Falstaff (opera)

Falstaff is a comic opera in three acts by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. The libretto was adapted by Arrigo Boito from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV, parts 1 and 2. The work premiered on 9 February 1893 at La Scala, Milan.

About Falstaff (opera) in brief

Falstaff is a comic opera in three acts by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. The libretto was adapted by Arrigo Boito from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV, parts 1 and 2. The work premiered on 9 February 1893 at La Scala, Milan. Verdi wrote Falstaff, which was the last of his 28 operas, as he was approaching the age of 80. It was his second comedy, and his third work based on a Shakespeare play, following Macbeth and Otello. The plot revolves around the thwarted, sometimes farcical, efforts of the fat knight Sir John Falstaff to seduce two married women to gain access to their husbands’ wealth. After the initial performances in Italy, other European countries and the US, the work was neglected until the conductor Arturo Toscanini insisted on its revival in the late 1890s into the next century. Conductors of the generation after Tos cananini to champion the work included Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti and Leonard Bernstein. Singers closely associated with the title role have included Victor Maurel, Mariano Stabile, Giuseppi Valdengo, Tito Gobbi, Geraint Evans, Bryn Terfel and Ambrogio Maestri. The piece was first recorded in 1932 and has subsequently received many studio and live recordings. It is now part of the regular operatic repertory, and editors have found difficulty in agreeing on a definitive score.

Many composers had set the play to music, with little success, among them Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Antonio Salieri, Michael William Balfe and Adolphe Adam. The first version to secure a place in the operatic repertoire was Otto Nicolai’s The merry WIVES of Windsor in 1849, but its success was largely confined to German opera houses. Not only is it Shakespearian, it was based in part on Trecento Italian works – Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Il Paccio and Baccio’s Decameron. It took the collaborators three years from mid-1889 to complete. Although the prospect of a new opera from Verdi aroused immense interest in Italy and around the world, Falstaff did not prove to be as popular as earlier works in the composer’s canon. Some felt that the piece suffered from a lack of the full-blooded melodies of the best of Verdi’s previous operas. For a comic subject Verdi considered Cervantes’ Don Quixote and plays by Goldoni, Molière and Labiche, but found none of them wholly suitable. He was pleased with Boito’s draftlibretto. He trimmed the plot, halved the number of characters and gave the character of Falstaff more depth by incorporating dozens of passages from the play, which had been piqued by early July 1889, when his interest had been waning.

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