-- A man who knows a thing or two about, you know, things
A man staggers up to an inn . . .
The exterior of the inn, which along with its name bears the motto: "HONNY SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE." A bench beside the door. It's the hour of twilight.
Our man is seated on the bench, meditating. Then he stirs himself, pounds on the bench with a big fist, and turning toward the interior of the inn calls to the host.
by Ken
Even if we make clear that by "an operatic bad day" I don't mean a bad day for the audience (of which I often feel I've experienced not just my own share but a whole bunch of other people's) but a bad day for the main character(s) onstage, it may seem oxymoronic to be talking about "operatic bad days." Aren't they mostly pretty rotten? Isn't this what opera is usually about? Isn't it a significant part of what we normally think it means for something to be "operatic"?
The kind of bad day I'm thinking of, though, isn't just a day when everything seems to go wrong, even disastrously wrong. I'm thinking of the kind of day when the victim realizes that he/she has played a major role in setting off the unfortunate chain of events, and as a result, despite a certain lack of totally accurate perspective, owing to the inevitable bleakness of spirit, sees truth(s) stretching out as far as the imagination can see.
The part about the victim realizing that he/she has played a major role in setting off the unfortunate chain of events clearly excludes out companion today. In Sir John Falstaff's imagination nothing is his fault, and never mind that it was his own crackpot scheme to seduce one or maybe two of the merry wives of Windsor, not even for libidinous satisfaction but to tap into their not-so-merry husbands' coffers to provide himself with a bit of working capital, blindly falling into separate traps set by both the women and men of Windsor, that resulted in his being dumped unceremoniously into the Thames in that giant basket full of rank laundry.
SIR JOHN'S FEELING OF VICTIMHOOD CERTAINLY
IS EPIC, THOUGH -- RUNNING DEEP AND, ER, WIDE
And he can't even imagine that things are going to get a good deal worse before they get better. Let's listen, starting with the admittedly audio-challenged English-language performance we already heard, followed by a performance from 1949 by the same baritone, now in Italian, in which the bright gleam of 1944 seems to have developed into a considerably more robust sound.
VERDI: Falstaff: Act III, Scene 1 opening
"Wicked world. -- There's no more virtue. -- Everything's in decline." Olafur Sigurdarson as Falstaff, Opera Colorado, May 2018
A SQUARE. On the right, the exterior of the Garter Inn, with its sign bearing the motto: "HONNY SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE." A bench beside the door. It's the hour of twilight.
FALSTAFF is seated on the bench, meditating. Then he stirs himself, pounds on the bench with a big fist, and turning toward the interior of the inn calls to the host.
FALSTAFF: Hey! Innkeeper!
[Returning to his meditating]
Thieving world! Villainous world!
Wicked world!
Innkeeper! A tankard of mulled wine!
[The host comes out of the inn, takes the order, and reenters.]
I, then, have lived so many years as a daring and adroit
knight, only to be borne off in a basket
and thrown into the water with ghastly linen,
as they do with cats and their blind kittens.
If this swollen belly had not floated for me.,
( should certainly have drowned. -- An awful death. --
I'm bloated with water.
Wicked world. -- There's no more virtue. -- Everything's in decline.
Go, old John, go, go on your way; tramp on
until you die -- then true manhood
will have vanished from the world.
What a horrible black day!
Heaven help me! -- I'm getting too fat. -- I have gray hairs.
[The host returns with a large tankard of mulled wine. He puts the tankard on the bench and reenters the inn.]
Let's pour a little wine into the water of the Thames.
[He sips, savoring the wine. He unbuttons his waistcoat and drinks again, becoming reanimated little by little. ]
Good. -- To drink fine wine and relax in the sun
is pleasant! - Good wine dispels somber fancies
of depression, brightens the eye and mind; from the lips
it rises to the brain and there awakens the little fashioner
of trills, a black cricket that chirps inside the tipsy man.
Every fiber in the heart throbs; the merry air flashes at the trill.
and a trifling madness unbalances the cheerful world,
and the trill invades the world!!!
-- translation (mostly) by Gwynn Morris,
for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
[in English] Leonard Warren (b), Sir John Falstaff; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham, cond. Live performance, Mar. 11, 1944
Leonard Warren (b), Sir John Falstaff; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. Live performance, Feb. 26, 1949
Casting Falstaff is always a problem, since the role clearly seems to call for more weight than a standard-issue baritone. Here are two good ones -- Giuseppe Taddei's 1950 recording probably gives me more pleasure than any other on records (even with the mad dash conductor Mario Rossi makes of this monologue). And from the conducting standpoint, Toscanini's brio, so smartly carried out by the NBC Symphony, has special qualities too.
Giuseppe Taddei (b), Sir John Falstaff; RAI Symphony Orchestra, Turin, Mario Rossi, cond. Cetra, broadcast performance recorded 1950
Giuseppe Valdengo (b), Sir John Falstaff; NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA-BMG, broadcast performance, Apr. 8, 1950
When the Met restored Falstaff to the repertory in the 1963-64 season, with Franco Zeffirelli directing and Leonard Bernstein -- not much thought of then as an operatic conductor -- making a triumphant house debut (he would subsequently make his Vienna State Opera debut with Falstaff, and there make a recording for CBS which has some problems but also quite a lot going for it), the title role was split between two very different sorts of singer, its master basso buffo, Fernando Corena (fresh from perfomances of the role in Holland) and another very good standard-type baritone.
Fernando Corena (bs), Sir John Falstaff; Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. Live performance from the Hague, June 20, 1963
Anselmo Colzani (b), Sir John Falstaff; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Live performance, Mar. 21, 1964
Both of Georg Solti's Falstaff recordings give us something a bit more in the title role: Geraint Evans's thicker-textured baritone and José van Dam's lovely soft-grained bass-baritone. More importantly, both recordings feature Solti's deeply sympathetic understanding of the opera -- and the cast of the 1963 RCA-Decca version remains unsurpassed.
Geraint Evans (b), Sir John Falstaff; RCA Italiana Opera Orchestra, Georg Solti, cond. RCA-Decca, recorded summer 1963
José van Dam (bs-b), Sir John Falstaff; Berlin Philharmonic, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded live in concert, Mar. 6, 8, 1993
Finally, I figure some readers will feel cheated without something a little less ancient. Okay, here's something.
Bryn Terfel (b), Sir John Falstaff; Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded April 2001
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