(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.
