jan 1, 1893 - Falstaff

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The tradition that Verdi inherited was essentially the comic tradition in which humankind is responsible for its own fate. The specifically operatic tradition that led to him is one that proceeded through ever greater infusions of opera buffa styles, forms, and attitudes into opera seria. The dramatic tradition that led to Wagner is the tragic tradition, in which humans are the helpless playthings of the gods. Verdi's operas shun the supernatural, while Wagner's embrace it. Verdi's operas present action, while Wagner's revel in static tableaux.

Thus it is no surpsie to find that Wagner's last opera, Parsifal, was an out-and-out metaphysical drama, replete with actual sacred rituals enacted onstage and ending with miraculous healings and redemptions--or that Verdi's last opera was Falstaff, fashioned by Boito from Merry Wives of Windsor and other Shakespeare plays. It was Verdi's first opera buffa in fifty years and an astonishing departure for a composer approaching the age of eighty. One could hardly imagine a more fitting consummation to Verdi's career than his exploration of the wacky world of the lovable knight Sir John Falstaff.

Falstaff is hardly a neglected masterpiece, but it has never enjoyued the popular fame of many of his earlier operas. It may nevertheless come as close to musical perfection as any piece in the operatic literature, and it does so in teh omst subtle, compassionate, and humanely touching ways. Wagner aspired to "endless melody," and Verdi achieved something similar with the seamless economy of Falstaff. It is largely a perpetual-motion scherzo from start to finish. Every note is melodic and memorable, although few are presented in traditional arias or ensembles; some wit0ty leitmotifs aside, not many tunes are repeated.

While working on Falstaff, Verdi said that "I am writing it in moments of absolute leisure, simply for my own amusement." The autumnally wise comedy looks back on his career and on the genre of opera itself. He filled the work with self-quotations and with allusions to other composers, including Mozart, ROssini, and even Wagner. He mocks such long-standing operatic conventions as the love duet, the revenge aria, the exit scene, and the comic finale. The character of Ford, a jealous husband, is presented in an almost entirely serious manner, and hence the irony is supremely comic. Ford's ravings and cries for revenge revisit emotions Verdi had so often explored before. Verdi's earlier operas were big on male bonding: friendship and oath-taking duets often ring down the curtain. Ford's Act II monologue (Is it a dream, or reality?)--after which Falstaff and Ford parody conventional operatic exits by arguing about who should go first--is merely one such witty reflection on the genre.

Verdi ends his last opera, and his operatic career, with a joyous final fugue, a gesture that harkens back to Mozart's finales and ironically casts him as a "son of Bach" by displaying his own contrapuntal mastery overlaid with pure Italian lyricism. Here he takes leave of his art, as did SHakespeare through the character of Prospero when the revels ended in his late play THe Tempest. "I alone am the source fo your pleasure," Falstaff says before he states the final fugal subject then taken up by the entir eensemble:

Everything in the world is a prank. And man is born a joker. His reason is always confused in his head. All are duped! Every man laughs at the others, but he laughs best who has the last laugh.

After Falstaff, after age eighty, Verdi still composed a few pieces, modest sacred ones, which again look back to the rich Italian cultural heritage of Dante and Palestrina.

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