It is extremely gratifying, in an age when opera directors are wont to impose their own egos and neuroses on the works of composers, to see and hear a production that allows an opera to simply be. Such was the case of the Welsh National Opera's rendition of Verdi's Falstaff that prodigiously began the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM's) first excursion into an opera season, which also included Jean Baptiste Lully's Atys and Kurt Weill's Little Mahagonny.
The director for the Welsh Falstaff was Germany's Peter Stein, the maverick theater director and cofounder of West Berlin's famous Schaubuhne Company. When the Cardiff company nabbed him, many people expected radical stagings of opera. Nothing, however, could be further from it: For Falstaff, Stein has been content to pay scrupulous attention to Arrigo Boito's libretto and Verdi's quicksilver score, the composer's most musically complex and sonically ravishing.
Falstaff doesn't need "interpretation"; its fulsomeness is inherent in Verdi's score and the libretto's tightly knit action, taken from Shakespeare's Henry plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor. It's a comedy, to be sure, but Verdi, like Shakespeare, has found a ragged grandeur in the outsized figure of the ale-quaffing, fowl-chewing Sir John Falstaff.
Protean Portrayal
Most of Stein's directing concentration, it would seem, has gone into Donald Maxwell's protean portrayal of the rotund carouser. Maxwell, who as a clear, unforced baritone large enough for the role, holds his mammoth gut as if it were a scepter. He is a comic buffoon yet, at the same time, a graceful cavalier--an elegant gentleman trapped inside his density of flesh. It is nothing short of remarkable how his movements--belly shaking slightly to the swell of the strings, a gesture of the fingers to ornament a phrase--match and flow with the music.
The sets for Falstaff, by Lucio Fanti, are unadorned and pleasing, buttressing the action; primarily functional, they fade into the background without ever offending the eye, with the result that all our attention is diverted to what the characters do and sing. Stein has his cast trip merrily about the stage, pizzicato, in roundels and baby fugues of movement. In fact, in the Windsor Forest scenes with the final joke being played on Sir John by his tormentors as hobgoblins, Stein choreographs, with the entire cast, the great fugue with which Verdi brings down the curtain on his gossamer creation.
Falstaff is unlike any of Verdi's other operas. Apart from the early and practically forgotten Un Giorno di Regno, it is his only comedy. The music is symphonic, in continuous flow, with no show stopping arias, unless you want to count the young tenor Fenton's in the last scene, but even that is more lyrical than stand-out. And Verdi makes much busier use of motifs throughout than in his previous work: Falstaff, is a hive of musical invention.
I don't think I've ever heard a better conducted Falstaff. Stein insists on an enormous amount of rehearsal time, and the Welsh National orchestra, under the baton of Richard Armstrong, responds with transparent playing. Armstrong seems to ferret out the score's minutiae, just as Stein creates a delicate, toylike carnival of farcical behavior on the stage.
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