Falstaff
By Lee Sandlin
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The problem is that what enchants on paper (or on CD, which lets you keep going back to catch what you missed) doesn’t necessarily charm in performance: transferred to the physicality of the opera house, some of Falstaff’s airiest effects come out smeared. A deeper issue is that Verdi is so uncharacteristically focused on his ornate margins that he neglects the main musical action. The score is always exquisite to listen to, but it’s all melting nuance. There aren’t any of those ear-candy melodies that make even his worst operas so catchy, and there’s only one showstopping aria–which is inscrutably handed off to a secondary character, as though the composer had been too distracted to notice who got top billing. For all its intellectual excitement, the work can be pretty monotonous onstage. This is particularly true toward the end, when Falstaff wanders through Windsor Forest at night pursued by his mysterious tormentors and the music floats into a weird realm of extravagant fantasy. It’s all gorgeous, and it’s fascinating to know Verdi had it in him. But dramatically it grows inert: you start longing for the practical jokers to pull the plug and go on to some other victim.
This means that a successful production has to work hard to ground the fantasy in something tangible: the more real the world, the more effective the drifting oddity of the music. This isn’t the route the Lyric team chose. Their Falstaff is oddity from beginning to end–Windsor Forest winds up looking like the only sane place on earth. At least you can tell that the tree on the back wall during the last act is a tree and the moon the moon. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but until then I couldn’t figure out what the hell anything onstage was supposed to be.
No one’s likely to complain about the production of Bolcom’s A View From the Bridge. Whatever doubts there might be about the opera’s long-term viability, the Lyric production is surely going to be the best it’ll ever get. It was an exhilarating shock to go from Falstaff’s languidly dateless surrealism to this brilliantly concrete and atmospheric vision of Brooklyn in the 1950s; if nothing else it was proof that the art of opera production hasn’t been completely swallowed up in fatuity.
A similar failure of nerve insinuates itself into the music. Bolcom deserves all the praise he’s gotten for writing such a spikily dissonant score that works so well dramatically–I didn’t see a single walkout all night, and that’s practically a miracle with a new opera. But at least on first hearing, long stretches of it seemed to be generic Euro-academic modernism, heavy on harshly chromatic recitatives and sparing with melody. I don’t want to sound like Pat Buchanan here, but shouldn’t an American tragedy sound more, well, American? It’s true a few snatches of popular music and a couple of serenely lilting arias have been incorporated into the harsh texture. But wouldn’t it have been more daring to reproduce the sound world of midcentury Brooklyn–with the endless babble of competing melodies you can hear in any working-class American neighborhood–and reserve the astringent dissonance for the darker psychological drama underneath?
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Dan Rest-Lyric Opera of Chicago.
