Falstaff
Glyndebourne
There was an interesting, startled article in the Independent a couple of weeks ago in which the writer recorded that, contrary to the expectations of everyone in ‘the media’, as the credit crisis squeezes harder, its victims, instead of turning to ever more feather-brained sources of enjoyment and consolation, are bewilderingly trying an escape into seriousness, with ‘heavy’ plays and operas, long taxing books, etc., being what they are headed for, rather than the jolly irrelevant frolics that they might have been expected to favour. Really that should have come as no surprise, since seriousness or anyway a plausible imitation of it is so much more absorbing, and therefore agreeably demanding, than tripping the light fantastic and driving all over the country in search of forgotten operettas set in Ruritania. ‘Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment,’ as Samuel Johnson remarked, with characteristic casual penetration, and it is a lesson that patrons seem in some measure to have learned, even if managements and artistic administrators haven’t.
That was a preamble to thinking about how successful Glyndebourne’s new production of Verdi’s Falstaff is. How serious a work is it? Is its message that all the world’s a joke, the message purveyed by the final fugue, something we are meant to believe or something the inhabitants of Boito–Verdi’s opera sing to cheer themselves up, after many of them have made fools of themselves? It’s a question one expects a production at least to try to answer, since this work is susceptible to immensely different interpretations, from Toscanini’s brutal-cum-gossamer brilliance to the pondered, strenuously sad Giulini — and that is only the musical side. Richard Jones, atypically, has decided to sit on the fence, so that there are few laughs in his production, until after the interval, when the audience’s reaction was gales of laughter and even applause in response to pretty well everything. Jones and his designer Ultz have set Falstaff in the 1940s, both during the war and after it, to judge from the clothes. The Fords live in a mock-Tudor villa, and their front garden shows that they are Digging for Victory, with rows of oversized cabbages. The US army has arrived too, Fenton being one of its members and behaving in the time-honoured manner, Nanetta his willing conquest. Mistress Quickly has joined up, too, and is a daunting NCO. But some things in English life were unaffected, we are reminded: Brownies carried on as usual, Etonians in top hats and tails looked in joke shop windows, Doctor Caius is one of their teachers, while Ford appears to be a courtier, from his formal dress. The 1940s are clearly the coming thing for opera directors (compare last week’s new production of Peter Grimes at ENO, under David Alden).
This updating may not occasion much loss of atmosphere, especially since the climactic final scene is very much as usual, Herne’s Oak being largely unchanged over the centuries, and people disguised as fairies or the Black Hunter not time-bound either. I don’t see, though, that much is gained, apart from a momentary surprise when the curtain rises. Everything depends on the characters and their performers, and here I can only say that this is not an impressive cast, though it has only one serious weakness. The performers make a decent team, but one longs for more vocal lustre than one ever gets.
The one really impressive voice is that of Marie-Nicole Lemieux, whose Quickly has all the fruitiness that Verdi wrote into the role, but which has seemed, in recent years, to have vanished. This was in all respects a brilliant characterisation. What, as the evening wore on, one longed for were those lyrical oases which Verdi parsimoniously allotted to his score, mainly the Fenton–Nanetta scenes. Alas, the Fenton of the Turkish Bülent Bezdüz put one in mind of anything but an oasis; pinched and parched, he failed to inspire in Adriana Kucerová any answering warmth; his enchanting arietta, sung curled up on a bough of the Oak, was particularly unwinning. Alice, who should be the centre of the action, was inconspicuously homely: Dina Kuznetsova failed to soar in the climactic passage of letter-reading, and, self-parody on Verdi’s part though it is, one is always grateful for this reminder of the world of Forza del Destino.
The two male leads, whose music is predominantly declamatory, fared better than the wives. Ford, an alarming figure, taken by Tassis Christoyannis (this was truly an international cast), delivered his monologue with such inspissated rancour that it was hard to believe he could ever emerge from such a state. Christopher Purves took the title role with his usual extreme intelligence and economy of gesture. He refuses to turn the part into a grotesque, plays him as merely an averagely overweight, late middle-aged slob — one wonders where the knighthood came in. My feeling was that he took the understatement too far — Falstaff is larger than life in the first place metaphorically at least as much as physically. So the upshot, onstage, was vague. In the pit, Vladimir Jurowski paced things moderately, too, with bottom-heavy chords, but his usual immaculate pointing of phrase. All told, I felt mildly short-changed, certainly not replete.
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