By Gabriele Klein
Special to the Observer
Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff will be featured at the Salmar Classic Theatre’s HD Live from the Met on Saturday, April 1, at 9:30 a.m.
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Baritone Michael Volle is the larger-than-life knight Sir John Falstaff, leading a sterling ensemble cast in Verdi’s ingenious Shakespearean comedy. A trio of clever women sopranos deliver his comeuppance and gleefully torment Sir John. Daniele Rustioni conducts the Met orchestra.
Giuseppe Verdi’s (1813 - 1901) last opera, Falstaff, is a deeply human farce full of humour and genuine emotion and it is a splendid finale to the composer’s unparalleled career in the theatre. The story is an amalgamation of scenes from Shakespeare, primarily drawn from the comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and centres on the remarkable personality of Sir John Falstaff.
He is one of literature’s most compelling characters: aging, vain, dishonest, a bit crass, prodigiously self-indulgent, but also curiously philosophical.
Falstaff decides to seduce two women at the same time. The women have no secrets so they confide and scheme together – something will happen. The instant level of respect the women have for each other cements their relationship and makes them together one character.
The opera is set in and around the town of Windsor, west of London, in the first decades of the 15th century. The current Met production places the action in mid-20th century England, after the Second World War – an era when long-established social norms were rapidly changing and the aristocracy lost much of their wealth and influence.
Falstaff marks a stylistic departure for Verdi, and the score avoids traditional arias almost entirely, with the musical ideas coming fast and abundantly, moving organically from one to the next. Most of the singing happens in ensembles that seem as natural as speech and adhere perfectly to the lines of the text.
The opera’s celebrated finale is a grand fugue in which all the characters take part, each one both a perpetrator and butt of the “great joke of life” that Falstaff evokes in his final words.
Run time is two hours and 45 minutes – Acts I & II, 90 minutes, intermission 30 minutes, Act III, 45 minutes.
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