Brescia e Amisano
Each month is a Verdi month in Italy, however October is a particular month for Verdian efficiency, particularly in his native province of Parma the place the annual Parma Verdi Pageant coincides with the celebration of his birthday on 10 October (1813), whereas January is the month that culminates within the commemoration of his demise in Milan on 27 January (1901), which additionally occurs to be Mozart’s birthday. January 2025 started with the revival in Milan of Falstaff, Verdi’s most Mozartean work, his final opera and his solely mature comedy, which had its premiere at La Scala in 1893, the 12 months that Verdi turned eighty.
In January 2025 Falstaff was introduced in a restaging of the basic 1980 manufacturing by Giorgio Strehler, one of many giants of twentieth-century Italian theater; he died in 1997 however his Falstaff manufacturing, after nearly half a century, fantastically restaged by Marina Bianchi, stays a directorial masterpiece in an age when operatic course typically misfires with overly bold conceptual ammunition. Just a few days after La Scala introduced Falstaff, the Teatro San Carlo in Naples revived its worthy (although uneven) latest manufacturing of Don Carlo, directed by Claus Guth, providing an emotionally traumatized Carlo, prostrate on the stage, who relives his psychic catastrophes in the middle of the opera. Lastly, the final week of January introduced Parma’s model new manufacturing of the early Verdi opera Giovanna d’Arco in a manufacturing by Emma Dante that magnificently made the case for the musical and dramatic energy of this not often carried out work about Joan of Arc which I’ll talk about intimately in a separate put up later this week.
Strehler’s manufacturing from 1980 was in a short time labeled because the “Falstaff padano”—set not at Windsor on the Thames however someplace alongside the Adriatic delta of the Po River. Strehler himself was born in Adriatic Trieste and at all times had an affinity for the nice Venetian dramatist (and librettist) Carlo Goldoni whose spirit is playfully current on this staging of Verdi’s ultimate encounter with Shakespeare. When John Eliot Gardiner performed Falstaff in Florence in 2021 he discovered components of Renaissance music within the rating, however Daniele Gatti at La Scala, maybe partly impressed by Strehler, introduced out the Mozartean dynamics of Verdi’s intricate ensembles.
Within the Goldonian-Padanian Falstaff Nanetta and Fenton woo and flirt and twirl like commedia dell’arte figures; additionally they sing like angels, the one two non-Italians within the forged, Spanish Rosalia Cid and Argentine Juan Francisco Gatell. The lovers are styled as figures from the frescoes of Giandomenico Tiepolo (not his extra well-known father Giambattista), and the dramatis personae of the Ford household and associates who make up the nice ensembles seem in a magical Adriatic mild that alternately illuminates them and throws them into silhouette.
Italian soprano Rosa Feola, who not way back was singing Nannetta, has now assumed the function of her mom Alice Ford, full-voiced with nonetheless the attraction of youth and nostalgia for love, singing with a radiance that urged some spousal resemblance between Verdi’s Alice and Mozart’s Countess Almaviva. She was enjoying reverse the equally youthful baritone Luca Micheletti as Ford; his jealousy was partly a matter of delight and possessiveness, but additionally urged a husband infatuated together with his personal spouse. With each Feola and Micheletti beneath forty, the Fords have been in no way a stodgy and complacent bourgeois couple, however gave off sparks of youthful vitality of their very own.
Verdi’s first Falstaff in 1893 was the French baritone Victor Maurel, already a well-known Don Giovanni, and it isn’t troublesome to discern the virtually parodic connection between these two operatic libertines, separated by a century: each buying and selling on their the Aristocracy as a way of seduction, each outrageously assured of their very own romantic and sexual charisma, each focused and attacked by righteous and vindictive conspirators. Ambrogio Maestri has been singing the function of Falstaff for greater than twenty years and, now in his fifties, has lastly reached a believable age applicable to the half, whereas changing into through the years the opera world’s plain first Falstaff, bigger than life, extra charismatic than ridiculous, and marvelously philosophical.
Brescia e Amisano
When the curtain rises at La Scala he’s seated stage heart with one leg carelessly thrown over the arm of the chair and his richly commanding voice projecting regular calm whereas the opposite character carry out their frenzy of antics throughout him. Over time, Maestri has develop into a grasp at discovering the which means in each phrase of Arrigo Boito’s libretto, singing with stunning readability. Falstaff has no arias, it’s true, except you depend the thirty-second tribute to himself as a slender younger web page (“Quand’ero paggio”), however he has a sequence of monologues wherein Verdi exhibits how completely he appreciated Shakespeare’s genius: There’s Falstaff’s tribute to his personal paunch, Maestri booming with regal authority “Quest’è il mio regno, lo ingrandirò” (“that is my kingdom, I’ll enhance it”). There’s his “honor” monologue wherein he philosophically strips away each ethical pretense of honor to point out himself a profoundly nihilist libertine— reminding us that Maurel, who created the function at La Scala in 1893, had created the function of Verdi’s Iago at La Scala six years earlier than.
Most luxurious of all, maybe, was Maestri’s rendering of the “Mondo reo” (depraved world) monologue on the opening of the third Act, following the battering and humiliation of the second. Hauntingly he whispered the phrases— completely audible and understandable in acoustical area of La Scala— “ho dei peli grigi” (I’ve grey hair)— compelled for a second to confront outdated age. However then he known as for wine, and because it warmed him the viewers might hear the rising heat of Maestri’s voice, as he was stirred as soon as extra by the “trilling” of the world— which Gatti fantastically conveyed with the trilling of the orchestra. Marvelous was the second, on the finish of the third Act, when Falstaff reminded the triumphant conspirators that their lives would haven’t any curiosity with out somebody like him to impress them. Equally, on the conclusion of the ultimate fugue, the home lights went up, and Maestri gestured on the viewers as he pronounced “Tutti gabbati”— everyone seems to be fooled, which means that life makes fools of us all.
Luciano Romano
That is comedy, and although Falstaff is deceived and humiliated he’s clearly untraumatized on the finish of the night, however Don Carlo is tragedy, and Claus Guth’s manufacturing at San Carlo in Naples begins with Carlo utterly traumatized, in order that the opera can flash again by way of the phases of his collapse. A single chamber with a hexagonally patterned flooring types the idea of each scene, although the much more claustrophobic implication is that all the pieces is going on in Carlo’s thoughts and reminiscence. Through the supremely nice opening scene of the fourth Act, set in King Philip’s examine, and together with each main character within the opera besides Carlo, Guth has the imprisoned Carlo current on stage in a lighted field alongside the examine, as if he can witness or think about his father’s drama. Reciprocally, in the course of the second scene of the act, when Rodrigo involves Carlo in jail, the viewers nonetheless sees King Philip in his examine, signing Rodrigo’s demise warrant, in order that father and son stay psychically related.
Luciano Romano
A few of the particulars of the manufacturing are brilliantly conceived: Through the beautiful cello prelude to the examine scene, we see not simply the king’s desk however a handy daybed from which Princess Eboli is gathering herself to depart after intercourse with the king. John Relyea gave a high-quality efficiency as Philip with a gravelly basso voice that plumbed the depths of the nice fourth-Act aria “Ella giammai m’amò” (“she by no means cherished me”), although the staging leaves one unsure at first whether or not he means Eboli or Elisabetta. When the Grand Inquisitor then seems for the dramatic and disturbing basso-basso duet, Philip himself lies down on the daybed, and the Grand Inquisitor sits in a chair alongside the mattress, as if, in Guth’s conception, he have been the king’s psychoanalyst as an alternative of his religious dictator, authorizing him to kill his son and commanding him to execute Rodrigo.
The manufacturing additionally has some standard missteps, together with the overuse (as in so many up to date productions) of mime drama and video projections. Each mime and video are very tempting directorial gambits for opera, since they don’t contain including any sound to the musical rating which stays completely inviolate. Guth introduces the mime function of a courtroom jester who is continually current on stage (actor Fabián Augusto Gómez) performing antics that act out, or maybe parody, a few of Carlo’s inside impulses. When Philip imagines his demise and interment within the monastery of El Escorial, the jester locations a paper crown on Carlo’s head because the inheritor; when Carlo and Elisabetta sing the stirring marziale duet about Flanders within the ultimate scene, the jester is in some way current waving a banner.
Luciano Romano
Some viewers members could really feel that this silently enhances the drama; others could discover it merely distracting from the dramatic energy of the music itself. Video projections are additionally overworked: Guth accompanies Verdi’s stunning tenor-baritone friendship duet between Carlo and Rodrigo with a video projection of two boys at play, the remembered childhood friendship of the 2 males. The identical video of the identical boys then recurs later within the opera, in automated affiliation, each time Verdi brings again the musical materials of the friendship duet.
Italian tenor Piero Pretti sang with dramatic depth and embraced Guth’s conception of a traumatized Carlo. American soprano Rachel Willis-Sørenson was in beautiful voice as Elisabetta, her full and creamy soprano navigating the numerous aspects of the function, from her tender farewell to her lady-in-waiting within the second Act to the chic aria of feverish romantic renunciation that opens the ultimate act. Guth has her carrying bridal white within the opening Fontainebleau scene however then Victorian black with a black veil on the Spanish courtroom, the place she typically simply walks mournfully across the perimeter of the stage, evoking the picture of one other unlucky Habsburg bride, Empress Elisabeth of Austria within the late nineteenth century.
Luciano Romano
Italian baritone Gabriele Viviani was in velvety voice as Rodrigo, and exceptionally shifting within the jail scene that culminates in his demise (accompanied by the sonorous Naples brasses beneath the baton of Hungarian maestro Henrik Nánási). Armenian mezzo-soprano Varduhi Abrahamyan was good for the horny musical ornamentation of Eboli’s veil aria however considerably disappointing within the opera’s most intensely dramatic aria, “O don fatale.”
Whereas Relyea was powerfully efficient as Philip, with the rumbling basso depths of an getting old monarch, the supposedly ninety-year-old Grand Inquisitor was sung by the youthfully virile Ukrainian basso Alexander Tsymbalyuk, giving an sudden mixture of bass textures to their duet. Probably the most youthful basso voice of all, nevertheless, impressively wealthy and delightful, belonged to Georgian Georgi Manoshvili within the smaller function of the outdated monk who would possibly or won’t be the ghost of Emperor Charles V. Manoshvili, who sang the title function of Attila on the Parma Verdi Pageant in 2024, is unquestionably any individual to look at for sooner or later. And our dialogue will resume in Parma on Friday to debate this season’s Giovanna d’Arco.
