SIR JOHN MEETS SIR JOHN
Sir John Eliot Gardiner talks about the octogenarian Verdi’s miraculous final operatic offering and his approach to recording the work.

Toscanini’s 1950 NBC radio broadcast of Falstaff has always been regarded as the benchmark performance of the opera. Gardiner has listened repeatedly to the tapes of Toscanini rehearsing the soloists and orchestra to hear how the great Italian maestro worked on text and characterisation. "It’s phenomenal what he achieved – the sheer amount of detail and the trouble he took over verbal inflection and over phrasing and characterisation," enthuses Gardiner. "In the first orchestral read-through, he sings all the vocal lines himself, in a husky, raspy voice, a bit like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Later you can hear him cajoling, upbraiding and growling at Giuseppe Valdengo, his Falstaff — Valdengo wasn’t like Stabile who knew every crease and wrinkle of Toscanini’s interpretation of the fat knight."

Shakespeare Italian-style
Does Gardiner see Falstaff as an Italian opera set in England or as a Shakespeare play set to music by Verdi?

"It’s Shakespeare Italianised and very different, of course, from the original: in fact you can argue that Boito and Verdi improved on the original in certain respects. Let’s not forget that The Merry Wives of Windsor is by no means one of Shakespeare’s finest plays. Boito, in adapting it as an opera libretto, rifled through several other Shakespeare plays for other references to Falstaff, to help him round out his character and, in characteristic Italian fashion, emphasised his rapacious sexual appetite at the expense of sheer greed and lust for money. This in turn gave Verdi marvellous opportunities to create in music differing moods of sensual anticipation. The same goes for the other characters: The Italian merry wives are a lot more chic and feisty than their Elizabethan bourgeois originals, and Verdi’s Fenton unlike Shakespeare’s (who is less interested in Ann Page herself than in her potential dowry) – is a more ardent romantic figure.

"But above all, Boito — and hence Verdi — made significant structural improvements. Boito rightly diagnosed the final act — set in Windsor Park — as being the dullest: ‘Even Shakespeare’, he said, ‘with that extra bit of energy he had, could not escape this basic law [of diminishing interest as the predictably happy ending approaches].’ He found the perfect remedy — introducing a brand new element, that of phantasmagoria, — and Verdi duly responded with the most magical music imaginable. Overall, the subtle process of italianising Shakespeare’s Elizabethan social scene entails greater sensuality, greater realism and a contemporary (and very Italian) sense of fun which permeates all the comic exchanges. Most original of all, Boito and Verdi bring an enhanced emotional charge to the play. Take, for example, the way the jealousy of Shakespeare’s Ford — spluttering, prolix, but in the last resort, tame — is transformed into something seriously threatening and explosive, to the point when it begins to resemble that of a totally different Shakespearean hero, Othello."

An opera sui generis
Gardiner is keen to point out how different is Falstaff, not just from all of Verdi’s previous operas but from every other opera ever written. "The miracle of Falstaff is — it’s an old cliché but is nonetheless true — that Verdi reserves for his eightieth year his most subtle, imaginative writing for both voices and orchestra. There are not two dull bars in Falstaff from the orchestra. It seems to me that a lot of commentators have misunderstood this and made far too much of the German influence — mostly Wagner, of course — on Verdi’s score. The reaction to situation and character takes place within the orchestra – it’s not isolated from the singers but actually interwoven with the vocal lines. It would be difficult to extrapolate vocal or orchestral lines from Falstaff and make them stand on their own: it is their wonderful intersection that creates the whole fabric and, to this end, the craftsmanship he employs is endlessly fascinating."

Period instruments
On this new recording, as with his earlier recording of the Requiem and Quattro pezzi sacri (Philips 442 142-2), Sir John Eliot Gardiner uses instruments – originals or replicas - that were up-to-the-minute in Verdi’s time but which have since been discarded or "improved upon" by modern instrument-makers. These are mostly French in origin — Paris being very much the capital of wind instrument construction in the nineteenth century — and much in vogue in Italy in Verdi’s time. "Through the use of these instruments you gain specific differentiated colour, both in isolation and in combination. Take, for example, the use of the cor anglais and the clarone (bass clarinet) that Verdi reserves for the Third Act and the whole fairy scene. The timbre of his bass clarinet is more hollow-sounding than we are used to hearing nowadays , and this seems to juxtapose more sharply with that of the cor anglais , which in turn has less of that fruity, plummy sound that we’re used to, say in traditional performances of the "New World" Symphony, and more of a reedy edge, revealing its ancestry in Bach’s oboe da caccia. Or take the piccolo and the wonderful way Verdi uses it during Alice’s narration of the legend of Herne the Hunter (Act 3 Scene 1). It just sits on that top A making an eerie sort of whistle, while far below you have the lower three horns grunting away on a bottom F.

Meanwhile Alice continues her narration with the first horn weaving a sinister counter-melody around hers — a bit Mahlerian, like one of his Rückert-Lieder . The differentiation of texture and instrumental voice type is perhaps even more palpable in this sense than it is with modern instruments. It requires incredible technical control by the players because these instruments are a lot less reliable than their modern counterparts. Or take, for instance, the beginning of Act 3 Scene 2. Here Verdi stipulates "a genuine corno da caccia without valves in A flat basso". His remark to Ricordi that this is going to have to be "rather bulky" is a bit of an understatment: an A flat bass horn has at least nineteen feet of tubing coiled around the standard five or six feet! When we did it in an open-air amphitheatre in Cagliari, the player (Gavin Edwards) stood on the ramparts silhouetted against the moonlight… there he was, the Black Hunter, looking impressively sinister and making this very, very eerie noise. Verdi marks it fortissimo. This is not the clear, noble sound that you find in a modern opera house or in Wagner: it’s a kind of ruined, wrecked sound that is almost supernatural - you can hear the breath and the sound rattling all through the tubing. This may come as a surprise even to Verdi scholars like Julian Budden who hear ‘no menace, only enchantment’ in this distant horn call. I wonder whether in fact Verdi was harking back to that earlier horn call that delighted Ernani’s bride but turned out to be the signal for his own death."

Verdi, Mozart and ensemble
Does the way in which Gardiner draws out orchestral colours and pushes orchestral sonorities to the edge with its attendant technical difficulties, reflect the way he approached the music with its articulate characterisation? "Very much so, because I feel that for all its contemporary wizardry the truest ancestry of Falstaff is in Mozart’s operas: Mozart was unsurpassed at interlocking voices and instruments and at using the orchestra not simply to accompany but to give the gestures of drama, to articulate it — almost to the point of giving the stage director a dig in the ribs to tell him ‘this is what should be happening on stage’.

If you look at and listen to the scores, I feel that a lot of the stage action suggests itself quite naturally in Mozart’s operas, particularly in the Da Ponte trilogy — and you don’t therefore need to invent a whole lot of extraneous stage ‘business’. The same thing surely applies to Falstaff. If you take that as a starting point, then the closeness of singer to player becomes even more important, so that they understand each other’s functions, know which line they’re doubling and how they fit into the overall texture. If you stick an orchestra in the pit, which was certainly the practice in Verdi’s day, it means that the conductor has to explain to the players how and where they fit into the texture at any given moment. But, as Verdi said to Boito, ‘if nowadays they put the orchestra in the cellar, why couldn’t we put a violin in the attic?’ Why not, indeed?

My idea was to arrange the orchestra centre-stage with the action taking place all around it, in front of it and behind it, so that at times — such as in the whirlwind dénouement to Act 2 — you can never be quite sure who are the actors, who are the players: is it the violins with their rapid bow-strokes who are rushing hither and thither, are the young lovers hidden amongst the woodwind, is Falstaff inside the hamper or the bass drum? The way Verdi manages to weave the action and music together in this his final and most carefully written of his operas, is breathtaking. Our stage director, Ian Judge, and his designer, Tim Goodchild, bravely subscribed to this premise and rose to the challenge of reflecting this detailed interpenetration by presenting it visually as well as aurally. In this way we worked together to achieve a clear articulation of the whole score (aided by Verdi’s cryptic notes and observations regarding the production) that was immediately apparent to different audiences. I hope that on our recording the listener, even without the benefit of the visual promptings of the stage action, can hear the close rapport and complicit understanding between singers and players that grew as a result of this imaginative production."

Singers and speeds
In putting together his cast Gardiner says he sought to combine "vocal allure, passion, contrast, an ability to articulate the text and to fit together in the whole ensemble: Verdi demanded that each note and syllable be given its proper due and was wont to remind his cast that Falstaff is comedy — ‘music, notes and words; no cantabili; mobility on stage and plenty of dash’." For Gardiner the four ladies, for example "needed to have four very distinctive personalities, four distinctive voice types and yet be able on occasion to sing in perfect unison and to sound credibly ecclesiastical — as in the mock litany of Act 3, Scene 2 ‘Domine fallo casto’ - or agile as in the virtuosic unaccompanied madrigal in Act 1, Scene 2, where each line has to be perfectly articulated and balanced because they are singing four different texts simultaneously". In Jean-Philippe Lafont (Falstaff) and Anthony Michaels Moore, Gardiner hit upon two seasoned Verdian baritones of perfectly contrasted weight and timbre.

Gardiner took to heart Verdi’s injunctions to Edoardo Mascheroni to whom he had entrusted the task of conducting the premiere of Falstaff in 1893: "your performance can never succeed unless you have first really worked with the singers… as conductor you should concern yourself above all with the concerto delle voci." In rehearsal Gardiner put a premium on "vocal elasticity, dynamic range, clear articulation and attack (or ‘accents’ as Verdi would have put it) — and above all on teamwork".

All through the run of performances and during the recording sessions there was a palpable sense of enjoyment within the cast, of teamwork and bonhomie, and everyone rooting for each other and a willingness to take things to the edge, to explore below the surface of the music. Each of the six scenes or tableaux were recorded in a single take, with corrections of short passages made afterwards. Speeds were generally fast — up to or in some cases exceeding Verdi’s metronome marks, justifiable in Gardiner’s view by Verdi’s own verbalisations of how he hoped and requested the score to be played. Verdi, for example, stipulated that Mistress Quickly’s narration in Act 2, Scene 2 was "to be sung as fast as possible mezza voce, in a single breath, making the syllables clear and precise." He also jotted down overall timings for Act 1, Scene 1 — fourteen minutes — and Scene 2 — fourteen and a half minutes.

Verdi — musical dramatist and cinéaste
As to the score itself, Gardiner has been keen to bring out its laughter, wit and frequent mercurial changes of mood. "One of the most brilliant things in Falstaff is the way that Verdi has of changing seamlessly from one very strong atmosphere to another totally opposed atmosphere. I suppose the most celebrated example comes at the end of Ford’s monologue (at the end of Act 2, Scene 1): you get that sinister B flat timpani roll and you think, ‘we’re surely in Otello here’. Prior to that Ford has almost choked from repressed emotion: now he lets it out, climbs to a top G and all hell is let loose. The horns emerge out of that full orchestral blaze and start on a chromatic descent in triplets and you think ‘this will last for ever’ and then in the space of just one beat, suddenly you’re into pure buffoonery and the most genial atmosphere imaginable. In comes Falstaff again like a peacock in all his finery. The dislocation is both poignant and funny, because Ford having at last emptied his sack of jealousy and sworn revenge has now abruptly to put his mask on again for the idiotic but enchanting charade in which each in turn exchange fatuous courtesies — ‘prima voi, prima voi, no, no’. That is my favourite transition but there are several others that are almost cinematic in the way Boito and Verdi achieve their purpose. One thinks of the several Nannetta–Fenton scenes — how they emerge and then dissolve, fading in and out of their surrounding textures."

Verdi’s comic masterpiece
"Falstaff is through and through a commedia — a ‘lyric comedy quite unlike any other’ as Verdi described it and one which at times is ‘red-hot to the touch’ as Boito said of Act 2. There are no tell-tale Verdian ‘oom-pah-pah’ rhythms and hardly any of the usual formulaic devices. And apart from the final fugue, the so-called closed musical forms are not really closed. Even the ‘sonata’ structure of the opening scene of Act 1 is loosened at the edges, as it were: it is just there as a sort of structural scaffolding, allowing Verdi to hang on it and to introduce around it wonderfully subversive elements; or, as Boito put it, allowing Verdi ‘to tailor the piece in your own way and with more ease’.

Throughout, Verdi is pitiless in his demands on his instrumentalists. The virtuosity he demands is both individual and collective. There is some very fast exposed writing for the strings, the woodwind and brass have many difficult hurdles to overcome, the horns especially. In Act 3 Verdi’s fairy music has a diaphanous elegance that really only Mendelssohn and Berlioz matched. Surely Verdi must have known Midsummer Night’s Dream, possibly Weber’s Oberon and bits of Romeo and Juliet such as the Queen Mab scherzo, otherwise how else could he have written Falstaff? At the other end of the spectrum is this colossal dynamic range required by Verdi — from the most powerful fortissimo when you feel that the whole orchestra can erupt when it wishes to — and the effect is so strong, it’s like tearing calico — reducing right down to the most refined, gossamer pianissimi imaginable. We have given full value to these contrasts in our recording without recourse to artificial amplification or distancing.

As an opera Falstaff gives all the impression of being spontaneous and easy, of Verdi at last having fun — and to hell with the public, with critics etc. But we should beware: he may have said he wrote it ‘to pass the time’, but in fact it took an awful lot of prodding by Boito to get him to agree to fulfil a long-cherished ambition and so ‘to finish with a mighty burst of laughter… that is to astonish the world’. There were long delays and moments when Falstaff, in Verdi’s words, ‘has probably gone to sleep for ever! Let him sleep on!’ Verdi’s own analysis of the difficulties he faced serves also as the perfect definition of the brilliant success he had in overcoming them: ‘to sketch the characters in a few strokes, to weave the plot, to extract the juice from the enormous Shakespearean orange without letting the useless pips slip into the little glass, to write with colour, with clarity, with brevity, to delineate the musical plan of the scene so that there results an organic unity which is a piece of music and yet is not, to make the joyous comedy live from beginning to end, to make it live with a natural and infectious gaiety, is very, very difficult; and it must appear very, very easy. Courage and forward march!’"

[ To find complete information on Falstaff and the world's greatest Verdi catalogue, visit http://www.viva-verdi.com ]