Falstaff

Verdi, Guiseppe

album cover

A For-the-Ages Pairing of Composer and Conductor

As a young cellist, Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957) participated in the 1887 premiere of Giuseppe Verdi's Otello. Upon hearing Falstaff, which was first performed in 1893, Toscanini sent Verdi a famous three-word note: "Grazie, grazie, grazie." The two became acquainted, and as Toscanini's reputation as a charismatic conductor grew, they inevitably discussed music. This association gives Toscanini's Verdi recordings a special straight-from-the-source resonance—we're hearing a keen interpreter who has firsthand knowledge of the composer's intent.

The lively, intensely animated Falstaff is Verdi's final opera; like its predecessor Otello, it recasts Shakespeare for operatic voices. But unlike Otello, its libretto conflates elements of two works, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, into one story—a comedy about a fat drunken knight, Falstaff, who concocts a scheme to get money out of two of Windsor's more attractive widows. The narrative isn't riveting, but the music easily transcends that shortcoming—this is Verdi communicating in melodic bursts and brief musical poems that convey the essence of a character or a situation with stunning concision. Where Otello is riddled with devices the composer used before, Falstaff has a pronounced boldness, and a level of invention (audible in the contrapuntal exchanges between voices and orchestra) that extends well beyond his previous works.

In the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians entry on Toscanini, this recording is singled out as a monument to the conductor's "vitality and interpretive insight." Listen first to the elements that are directly under Toscanini's control—the brisk pace, the clean textures, the sudden power-surge crescendos that rise from the orchestra's back row. There's no dithering on his stage, and no excessive ornamentation; even this lighthearted opera is serious business. Then listen to the way Toscanini supports the singers, using precise orchestral colors to throw contrast onto Verdi's soaring vocal lines. The maestro with the photographic memory doesn't steamroll through the score; he frames it in absolute terms, so that a casual listener might discern something of its structure.

That authority is one reason Toscanini cuts such a towering figure in twentieth-century music. He was known to be fearsome in rehearsal, a stickler for detail. Still, musicians loved him. Spend time with this and you'll hear why. He was forever pushing his orchestra toward ecstatic peaks of music-making that aren't always accessible to mortals.

Genre: Opera
Released: 1950, RCA
Key Tracks: Act 1: "Falstaff m'ha canzonetta"; Act 2: "È sogno? o realtà?"; Act 3: "Epilogue."
Catalog Choice: Rigoletto, Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, London Symphony Orchestra (Richard Bonynge, cond.).
Next Stop: Johannes Brahms: The Four Symphonies, NBC Symphony Orchestra (Arturo Toscanini, cond.)
After That: Jean Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2, NBC Symphony Orchestra (Leopold Stokowski, cond.).
Book Pages: 833–834