Opera Chic

No Country for Old Men: Michieletto's Salzburg Falstaff Homage to Milan's Casa Verdi

(Photos: Silvia Lelli)

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

So begins the second stanza of Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, an old man's journey as a dying animal into twilight years -- and if he's lucky, immortality through fortune, fame or family -- latent preoccupations that are routinely tethered by good health and under-40s vitality, which is why it's so incongruous that young Venetian opera director Damiano Michieletto glorifies such a forgotten census slice through his latest production, a new Falstaff for the Salzburger Festspiele.

Michieletto -- who just deflected the leaflet-thrown vitriol of La Scala's cranky loggionisti at the premiere of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera -- purges Anglophilia from The Merry Wives of Windsor and sets Falstaff inside the eclectic neo-gothic chambers of Milan's Casa di riposo per musicisti Giuseppe Verdi, a rest home for retired opera singers and musicians since 1902, conceptually established by Verdi six years prior.   

Located in Milan's Piazza Buonarroti (in the same neighborhood as Maria Callas' bourgeois Milan apartment), it was designed by Italian architect, Camillo Boito, brother of Verdi's frequent co-collaborating librettist, Arrigo, crowned by a Verdi statue in the piazza's roundabout.

After 111 years, it offers its guests (with a median age of 85) 33 single rooms, four mini apartments (for couples) and seven double rooms. There are music rooms, a physical therapy studio and a library and an in-house crypt holds the bodies of Verdi and his second wife Giuseppina Strepponi. Famous benefactors include Wanda Toscanini Horowitz, who left six million euros to the private foundation.

Here's Michieletto’s statement on his new production -- which opens on Monday night with Zubin Mehta and the Vienna Philharmonic and Ambrogio Maestri in the title role -- interiors complete with the famous Giovanni Boldini oil portrait of a jaunty middle-aged Verdi (OC’s translation, k thnx bi!):

I set the opera in the Casa di riposo per musicisti Giuseppe Verdi di Milano, which was designed by the architect Camillo Boito during the same period that his brother, the writer Arrigo Boito, had written Falstaff alongside Verdi. The composer had wanted this retirement home for, 'old artists who didn't have the chance in life to have the virtue of saving up' which is what made me think of Falstaff as an old retired singer of the past who wasn't well identified, more or less glorious, surrounded by the characters who needed him and incited him continuously to be Falstaff. In the opera, the themes of melancholy, of getting old and of death constantly emerge. The protagonist lives in a condition of remembrance, because his reality is the imperfection of waiting around for death.  And the whole episode unfolds a bit like a memory, a dream or a joke: Falstaff in a single moment watches his entire life flash before his eyes.

We were at La Scala in February for Robert Carsen's youth-obsessed Falstaff and although we thought it was brilliant, Michieletto's Casa Verdi billet-doux would have been significant in such an important anniversary year. We're already touching our Hermès silk scarves to our eyes at Michieletto's gesture, a (hopefully non-exploitive) testament to those old maestri who’ve scarified themselves to the muses of art and music, tucked behind Casa Verdi’s thick walls -- passed over, but no longer forgotten.

Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor Club at Teatro alla Scala

Milan last greeted Verdi’s final opera Falstaff in 2004. Nine years ago, Teatro alla Scala was closed, pending restoration, so the Giorgio Strehler production curtained under Muti's baton at Teatro degli Arcimboldi on the city's outskirts, dedicated to Tito Gobbi's death-year 20th anniversary for his enduring, late 1950s whiskered Falstaff with Herbie von Karajan and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

It was also the year of OC's inaugural Milan visit, and over summer break, she visited La Scala's museum, its collections temporarily housed in a stunning palazzo on Corso Magenta that overlooked Santa Maria della Grazia. The Northern Italian city of understated, un-boastful elegance struck OC as one who never tried too hard -- the very definition of cool -- and instantly reverberated with New York-based OC. Aaaand you guys pretty much know the rest of the story.

Falstaff (tonight in its penultimate replication) is the only Robert Carsen- stamped production in Teatro alla Scala’s 2012-13 season (in coproduction with Royal Opera House and the Canadian Opera Company) and as Carsen Crusaders, we weren’t going to miss it. We find his b-side, hidden track of ripe sexuality -- never vulgar or desperate (unless it has to be) -- and his fashion title familiarity a winning match for Milan, and since we’re not convinced that Falstaff needs a traditional Shakespearian director to stage it, we loved it.

We've never supported a buffo Falstaff staging and feel that it needs a delicate balance between commedia lirica and opera seria -- a fat knight mocked in his twilight, a bittersweet glimpse of flawed man too arrogant to realize it until everything converges in absolute absurdity -- tutto nel mondo e' burla -- and that's where a lot of lazy directors get it wrong.

Seniority Rules at Opera di Roma's Falstaff

 
(Above: Renato Bruson as Falstaff at Opera di Roma's Zeffirelli production)

Verdi's last opera, Falstaff, was his last opera for a good reason: old dude was in his 80s when he wrote it and he died less than a decade after its premiere (in his regal suite at Grand Hotel Et De Milan).

So it's actually quite fitting that Opera di Roma launched (this past Friday) their 2010 season opener with a Falstaff manned by men in their twilights. The opera house resurrected Franco Zeffirelli's (he's 87-years-old) classic & beloved production, which had already been used nine times since it premiered in 1956.

On the podium, Israeli conductor Ascher Fisch needs to keep track of his star Sir Johns for the run. The lead is being split between four singers: Renato Bruson (at 76-years-old), Ruggero Raimondi (at 69-years-old), Juan Pons (at 64-years-old), and the youngest, Alberto Mastromarino (who ironically doesn't divulge his age).

Renato Bruson sang the premiere with Myrto Papatanasiu (Alice), Carlos Álvarez (Ford), and Laura Giordano (Nannetta). Too bad Leo Nucci is currently here singing in James Conlon's unforgettable Rigoletto for Scala..he coulda been a contender! 

(Above: Bruson with Carlos Álvarez)
 
 

James Conlon's Falstaff in Bologna

Whenever the topic "musicians who seldom get the credit they deserve" comes up, a goto example of this sad phenomenon is maestro James Conlon (and this is not just a New Yorker's pride on my part): he is a fine, fine maestro, with a keen understanding for Verdi's raw emotional power and he gets Verdi's talent for nuance. And Conlon's a good man, to boot.

He's in rehearsals now at Bologna's Teatro Comunale for his Falstaff, directed by Wimbledon champ Pier Luigi Pizzi, debuting next week.

One of Pizzi's witty ideas, and I hope we're not spoiling anything here for the audience, is that the ending of the opera causes the sets to fall apart, destroying the fiction of the theatre and revealing the stage machinery beneath the sets.

"Big Belly", as Verdi called him during the feverish writing of his last great work, will be Ruggero Raimondi (in the photo above, courtesy of Salzburg Festival, Raimondi in Salzburg in 2001 as Falstaff, Claudio Abbado conductor).

"I always dreamed of staging Falstaff -- Pizzi explained during the press conference at the theatre -- It has perfect dramatic timing, it flows magnificently. It flows so well that I've decided to abolish one intermission, there will just be one intermission  between the first and second act. There's not a dull moment in this opera, a race toward folly!". Pizzi's Falstaff takes place in the last decade of the 19th century.

According to Raimondi, "this opera's characters are in constant evolution as the action barges ahead; but there are moments of reflection, of nostalgia".

Conlon admitted that "every chance one has to conduct Falstaff is a joy, a special occasion" and then explained that the first time he saw the opera he was 14. It was Franco Zeffirelli's famous staging. According to the New York born maestro, "in Falstaff Verdi is a master of comedy, with a sense of irony: he very wittyly quotes his own work, Traviata and Otello for example ".

(Conlon photo above courtesy of Ravinia Festival)

Amato Opera's Slimmed-Down Falstaff

Only the Amato Opera (page with sound), that workshop of bonsai teatro musicale, could attempt the monster feat of slimming that sweet whale of a character down. Tonight and tomorrow at the Amato Opera, NYC. We wonder: how many baby paellows will it take to fill Falstaff's belly on that tiny little stage?