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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Shrewd survivor

Falstaff
WNO

Paradise Moscow
Royal Academy of Music

Verdi’s last opera Falstaff is also for many people his greatest. I went to see it in Cardiff this week, having heard Radio Three’s broadcast of his previous opera Otello from the New York Met a couple of evenings before. Otello I found, as I always do in a good performance, and that was, thanks to Semyon Bychkov’s conducting, an outstanding one, a work which puts me into a greater state of agony about the limitless human capacity for self-torment than almost any other. Falstaff, also admirably performed, left me, as again it nearly always does, impressed by its brilliance but otherwise unaffected. It too concerns human folly, but also resilience; Falstaff is what would nowadays be called more emotionally intelligent than Otello. Despite his grotesque vanity, he realises when he has made a fool of himself, and without, so far as we can tell, any resolution to be more careful in future, points out that everyone else is a fool too, and at least he can make a jest of it. All worth remembering, and embodied in music of endless resource and invention, with some comic situations and a last scene of utter enchantment. And yet...

Well, I’ll delay further speculation on what’s wrong with me in relation to Falstaff and concentrate on the WNO production. It’s a revival of Peter Stein’s 1988 production, which the great man came back to supervise. The sets are mock-Tudor, and might easily be borrowed for a production of Die Meistersinger; though the roof of the Garter Inn has some modern light-slats. I found a tendency to tweeness, but fortunately it doesn’t spread to the performance, which is, if anything, on the sober side. The Falstaff of Bryn Terfel is shown to much better effect than it was at Covent Garden. Here he is touchy, peremptory, self-aware to an unusual extent, realising what kind of risks he is running in courting two merry wives, and with a shrewd sense that other people are as rascally as he is, though he thinks he is more cunning. Falstaff becomes almost a realistic figure, and Terfel’s marvellous vocal performance matches his acting. The figure he cuts, were he to walk the streets of the UK today, certainly wouldn’t be conspicuous for girth; only for his capacity to hold his liquor.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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