everybody’s fooled
by Douglas Messerli
Arrigo
Boito (libretto, based on Shakespeare’s The
Merry Wives of Windsor and King Henry
IV), Giuseppe Verdi (music), Robert Carsen (stage director), Gary Halvorson (director) Falstaff / 2013 [The Metropolitan Opera H.D.-live broadcast]
As
numerous musicologists and, in an intermission interview with Peter Gelb, as
conductor James Levine and director Robert Carsen reiterated, it is amazing to think
that the great composer of 19th century tragedies should have chosen
as his last work to write this sparklingly antic comedy, paralleling indeed
Shakespeare’s own trajectory.
But it is also apparent that Verdi poured
all his musical experience into this work, creating, throughout, ensemble works
that literally shimmer with contrapuntal complexity, despite the rather
straight-forward—and, at times, inexplicable—plot. At the center of work,
obviously, is the mound of decayed flesh and quite filthy pig of a human being,
Falstaff (performed with brilliance by Ambrogio Maestri). While he once may
have been a slim man who dined with the King, in this work Old John, despite
his desire and intentions of moving forward, is tired and poor, living in an
outlandish mess of trays with left-over meals stacked with dishes and wine
glasses. His dress, his room in the Garter Inn, indeed, his life is a mess, as
he appears, at moments, to be sharing his huge bed with his two thieving
servants Bardolfo (Keith Jameson) and Pistola (Christian Van Horn), who are
nearly as physically disheveled as the rotund knight. Most importantly, the
corpulent continent of flesh has run out of money, desperately needed if he is
to continue celebrating the joys of life to which he has become accustomed. He
reveals his solution to the problem to his servants: he will seduce two local
Windsor wives, Alice Ford (Angela Meade) and Meg Page (Jennifer Johnson Cano),
who, although they are commoners, are wealthily married and control their
hubands’ coffers. He attempts to dispatch love letters to the women through
Bardolfo and Pistola that very morning. Although their refusal to do so, and
their sudden discovery of the word honor, is inexplicable, it sends the plot
forward, as he tosses them out and they turn to Alice Ford’s husband as a kind
of ridiculous revenge.
The rest of the opera might be described
as a kind of revenge comedy, as the outraged women and Alice’s husband attempt
to foil and punish the overweight knight’s ridiculous romances not once, but
twice. In each case, Mistress Quickly (the glorious Stephanie Blythe) acts as
go-between, seducing Falstaff into the belief that he truly has a chance to woo
the women.
In between these absurd romances, Verdi
and Boito insert the “real” romance between lovers Fenton (Paolo Fanale) and
Nannetta (Lisette Oropesa), the later the Fords’ daughter whom her father wants
to marry to the elderly Dr. Caius (Carlo Bosi). The merry wives, accordingly,
need not only to fool and punish Falstaff but Ford (Franco Vassallo) as well.
How they achieve their goals, of course,
is at the heart of the work’s antic comedy, involving the staples of farce,
including hiding out in closets, ducking under tables, and implanting the hero
within a huge, smelly laundry basket, as the entire ensemble rush about inn
various directions as if they were in a Mack Sennett comedy. The final act,
moreover, takes the action to a Shakespearean countryside where old wives’
tales and local folklore are combined with the whole town’s trickery to
convince Falstaff that he is being hounded by fairies, nymphs, and ghosts, and
to alter the intentions of Ford, allowing the ingénues to marry. As in Mozart’s
Cosí fan tutte, everything turns out
happily, even if in the madcap events Bardolfo is also accidentally married to
Dr. Caius. After all, as Falstaff, once he realizes he has been made an ass of,
sings: “Everybody is fooled!”
Director Robert Carsen has quite
appropriately set his version of this wonderful opera in 1950s England, a time
of great upheaval in the English aristocracy, suddenly forced to sell their
castles and marry wealthy commoners. The very issues of Shakespeare’s day—the
radical changes in class and position—are quite nicely reiterated in brightly
flowered dresses and candy-colored kitchens of the post-War II England.
This production was notable, moreover,
not merely for the excellent performances of the entire cast, but the return to
the director’s podium of James Levine, out for a few years because of back
problems. Sitting at his stationary chair instead of joining the cast on stage,
Levine surely seemed to the Met audience that he was now one of them!
Despite all the on-stage revelry,
finally, there was something, as some critics pointed out, terribly melancholy
about this production, a revelation, perhaps, that Verdi’s final creation was
also a wistful representation of the end an era when such outsized lovers of
life were free to roam, celebrate, and devour life. As Falstaff fires back when
he discovers that he has been once more tricked, “I am not only the source of
wit, but the cause of it.” It is, after all, his outsized actions that have led
to the complex machinations in all the others. Asked by Renée Fleming, during
an intermission conversation, whether Falstaff actor Ambrogio Maestri (who has
performed the work more than 200 times) felt Falstaff’s comeuppance was
deserved, the rotund baritone answered, looking down upon his own girth and the
pasta he has just prepared, shot back, “No!” As he himself makes apparent
through his performance, how boring life would be without the world’s
Falstaffs.
Los Angeles,
December 15, 2013
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2013).
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