

...For the composer there was the burden of incessant invention, a burden Verdi often sought to lighten by employing clichés or indulging in a rather childish language of tone-painting: a fluttering flute to suggest the phrase "a word floating in air" in the Honor monologue...

...is a prime example...

...Moreover, it is not the method of a composer-one who organizes musical ideas in unified, completely evolved designs...

...For the audience there is the sense of frustration that comes from hearing beautiful melodies and interesting motifs tossed up and then snatched away before one has really had enough of them...

...Of Verdi's crabbed efforts at comic counterpoint in scenes of tumultmusically impoverished ensembles in which four or eight voices share half as many parts, and the poor concluding fugue-one would say nothing if they did not furnish further evidence of the composer's perverse passion at 80 for musical effects above, or perhaps below, his reach...

...In the first and last scenes, no frontal illumination was used and consequently every time the singers approached the curtain line-normally a very prominent positionthey entered a twilight zone...

...The hero of the Met production is Franco Zeffirelli, the director and stage designer, who has filled the enormous tarnished gilt frame of the Opera's stage with some immense and wonderfully solid-looking sets in which at times the singers disport themselves like the cast of a Keystone Cops comedy...

...pizzicato (literally: pinched) strings for the scene in which Falstaff is pinched by the fairies...

...The other members of the cast were more satisfactory, with the exception of Judith Raskin, who as Nannetta looked rather tubby and sang the way she looked...

...And Verdi's failure is not only obvious but strongly felt...

...Verdi did not solve this problem, nor did he avail himself of Wagner's solution (with which he was thoroughly conversant...

...Her voice is lovely, and it takes on an even greater beauty when she sends it soaring and swooping along the enchanting phrases of her invocation to the sylphs...

...Ford's garden, full of delightful hollyhocks, and his halftimber Tudor house, with an upstairs gallery and a sideboard loaded ostentatiously with plate, provided the settings for Falstaff's wooing, his disappearance into the clothes hamper, the wild ransacking of the house by Ford and his posse, and the mock-heroic assault on the screen where Falstaff is thought to be hiding-all of which leads up to the astonishing moment when the huge hamper goes flying out the window...

...his voice was neither interestingly colored nor sufficiently powerful to project the passages of bluster through the blare of the orchestra...

...The wellknown passage beginning, "Va, vecchio John...

...Even more unfortunate is the stylistic incoherence that results from Verdi's improvisatory method...

...One would think that, since he went to such lengths to mount this new production, Mr...

...His performance has a unique, lateVerdi flavor: vigorous, mercurial, and inexhaustably mimetic...

...here they make little more than a musical jumble...

...The greatest actor in the Met production, alas, was constrained to play his long and exhausting role on the tiny stage of the conductor's podium...

...It is a pity that Bernstein's enthusiasm so rarely infects his orchestras...

...Though it has often been described as "sophisticated" by critics who view Falstaff from the narrow perspective of traditional Italian opera, Verdi's method is actually quite primitive...

...Deeply impressed with the literary abilities of his librettist, Arrigo Boïto, and the charm of his subject, Verdi desired to set the text in a style that would prevent the loss of a single word or even the slightest retardation of the action through the exigencies of the music...

...When Nannetta, mounted on a white horse, led on the rout of fairies-cowled figures bearing illuminated jack-o'-lanterns and accompanied by little children and wooley white sheep-the impression of an ancient, rustic festival combined momentarily with the image of Falstaff, a huge man with horns on his head, and one gazed through the filmy gauze of the comedy into mysterious mythological depths...

...The RCA recording of Falstaff, with Geraint Evans as Sir John and Georg Solti conducting, offers a much finer interpretation of the score and generally better singing...

...Where Bernstein glides over the surface of the music employing rapid tempos and conventional phrasing, Solti seeks at a more leisurely pace the full realization of the dramatic and musical nuances...

...These lines epitomize Falstaff's whole character, yet Verdi could think of no better setting for them than a banal bimbum, bim-bum orchestral figure that would sound simple-minded even in Gilbert and Sullivan...

...But such things are often neglected at our busy Opera...

...horns to symbolize the frequently mentioned cuckold's horns...

...I must confess I did not know anything of Mirella Freni, one of the finest sopranos now singing, until I heard her as Nannetta in this recording...

...The one blotch on this recording is the excessively mannered singing of Alfredo Kraus, who sounds as though he were impersonating some long-forgotten figure of the Golden Age, as perhaps he is...

...One technical flaw I did note was a lack of coordination between the lighting and the stage direction...

...Falstaff is a gallimaufry of halfhearted parody (of Rossini, Wagner and indeed of Verdi himself), beautiful but conventional Italian melody, and boisterous grotesquerie...

...On the other hand, by hewing strictly to the textual line, Verdi often disappoints us, even when the verses are dramatically important and finely written...

...she should do Rossini...

...Evans is splendid as Falstaff, though one would like more buffo in the part and a stricter attention to the meter...