In 1887, after 16 years of silence, Verdi presented his work Otello at La Scala in Milan, which immediately became a tremendous success. Riding on the wave of this success, composer and poet Arrigo Boito started trying, with caution and diplomacy, to convince the old Maestro to write another opera. It took another couple of years before Boito mustered his courage and sent a draft of a new libretto to Verdi, based on Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. The bait was well chosen: Verdi did not resist to the temptation of putting his art to the test in his comedy Falstaff, after a lifetime of works dedicated to tragic stories and devastating passions (his only previous attempt to humour, Un giorno di regno in 1840, had been a resounding fiasco).
The character of Falstaff was ideally suited to Verdi, with his mixture of tragic and comic aspects, and his cynical philosophy; Verdi’s last opera finally premiered in 1893, with great success, the crowning element of the incredible career of the composer.
Mario Martone’s production, at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, moves the action to the modern day, in a city which may very well be Berlin itself, with its graffiti, shady clubs and anachronistic characters. Sir John Falstaff becomes an ageing free spirit, spending his time in a sort of community centre – “Garter Inn” – together with fishy characters with alternative lifestyles, while the merry wives belong to a class of nouveau riches. In this interpretation, the tension between the decadent aristocracy and the rising bourgeois society is lost: the only driver for the events seems to be a diffuse ennui plaguing the rich middle class, so that Falstaff’s shenanigans become a welcome distraction from utter boredom. This actually worked fairly well in telling the story, and even the last scene, set outside a BDSM club, with all the characters dressed in latex (costumes by Ursula Patzak), was engaging and as believable as any Falstaff’s finale ever was.
Zubin Mehta conducted the Berlin Staatskapelle after Daniel Barenboim cancelled (probably because of another commitment: the concert for the Holocaust Memorial Day); he was greeted with great affection by the audience, and gave us a sparkling, brilliant reading of Verdi's magnificent score. The orchestration in Falstaff is much more than a tapestry for the singers: the instruments converse with the voices, they laugh, they mock, at times they almost seem to gesticulate. The Staatskapelle was superb in this rendering of every nuance of the score, and Mehta was awarded great cheers at the curtain call. (It was kind of funny to spot Barenboim attending the performance from his usual stage box.)