Learning to love Falstaff

It’s taken me a shockingly long time to realise how great Verdi’s Falstaff is, and I still wouldn’t agree that it is his greatest opera, which fully paid-up Verdians tend to think. It may be a measure of my progress, though, that I got a lot of pleasure out of the new production at Covent Garden, by Robert Carsen, even while recognising that it is a shallow, wilfully unsearching account of a work much of whose magic is extraordinarily subtle, not only for Verdi, but for anyone.

Carsen’s production, and the musical side, too, are on a level with the Shakespeare play from which Falstaff derives, which is agreed by everyone to be a potboiler. Verdi and his librettist Boito were interested in the class aspects of the intrigues and humiliations and triumphs of the characters, but still more interested in Falstaff’s anguished ageing, and in his understanding, like Wilde after him, that the tragedy of age is not that we grow old but that we remain young. This is not explored at all in Carsen’s production, which is far more notable for the 1950s sets designed by Paul Steinberg and the costumes by Brigitte Reiffenstuel.

The curtain rises on Falstaff reposing in a huge bed surrounded by dining tables, and food is an insistent motif, though one which Boito and Verdi overlooked. Falstaff’s visit to Alice takes place in her vast and gaudy kitchen, and at the touch-and-go reconciliation of the ending, they all sit down to a feast in a non-existent Windsor Forest. Oddly, Ambrogio Maestri, who sings Falstaff — he seems to have sung it everywhere — is not particularly fat, and seems unpadded, so the jokes about his size, and his own pride in it, seem beside the point.