100 Great Operas and Their Stories: Act-By-Act Synopses (21 page)

Now Onegin is at last in love himself. He wonders that he ever could have given condescending advice about love to so wonderful a creature; he recalls that he still has the letter she sent him; and in the climax of the aria, he sings the very theme (though in a baritone key) that Tatiana had sung in her
Letter Scene
, when she decided to dedicate herself to her love for Onegin.

Scene 2
It has now been Onegin’s turn to write a letter. Tatiana, in a room in her husband’s house, is awaiting his visit and, holding the letter in her hand, indicates clearly that the next few minutes are going to be trying.

When Onegin rushes to her and goes down on his knees, she attempts to be cold. She suggests that he may be only attracted by the glamour of having a love affair with the wife of a distinguished ornament of society. Onegin’s passion, however, is obviously far more genuine than this. He acknowledges that his former behavior had been sheer madness; he begs for pity; he asks her to run away with him. Tatiana, who has been trying to conquer her real emotions by the earlier show of coldness, now melts and finally sinks into his arms. Yet even during the passionate phrases that follow she knows what she owes to her husband. Summoning all her moral strength, she dismisses Onegin and rushes from the room. Again Onegin is overwhelmed with anguish.

FALSTAFF

Opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi with
libretto by Arrigo Boito based on Shakespeare’s
The Merry Wives of Windsor
and bits of
Henry IV

Time: early 15th century

Place: Windsor

First performance at Milan, February 9, 1893

    Verdi’s
Falstaff
is, as everyone knows, based on Shakespeare’s
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. It is, thus, a great opera by a great composer; and it is based on the work of a great dramatist who happened, for once, to write a pretty poor play. Maybe it is not polite to say that anything by Shakespeare is not very good. Anyway, this play was so really second-rate that many Shakespearean scholars doubt that Shakespeare wrote much of it.

Be that as it may, Verdi’s librettist, Arrigo Boito, took out some of the unnecessary stuffing, added bits and pieces from
better Shakespeare plays, and gave his friend Verdi an excellent concoction, filled with the champagne of high spirits. And Verdi, though in his eightieth year when the opera was produced, wrote a sparkling score. There is none of the long, passionate melodies here of the youthful
Traviata
and
Trovartore
, but wit, skill, and high spirits in almost every bar.

ACT I

Scene 1
The time is the fifteenth century; the place is Windsor, not far from London; and the scene is inside the Garter Inn. That fat old rascal, Sir John Falstaff, is being upbraided by the foolish old Dr. Caius. Apparently, the night before, Caius has had a drinking bout with Falstaff and his disreputable hangers-on, Bardolph and Pistol, and Caius’s pocket has been picked. He gets exactly nowhere with the three: they are merely contemptuous.

When Caius has left, Falstaff is given a bill by the host of the inn. He cannot pay, and so he devises a plot to get money. He tells Bardolph and Pistol how two jolly wives of Windsor-Mistress Ford and Mistress Page—have been attracted to him. Both, he says, control their husbands’ purse strings. He means to make love to them and to get money from them. For this purpose he has written each a letter, and Bardolph and Pistol are to constitute themselves the postal department. But, surprisingly, these good-for-nothings refuse: they say they stand on their honor and will have nothing to do with this business. “Honor!” cries Falstaff—and he delivers them a terrific lecture on the meaninglessness of that word. (It is a pretty magnificent lecture, taken largely from Shakespeare’s
Henry IV, Part 2
.) Honor cannot fill an empty stomach or set straight a broken limb, and is nothing but a word that floats away. As for Bardolph and Pistol, they are nothing but thieves; and he closes the act by chasing them, with a broom, right out of the inn!

Scene 2
In spite of Bardolph and Pistol, Falstaff has had his letters delivered by a page to Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. And in the second scene of this act, we turn from the
purely masculine company of the Garter Inn to meet the ladies in Ford’s house. There is Meg Page, and there is Alice Ford (those are the two “merry wives”), there is Alice’s pretty daughter Ann, and there is the gossipy old neighbor Dame Quickly, who happens also to be the servant of Dr. Caius. The two merry wives soon discover that they have received identical letters from Sir John Falstaff, and they are convulsed with glee.

Meantime, those rapscallions, Bardolph and Pistol, have told Ford that the fat knight is planning to seduce his wife. The Ford household is a pretty busy place that morning, for Dr. Caius has also come over to complain of the way he has been treated. And, to make the stage quite full, there is also young Fenton, a suitor for the hand of Ann Ford. What with the women plotting against Falstaff on one side of the stage, the men plotting against him on the other, and everyone talking at the same time, Verdi had a fine chance for chattery nine-part writing. He made splendid use of it. And, by way of contrast, he also wrote some light love music for Ann and Fenton. Fenton’s suit is not approved by Ford, who wants Ann to marry Dr. Caius. Therefore, the young folks have only brief words with each other on the sly. No full-blown love duets here—just flirtations. The whole scene, in fact, is light and airy as a feather.

ACT II

Scene 1
The plots against Sir John Falstaff now begin to take shape. Back at the Garter Inn, Bardolph and Pistol, the hypocrites, ask to be taken back into Falstaff’s good graces. Soon they usher in Dame Quickly. She tells the knight that the two ladies—Mistress Page and Mistress Ford—are both in love with him. Ford, she says, is always away from home between two and three. Won’t Sir John pay a call? And Page—why, he’s away from home most of the time, so … Vastly flattered, Falstaff promises to come; and when Dame Quickly leaves, he expresses his self-satisfaction in the monologue
Va
,
vecchio John
. “Get along with you, old John,” he says in effect; “there’s life in the old boy yet.”

But now Bardolph announces another visitor, one Maestro Fontana, who wishes to meet him, and who brings along a demijohn of wine for breakfast. This Fontana is none other than Ford in disguise. He enlists Falstaff’s aid, with the promise of money, in seducing the wife of a certain burgher of Windsor—Mistress Ford, to be exact. Falstaff falls into the trap completely, promising success based on his own attraction for the lady in question. But when he goes off to array himself properly for the conquest, Ford sings a terrific monologue (
È sogno? o realtà?
—“Is it a dream? or is it real?”) on the chances he stands of being made a cuckold. He swears a terrible revenge on both Falstaff and his own wife; but the scene ends again in comedy as he and Falstaff, now splendidly attired, bow each other out of the doorway with ludicrous ceremony.

Scene 2
Back in Ford’s house things begin to come to a boil. The ladies are together, and Dame Quickly reports her success with Sir John Falstaff. He will come wooing Mistress Ford today, from two to three. Meantime, pretty little Ann tells her mother that Ford wants her to marry old Dr. Caius—a dreadful thought to both of them!

Unfortunately, it is time for Falstaff to come a-wooing. The stage is set for him: Mistress Ford takes up a lute; the others hide behind a screen. The fat old gentleman wastes no time in his ludicrous love-making. Within two minutes he is proposing: he tells Alice how beautiful she is and how handsome he once was, and he does his best to take her into the cushioned circumference of his arms. Alice, of course, resists coquettishly, but they are soon interrupted. Ford is on his way home! And there is a fine how-de-do as the ladies hide His Fatness behind the screen.

Ford breaks in furiously, with a whole retinue of followers. They look everywhere—even in a large laundry basket—but not, fortunately, behind the screen. When the men are off searching other rooms, the fat knight is stuffed into that laundry basket. He is covered with dirty clothes; and when the men
return, he occasionally sticks out his head to complain that he’s roasting to death. It’s a perfectly mad scene, everyone singing at once, or in pairs, or in quartets. Even the two young lovers—Ann and Fenton—have a chance to exchange some tender words behind the screen. Finally, with the men off again searching in another room, the laundry basket, complete with Falstaff, is heaved out of the window and—splash—into the river outside. Huge laughter and merriment close the broadly farcical scene.

ACT III

Scene 1
Poor Jack Falstaff! Honest Jack Falstaff! Rogue Jack Falstaff! He has been thoroughly defeated—thrown, in a laundry basket, into the river, while Ford and his wife have become quite reconciled. But they are not through yet with the fat knight; otherwise there would have been no Act III. There he sits, before the Garter Inn, commiserating with himself. He has been terribly treated, vilely treated. But he gets a big beaker of hot wine, and then we hear the famous trill in the orchestra to show what it does to him. It starts way down (like the effect of wine), and it grows and grows, till the whole orchestra—like Jack’s whole body—is one big trill and thrill!

Now Dame Quickly comes. With little difficulty she persuades Falstaff that it was not Alice’s fault. She still loves him—and he reads her letter, which Dame Quickly has brought. It is an assignation to meet at midnight, in disguise, at the royal park. The other plotters have been listening to this exchange; and when Falstaff and Dame Quickly enter the inn, the eavesdroppers occupy the entire stage and develop their various plots. And while they are in a conspiratorial mood, Dr. Caius and Ford plot, by means of disguises, to marry the old physician to young Ann that same night.

Scene 2
And now, last scene of all: midnight in Windsor Park. There all sorts of things may happen—especially under Herne’s Oak. Herne was a legendary huntsman, and the very opening notes of the scene suggest the hunting horn’s echoing
in ghostly fashion. There the lovers—Fenton and Ann—meet to sing a brief duet. It cannot go on long, for they must don their costumes for the fun, and to carry out their own plot.

Then, cold on the stroke of midnight, enter Sir John, disguised as the hunter Herne. One … two … three … up to twelve he counts the strokes, when his beloved Alice greets him. Sir John’s love-making makes a sharp contrast with young Fenton’s; but he too is interrupted. A whole troop of fairies arrives, with Ann, disguised as their Queen, at their head. It is all done to charming, fairylike music, but Sir John hides, frightened to death, before the oak. In his superstitious mind it is death to look on fairies. With everyone assembled—the men, too, in their supernatural disguises—the fun begins. They torture poor Sir John—they stick him, prick him, pinch him, roll him, and tumble him, till the old man can take no more. At length he arises and shakes them off, only to be reviled—and finally forgiven. Never again will he go a-courting the merry wives of Windsor!

But what of the young lovers? Ford, who has plotted to betroth Dr. Caius to his daughter Ann, does so. Only it turns out that the redheaded rascal Bardolph has taken over Ann’s disguise as the Queen of the Fairies, and Caius finds himself with a pretty bride indeed! At the same time Ford has blessed another couple in masks, and these turn out to be Ann herself and her true-love Fenton.

In the magic of the night and the wooded scene everyone is reconciled. Falstaff proposes a grand finale, and Verdi ends his long and glorious operatic career with a magnificent fugue in nine parts.

FAUST

Opera in four acts by Charles Gounod with
libretto in French by Jules Barbier and Michel
Carré based on Part I of Goethe’s
Faust