Fallstaff by Giuseppe Verdi

Falstaff is a wonderful yet strange work that has aroused all kinds of contradictory interpretations. This last opera by Giuseppe Verdi, written when the venerable composer was close to 80 years old, seems in many respects to be a comedy and, in some productions, can provoke the audience’s mirth. Yet one rarely laughs uproariously here. “It’s too nasty,” say some people. “It’s too subtle,” asserts others. This apparent contradiction bothers certain commentators. But for Verdi, the danger lay elsewhere. It resided in the discontinuity of the plot. He worried about the third act. He was afraid that it would appear cold or anti-climatic after the excitement and thrilling pace of the previous scene that closes the second act. How could one move from the solid, bourgeois reality of Alice Ford’s home to the diaphanous atmosphere of the nocturnal revelries that illuminate the final act? How could one make Falstaff’s triumph at the end of the opera seem plausible after the audience sees him being constantly ridiculed and humiliated? Verdi and his extremely astute librettist, Arrigo Boito, resolved this dilemma by exploiting this very discontinuity and turning their opera into a protean substance. In other words, they created a lyric comedy that is in a perpetual state of metamorphosis.

But perpetual change does not mean incoherence. There are two unifying threads in this opera. They unfold along parallel lines and—although this may sound preposterous from the purely mathematical point of view—they do intersect at crucial moments in the plot. I would describe the first as “feminine inventiveness.” The second is Falstaff’s multi-faceted personality that enables him to bounce back from every successive setback (some would say like a far more intelligent Rob Ford!), and that fully justifies his right to have this opera named after him. I’d like to explore these two threads with you now.

Even for someone who is seeing this opera for the first time, it is obvious that it is the women—Alice Ford, Meg Page, and Dame Quickly—who are running the show from start to finish. Indeed, in Falstaff, Verdi creates a polarization between the foresight and wisdom of the women on the one hand, and the folly of the men on the other. Of course, comedy has always been the place where women take revenge for the insults they endure in drama, but this triumph is particularly striking in Falstaff, even at the expense of some unfaithfulness to Shakespeare. In the original play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Ann Page (who will become Nannetta in the opera) wants to marry Fenton but comes up against the opposition of her father who wants her to marry Slender as well as of her mother who wants her to wed Dr. Caius, whereas Mistress Quickly, the servant of Dr. Caius, plays the rather dubious role of the go-between, promising everyone to work for their cause. In other words, Ann and Fenton can count only on their own resources to overcome the obstacles that thwart their love. On the contrary, in the libretto, only Nannetta’s father, Ford, wants to marry her off to that doddering old pedant, Caius, and, the women (Alice Ford, Meg Page and Mistress Quickly), band together to help the young people fulfil their dream. Thus, the cleavage which, in the Shakespeare play, separates the young and the old divides Verdi’s characters into two distinct camps: the men on one side and the young, aided by the women, on the other.

Because of this change in perspective, the women become the prime movers of the plot. They are the ones who set up the farces, devise the traps destined to thwart Ford’s plans, and stage-manage the final phantasmagoria. As Verdi stated, they keep stirring the porridge and make not only Falstaff but Ford and Caius look ludicrous. This reshaping of the play was essentially the work of Boito, who also was inspired by King Henry IV, parts 1 and 2; but Verdi enthusiastically approved the new orientation and always insisted on the importance of Alice Ford, calling her a devil of a woman. He even went so far as to declare her the principal character of his opera.

Through his music, the composer does a marvellous job of differentiating the men and the women, and he does so by emphasizing the latter’s verve. The first tableau, where only the men appear, is dominated by a measure in 4/4 time so that, when the women come on stage in the second scene, their characteristic 6/8 time appears sharper, more piquant and sparkling. The lovers’ entrance is marked by ¾ time, to underscore their solidarity with the three ladies. The grand ensemble bringing Act 1 to a close provides for a stunning contrast between the women’s group and the men’s: Alice, Meg and Quickly sing in 6/8 time (“Quell’otre, quell tino” whereas the men express their self-righteous and comical indignation in 2/2 time: “È un ribaldo, un furbo, un ladro”( Play no. 3). In Act 2, the “Merry Wives of Windsor” refrain is also heard in 6/8 time, while the arrival of Alice’s husband, at first pretend and then real, takes us back to 2/4. During the great ensemble that precedes Falstaff being dumped in the Thames River, the men’s aggressive sixteenth notes contrast with the elegant eight-note triplets of the women. Verdi does not use these rhythmic variations systematically but succeeds in indicating that the ladies are light-hearted and fun-loving, whereas the men appear half-crazy and clumsy, if not utterly stupid.

The ladies’ superiority and controlling power are clearly in evidence when compared to the self-righteous illusions under which most of the men in this opera labour. For example, Ford’s inner insecurity disguises itself as jealous rage in his honour monologue in the second act; in the third, he still imagines he can wield his full paternal authority whereas he has already been bamboozled by his wife, Alice, with a precious assist from Dame Quickly. Bardolfo and Pistola flaunt their respectability in the face of Falstaff, but the reality of their lives negates it. And Falstaff, a caricatural version of the hero, deludes himself into believing that he is an irresistible seducer, forgetting that he is, in the eyes of Alice and Meg, nothing more than a huge mass of ambulating venison. Not that the women escape the charm of illusion, but the big difference is that they know how to master it. There is a certain melancholy in Alice’s flight of fancy as she reads Sir John’s flattering letter, but an infectious burst of laughter dispels this temporary nostalgia. The most magical moment of the opera is the great invocation of the Fairy Queen, that is, Nannetta, but this enchanting scene beneath the oak of Herne has been organized by the three Merry Wives of Windsor. The men are the victims of their illusions, while the women are constantly manipulating them. Shakespeare’s solid, middle-class ladies become, in the hands of Boito and Verdi, graceful, cunning creatures who know how to surrender to the charms of fantasy without becoming its prisoners. They stage-manage the whirlwind carnival at the end of the opera but are never taken in by it. In many respects, this is a feminist opera!

And yet, in extremis, it is Falstaff who appears to accede to an apotheosis-like state. After being duped, cruelly mocked, humiliated, poked and pinched, forced to confess just about every sin in the Christian catalogue, he proclaims towards the end of the opera that everyone taking part in the Windsor forest revelry owes him a debt of gratitude. His wit, he insists, creates the wit of others. And his former tormentors readily agree as they hail him as a sage. How come? Simply because despite some pretty despicable traits of character, Verdi genuinely loved his last hero or, should we say, anti-hero. Just like the Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff, in his own way, anchors this opera. I mentioned earlier that Sir John is a protean personage, exhibiting traits that contradict one another. But it is precisely these contradictions that help give this opera its organic unity. As the plot unfolds, Falstaff reveals the conflicting aspects of his nature one after the other or even simultaneously.

I have always seen him as a larger-than-life embodiment of man the disillusioned philosopher and man the ludicrous buffoon who, nevertheless, is propelled by an irrepressible will to live. Falstaff reveals the gloomily pessimistic aspect of his nature in his diatribe against the ideal of honour. In the very first scene of the opera, his servants, Bardolfo and Pistola, refuse to carry his two identical love letters to Alice Ford and Meg Page on the pretext that their honour forbids them from acting like panderers. Falstaff explodes in fury. For him, the term “honour” has been voided of its substance by being invoked by cynical people as a pretext to legitimize all forms of moral vice, including flattery, pride and slander. He seems to imply that language takes revenge on the people who abuse it by emptying itself of its contents, somewhat like the word “awesome” has been debased in our 21st century by being applied indiscriminately to everything from Bloody Marys to chicken pizza. As a former professor of literature, I cringe every time I hear the word abused!

And yet this old sage, who can be ruthlessly lucid about human nature, is himself trapped in a monumental delusion: as I emphasized, he believes he is irresistibly attractive to women. He is convinced Alice Ford and Meg Page can hardly wait for him to lavish his attentions, sexual and other, on them. In fact, when he meets Alice’s husband disguised as Master Fontana prior to his rendezvous with the latter’s wife, Falstaff boasts of how he will cuckold the unfortunate wretch. Even after he has been humiliated by being dumped unceremoniously into the Thames River in a laundry hamper, his super-sized vanity again falls for Dame Quickly’s assurances that Alice Ford is still madly in love with him. How, then, you may ask, can the same individual be both so wise and stupid? The answer probably lies in the elemental life-affirming force within Falstaff that prevents him from dwelling too long on his glaring inadequacies or wallowing in self-pity. Indeed, this force saves him after he emerges, drenched and shivering, from the Thames River. 

At first, he is ready to consign all of mankind to hell. “Mondo ladro, reo mondo!” he snarls in disgust. Nevertheless, the minute he starts savouring the hot wine he had ordered, this melancholy old man, afraid of death and comically cynical, bounces back. His body tingles excitedly as the precious liquid flows through it. The orchestra mirrors this excitement eloquently. The strings shimmer as we imagine Falstaff tasting the wine. He describes the process deliciously. The wine is a cricket (“grillo” that flits in the body of a drinker (“brillo”, creating a trill (“trillo”. The flute begins a cricket-like trilling theme, which passes to the violins at “brillo;” they augment it one at a time until the whole orchestra is subsumed into the trill.

Falstaff’s life-affirming energy also enables him, as I mentioned earlier, to wrest a last-minute victory over the jeering denizens of Windsor Forest. At the end of the opera, it is he who leads everyone in the whirlwind fugue to the words “Tutto nel mondo è burla./ L’uomo è nato burlon” (Everything in the world’s a jest./Man is born a jester). In all probability, Alice, Meg and Quickly have arrived at a similar conclusion as well, but it is Falstaff who crystallizes this truth when their mad Windsor Forest adventure is happily resolved. Life is an insane merry-go-round, but why not enjoy the ride? Sooner or later we are all figures of fun (“Tutti Gabàti”;). So what? Our ability to laugh at ourselves constitutes our nobility. And when we can laugh at ourselves, we have the laughers on our side, too, just like Falstaff does in the end. (Play no. 4)

Robert Carsen could have provided us with an Elizabethan setting for this opera. But he has done something audacious. We are still in Windsor, England. The Merry Wives have lost none of their capacity for mischief. But he has transposed the action to the 1950s. At the outset, this concept may seem jarring for traditionalists. But it works beautifully because the stage direction and decors always remain faithful to the spirit of Boito’s text and Verdi’s music. In this particular production the aristocracy, of which Falstaff is a member, is losing its lustre. It is on its way down. The middle class, of which the Merry Wives and Mr. Ford are representatives, are on their way up on a wave of material prosperity.

The Garter Inn, where Falstaff resides, is no longer a seedy, run-down place. It is a luxurious hotel that also includes social club facilities and a dining area. Falstaff has embedded himself there where he runs up endless bills with a total insouciance as to how he will ever pay them. Instead of meeting in the garden of the Ford’s dwelling to discuss the identical letters sent by Falstaff, Meg, Quickly, Alice and Nannetta meet for a ladies' lunch at the sumptuous restaurant in the Garter Inn, while the agitated men discuss their business at the other end of the room. Fenton, Nannetta’s sweetheart, is a waiter in the dining hall. This is a very telling touch because it helps explain why Ford is so opposed to a young man belonging to a much lower social class than his daughter. The two lovers exchange endearments under a table rather than among the flowerbeds. Why not? Love always finds a way. When Falstaff comes to court Alice in the second act, she receives him in an immense, gaudily painted yellow kitchen replete with every conceivable new appliance. She pops a turkey in the oven that she will then share with her admirer. Falstaff, of course, will take the biggest portion for himself, leaving very little for the lady of his heart. Before he arrives, Nannetta bemoans her impending marriage to Dr. Caius while scooping ice cream out of a big container. I won’t tell you anything more in order not to spoil your fun.

In his way, then, Robert Carsen conjures up a very funny yet potentially sad clash between representatives of two very different social classes and mentalities. Just as Verdi intended, merriment prevails and then triumphs in the Windsor Forest tableau. And If Verdi could have attended a performance of this production, I dare say he would have smiled. Because, here the passions of desire, pride, jealousy, hatred and revenge that Verdi depicted seriously in just about all of his other operas are gently mocked, just as the great composer intended them to be.