Falstaff will come to Teatr Wielki - Opera Narodowa this month. Performances will run April 17-26.
Verdi's last work is, in popular tradition, a cheerful comedy about a fat drunkard who cynically seduces two women and is severely punished by them. However, when one carefully traces Shakespeare's original and thoroughly analyzes the extraordinary wealth of musical motifs, one finds the second dark bottom of the mysterious work that the aged, fulfilled composer consciously wrote as his farewell to his enormous body of work, his own impressive life and a world that he assessed with a philosophical wink as the creator's painful joke on people and their actions. Reaching this other bottom and showing its top-notch artistic beauty seems worth moving away from the stereotype of the main character, who is supposedly only concerned with using the remnants of the pleasures of the table and bed and fairground clowning.
It is worth showing who Falstaff really is and why he became the way we see him in his stage adventures. Therefore, in the performance, the director proposed a kind of prologue with music from the overture of one of Verdi's first operas, in which he tells the story of the tragic end for Falstaff of his cheerful and happy friendship with the prince „Henry”, who suddenly becomes King Henry V and brutally removes his guardian and mentor from royal life. Many of us have experienced an episode where a streak of joy and success ends in an instant, throwing us out and condemning us to loneliness, poverty and lack of prospects.
The moment when Falstaff finds himself on the verge of despair and death is shown. It is possible that after being pushed away like this by the man he loved, he decided to drink himself to death. This banal plan is put into practice by his conviction that the best place is the brothel he has taken up residence in among fallen people like him. He is angry and bitter. His sense of humor is scathing and aggressive. The producers avoid the image of an honest guy to use unusual motifs that recur constantly in the orchestra. But Falstaff's plan becomes complicated when he witnesses the pure love of two young lovers. Suddenly he understands that it is not prostitutes who are the solace at the hour of death, but love in the arms of a beloved, faithful woman.
The idea of seducing the one who arouses his most vivid feelings becomes a trap not only because his chosen one is married, but also because of his own clever decision to book an understudy just in case. When women communicate with each other, the clever seducer only heads towards defeat and, as a result, towards death, which he encounters on the border between real reality and drunken maligna. There, in a final reflection on his farewell to the world, he comes to the conclusion that everyone is being deceived and the world is a grim joke.
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