Falstaff () is a comic opera in three acts by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian-language libretto was adapted by Arrigo Boito from the play The Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, by William Shakespeare. The work premiered on 9 February 1893 at La Scala, Milan.

Verdi wrote Falstaff, the last of his 26 operas, as he approached the age of 80. It was his second comedy, and his third work based on a Shakespeare play, following Macbeth and Otello. The plot revolves around the thwarted, sometimes farcical, efforts of the fat knight Sir John Falstaff to seduce two married women to gain access to their husbands' wealth.

Verdi was concerned about working on a new opera at his advanced age, but he yearned to write a comic work and was pleased with Boito's draft libretto. It took the collaborators three years from mid-1889 to complete. Although the prospect of a new opera from Verdi aroused immense interest in Italy and around the world, Falstaff did not prove to be as popular as earlier works in the composer's canon. After the initial performances in Italy, other European countries and the US, the work was neglected until the conductor Arturo Toscanini insisted on its revival at La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York from the late 1890s into the next century. Some felt that the piece suffered from a lack of the full-blooded melodies of the best of Verdi's previous operas, a view that Toscanini strongly opposed. Conductors of the generation after Toscanini who championed the work included Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti and Leonard Bernstein. The work is now part of the standard operatic repertory.

Verdi made numerous changes to the music after the first performance, and editors have found difficulty in agreeing on a definitive score. The work was first recorded in 1932 and has subsequently received many studio and live recordings. Singers closely associated with the title role have included Victor Maurel (the first Falstaff), Mariano Stabile, Giuseppe Valdengo, Tito Gobbi, Geraint Evans, Bryn Terfel and Ambrogio Maestri.

Composition history

Conception By 1889 Verdi had been an opera composer for more than fifty years. He had written 27 operas, of which only one was a comedy, his second work, Un giorno di regno, staged unsuccessfully in 1840.Budden, Vol. 1, pp. 69–74 His fellow composer Rossini commented that he admired Verdi greatly, but thought him incapable of writing a comedy. Verdi disagreed and said that he longed to write another light-hearted opera, but nobody would give him the chance.Klein, John W. "Verdi and Falstaff", The Musical Times, 1 July 1926, pp. 605–607 He had included moments of comedy even in his tragic operas, for example in Un ballo in maschera and La forza del destino.Baldini, p. 220

For a comic subject Verdi considered Cervantes' Don Quixote and plays by Goldoni, Molière and Labiche, but found none of them wholly suitable. The singer Victor Maurel sent him a French libretto based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Verdi liked it, but replied that "to deal with it properly you need a Rossini or a Donizetti". Following the success of Otello in 1887 he commented, "After having relentlessly massacred so many heroes and heroines, I have at last the right to laugh a little." He confided his ambition to the librettist of Otello, Arrigo Boito. Boito said nothing at the time, but he secretly began work on a libretto based on The Merry Wives of Windsor with additional material taken from Henry IV, parts 1 and 2. Many composers had set the play to music, with little success, among them Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1796), Antonio Salieri (1799), Michael William Balfe (1835) and Adolphe Adam (1856).Melchiori, pp. 90–91 The first version to secure a place in the operatic repertoire was Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1849, but its success was largely confined to German opera houses.Rice, John A. "Falstaff (i)", and Brown, Clive. "Lustigen Weiber von Windsor, Die", The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2 March 2014

Boito was doubly pleased with The Merry Wives as a plot. Not only was it Shakespearian, it was based in part on Trecento Italian works – Il Pecorone by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, and Boccaccio's Decameron. Boito adopted a deliberately archaic form of Italian to "lead Shakespeare's farce back to its clear Tuscan source", as he put it.Porter, Andrew. "Roll Up! Here We Come Again!", programme booklet, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 6 December 1999, pp. 10–14 He trimmed the plot, halved the number of characters in the play, and gave the character of Falstaff more depth by incorporating dozens of passages from Henry IV.

Verdi received the draft libretto a few weeks later, by early July 1889, at a time when his interest had been piqued by reading Shakespeare's play: "Benissimo! Benissimo! ... No one could have done better than you", he wrote back.Verdi to Boito, 6 and 7 July 1889, in Phillips-Matz 1993, p. 700. (punctuation used here are as in the book) Like Boito, Verdi loved and revered Shakespeare. The composer did not speak English, but he owned and frequently re-read Shakespeare's plays in Italian translations by Carlo Rusconi and , which he kept by his bedside. He had earlier set operatic adaptations of Shakespeare's Macbeth (in 1847) and Othello (in 1887) and had considered King Lear as a subject; Boito had suggested Antony and Cleopatra.Steen, p. 453

Verdi still had doubts, and on the next day sent another letter to Boito expressing his concerns. He wrote of "the large number of years" in his age, his health (which he admitted was still good) and his ability to complete the project: "if I were not to finish the music?" He said that the project could all be a waste of the younger man's time and distract Boito from completing his own new opera (which became Nerone). Yet, as his biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz notes, "Verdi could not hide his delight at the idea of writing another opera". On 10 July 1889 he wrote again:

Composition Boito's original sketch is lost, but surviving correspondence shows that the finished opera is not greatly different from his first thoughts. The major differences were that an act 2 monologue for Ford was moved from scene 2 to scene 1, and that the last act originally ended with the marriage of the lovers rather than with the lively vocal and orchestral fugue, which was Verdi's idea.Hepokoski, p. 22 He wrote to Boito in August 1889 telling him that he was writing a fugue: "Yes, Sir! A fugue... and a buffa fugue", which "could probably be fitted in".Verdi to Boito, 18 August 1889, in Phillips-Matz, p. 702

Verdi accepted the need to trim Shakespeare's plot to keep the opera within an acceptable length. He was sorry, nonetheless, to see the loss of Falstaff's second humiliation, dressed up as the Wise Woman of Brentford to escape from Ford. He wrote of his desire to do justice to Shakespeare: "To sketch the characters in a few strokes, to weave the plot, to extract all the juice from that enormous Shakespearian orange".Wechsberg, p. 229 Shortly after the premiere an English critic, R A Streatfeild, remarked on how Verdi succeeded:

In November Boito took the completed first act to Verdi at Sant'Agata, along with the second act, which was still under construction: "That act has the devil on its back; and when you touch it, it burns", Boito complained.Boito to Verdi, 30 October 1889, in Phillips-Matz, p. 703 They worked on the opera for a week, then Verdi and his wife Giuseppina Strepponi went to Genoa. No more work was done for some time.Hepokoski, pp. 22–26

The writer Russ McDonald observes that a letter from Boito to Verdi touches on the musical techniques used in the opera – he wrote of how to portray the characters Nannetta and Fenton: "I can't quite explain it: I would like as one sprinkles sugar on a tart to sprinkle the whole comedy with that happy love without concentrating it at any one point."Boito to Verdi, in McDonald 2009, p. 8

The first act was completed by March 1890;Hepokoski, p. 35 the rest of the opera was not composed in chronological order, as had been Verdi's usual practice. The musicologist Roger Parker comments that this piecemeal approach may have been "an indication of the relative independence of individual scenes". Progress was slow, with composition "carried out in short bursts of activity interspersed with long fallow periods" partly caused by the composer's depression. Verdi was weighed down by the fear of being unable to complete the score, and also by the deaths and impending deaths of close friends, including the conductors Franco Faccio and Emanuele Muzio. There was no pressure on the composer to hurry. As he observed at the time, he was not working on a commission from a particular opera house, as he had in the past, but was composing for his own pleasure: "in writing Falstaff, I haven't thought about either theatres or singers". He reiterated this idea in December 1890, a time when his spirits were very low after Muzio's death that November: "Will I finish it [Falstaff]? Or will I not finish it? Who knows! I am writing without any aim, without a goal, just to pass a few hours of the day".Verdi to Maria Waldmann, 6 December 1890, in Philips-Matz, p. 707: Waldmann was a young singer with whom Verdi corresponded By early 1891 he was declaring that he could not finish the work that year, but in May he expressed some small optimism, which by mid-June, had turned into:

Boito was overjoyed, and Verdi reported that he was still working on the opera. The two men met in October or November 1891,Hepokoski, p. 36 after which the Verdis were in Genoa for the winter. They were both taken ill there, and two months of work were lost. By mid-April 1892 the scoring of the first act was complete and by June–July Verdi was considering potential singers for roles in Falstaff. For the title role he wanted Victor Maurel, the baritone who had sung Iago in Otello, but at first the singer sought contractual terms that Verdi found unacceptable: "His demands were so outrageous, exorbitant, [and] incredible that there was nothing else to do but stop the entire project".Verdi to Teresa Stolz, 9 September 1892, in Phillips-Matz, p. 712 Eventually they reached agreement and Maurel was cast.

By September Verdi had agreed in a letter to his publisher Casa Ricordi that La Scala could present the premiere during the 1892–93 season, but that he would retain control over every aspect of the production. An early February date was mentioned along with the demand that the house would be available exclusively after 2 January 1893 and that, even after the dress rehearsal, he could withdraw the opera: "I will leave the theatre, and [Ricordi] will have to take the score away".Verdi to Ricordi, 18 September 1892, in Phillips-Matz, pp. 714–715 The public learned of the new opera towards the end of 1892, and intense interest was aroused, increased rather than diminished by the secrecy with which Verdi surrounded the preparations; rehearsals were in private, and the press was kept at arm's length."Verdi's Falstaff, The Times, 8 December 1892, p. 5 Apart from Verdi's outrage at the way that La Scala announced the season's programme on 7 December – "either a revival of Tannhäuser or Falstaff" – things went smoothly in January 1893 up to the premiere performance on 9 February.Phillips-Matz, p. 715

Performance history

Premieres