The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (45 page)

The role of Otello is one of the summits of any tenor’s aspirations, requiring enormous power, stamina and sensibility. Over the last thirty years, Jon Vickers, Placido Domingo and Vladimir Galuzin are probably the only three singers (none of them Italian-born) to have mastered its demands.
The difficulties begin with the character’s first entrance and the trumpet phrases of ‘Esultate’ which rise to a high B before the singer has had any chance to warm up.
The love duet at the end of Act I is warmly lyrical, while the duet with Iago at the end of Act II is brazenly ferocious.
The singer must convey both the noble warrior and the ardent husband, as well as suggesting a decline into paranoid insanity.
Many tenors fudge the written high C in the Act III duet with Desdemona; and even fewer can bring to Otello’s sombre final utterances the right mixture of dignity, remorse and tenderness.

Iago is another challenge, written for a powerful dark-hued baritone who can bring a light, wry touch to the Brindisi in
Act I and a sardonic snap to the monologue in Act II.
Mere roarers need not apply.
Desdemona is the last in the line of pure-hearted Verdi heroines – ‘the type of resignation, goodness, self-sacrifice’, as Verdi wrote.
Softer-grained sopranos find the character’s outbursts in Act III a strain, but come into their own in the soft, high-lying passages of the ‘Willow’ Song and Ave Maria in Act IV.
Note also the magnificent scene-painting of a storm-tossed sea which opens the opera, the delicate madrigal in Act II, and the eerie quietness and economy with which Act IV is orchestrated.

Verdi revised the ensemble which concludes Act III: the original and longer version, in which it is undoubtedly difficult to hear all the different contrapuntal vocal strands, remains the more commonly performed; the shorter and simpler version, less frequently heard today, was written for a production in Paris in 1894.

In performance

More radical producers want to see the racial question as the heart of the opera, but it was of little concern to Verdi or Boito (or Shakespeare, for that matter).
Part of the success of Peter Stein’s 1986 staging for WNO was that it reflected its roots in both Shakespearean tragedy and Victorian melodrama, presenting the opera in sets based on flat-perspective early Renaissance painting and using a language of theatrically heightened gesture.
But this is not an opera which responds kindly to being messed about with, and more aggressive attempts to update it (as in David Freeman’s production for ENO, set in a present-day military compound covered with barbed wire and barrels of explosives) end up seeming simply irrelevant.

Recordings

CD: Placido Domingo (Otello); James Levine (cond.).
RCA GD 82951 2

DVD: Placido Domingo (Otello); Georg Solti (cond.).
Covent Garden production.
Pioneer 452 736 089204

Falstaff

Three acts. First performed Milan, 1893.

Libretto by Arrigo Boito

When a newspaper article suggested that he was incapable of writing a comic opera, Verdi was stung – his one attempt at the genre,
Un
Giorno
di
Regno
(
King
for
a
Day,
1840), had been completely forgotten.
So at the age of seventy-five, he began work with Boito on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s farce
The
Merry
Wives
of
Windsor.
To cover himself, he made out that the project was something he was undertaking ‘to pass the time’ rather than for performance.
What eventually emerged surprised the first-night audience at La Scala – the octogenarian composer had produced something sparkling, sly and witty in a style entirely unlike that of his previous work.
As Boito wrote to Verdi, ‘After having sounded all the shrieks and groans of the human heart, to finish with a burst of laughter – that is to astonish the world.’

Among several earlier operatic adaptations of the play, the most notable is Otto Nicolai’s
Die
lustigen
Weiber
von
Windsor
(1849), known to Verdi; later came Ralph Vaughan Williams’s charming
Sir
John
in
Love
(1935).

Plot

Broadly the same as
The
Merry
Wives
of
Windsor,
in which Mistress Ford leads a comic female conspiracy designed to teach the lecherous Sir John Falstaff a lesson.
A sub-plot involves Mistress Ford’s jealous husband and his reluctance to let their daughter Nannetta marry young Fenton.

What to listen for

Otello
is the culmination of the Italian grand-opera tradition;
Falstaff
’s mercurial fluency and wit transforms and perfects Rossinian
opera
buffa.
As the dazzling double ensemble at the end of the second scene and the vast, uproarious final fugue indicate, this is an opera designed for an immaculately
rehearsed team with sharp ears, superb diction and quick musical responses rather than a line-up of star soloists, although both the title role (written for a
buffo
with a range which covers both bass and baritone) and Ford (written for the same sort of baritone as Rigoletto and Iago) are vocally tricky – as is Nannetta, a lovely role for a very young soprano with superb breath control and the ability to spin confident high pianissimi in her exchanges with Fenton (light tenor) in the second scene.

Rather than providing complete arias, Verdi scatters the score with memorable melodic phrases which seem to grow naturally out of the comedy – one thinks of the gorgeous soprano line unfurled in Alice Ford’s half-mocking, half-seductive outburst in the second scene, of the snatched encounters and kisses of Nannetta and Fenton (‘always disturbed and interrupted and always ready to begin again’, as Boito put it), of the contralto Mistress Quickly’s ludicrous curtsey, ‘Reverenza’, in the third scene.
More substantial highlights of the score also include Falstaff’s tiny but perfect aria ‘Quand’ero paggio’, sung as he describes his nimble youth to Mistress Ford, and lasting only a matter of seconds; Ford’s monologue at the end of third scene, a parody of the conventions of operatic melodrama; and the fairy music in the last scene, its spooky daintiness creating an atmosphere quite new to Verdi’s
œuvre.

In performance

In big opera houses like the Met or the Salzburg Festspielhaus, the fizzing comic vivacity of
Falstaff
tends to fall flat, and it is not an opera which responds happily to star singers elbowing forward to steal the show.
It is always at its most enjoyable when a team has been intensively rehearsed in the sort of collegial conditions that Glyndebourne offers.
In other respects, it is open to any number of approaches – pure carry-on farce (Graham Vick for Covent Garden) or ambivalent bitter-sweet comedy (Peter Stein for WNO, Matthew Warchus for Opera North), in Elizabethan (Jonathan Miller
for the Berlin Staatsoper), late Victorian (Declan Donnellan for Salzburg) or modern dress (David Pountney for ENO).

Recordings

CD: Giuseppe Valdengo (Falstaff); Arturo Toscanini (cond.).
RCA GD 60521

Bryn Terfel (Falstaff); Thomas Hampson (Ford); Claudio Abbado (cond.).
DG 471 194 2

DVD: Bryn Terfel (Falstaff); Bernard Haitink (cond.).
Covent Garden production.
BBC OA 08 12 D

Pietro Mascagni

(1863–1945)

Cavalleria rusticana
(
Rustic Chivalry
)

One act. First performed Rome, 1890.

Libretto by Giovanni Tragioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci

Based on a play and novella by Giovanni Verga, this opera pioneered what became known as the ‘verismo’ style.
This was a movement among young Italian opera composers, much influenced by Bizet’s
Carmen
and the novels of Emile Zola, in which the focus was turned on violent and highly emotional episodes of modern life, usually drawn from proletarian or peasant characters – in marked contrast to the historical and ‘noble’ subject-matter favoured by Verdi.
Cavalleria
Rusticana
is usually performed with
Pagliacci
(see p.
208) – a pairing known to opera lovers as
‘Cav
’n’
Pag’