A new appointment with the Opera Season of the Fondazione Teatro Petruzzelli: Friday 9 October at 20.30:XNUMX pm the premiere of Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi will be performed, directed by Mariano Bauduin.
Renato Palumbo dirigerà l’Orchestra del Petruzzelli e il Coro del Teatro (preparato dal maestro Fabrizio Cassi).
The sets of the beautiful production of the Fondazione Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi in Trieste are signed by maestro Nicola Rubertelli, the costumes by Zaira De Vincentiis, the lighting design by Daniele Naldi.
The opera will be brought to life by Carlo Lepore (Sir John Falstaff 9, 11, 13, 15 October), Filippo Polinelli (Sir John Falstaff 10, 14 October), Damiano Salerno (Ford 9, 11, 13, 15 October), Biagio Pizzuti (Ford 10, 14 October), (Cameron Becker Fenton 9, 11, 13, 15 October), (Francesco Marsiglia Fenton 10, 14 October), Christian Collia (Doctor Caius), Saverio Fiore (Bardolfo), Dongho Kim (Pistol), Erika Grimaldi (Mrs Alice Ford 9, 11, 13, 15 October), Angela Nisi (Mrs Alice Ford 10, 14 October), Giuliana Gianfaldoni (Nannetta 9, 11, 13, 15 October), (Veronica Granatiero Nannetta 10, 14 October), Enkelejda Shkoza (Mrs Quickly 9, 11, 13, 15 October), (Cristina Melis Mrs Quickly 10, 14 October), Daniela Innamorati (Mrs Meg Page), Paolo Romano (The Garter Innkeeper) and Tony Marzolla (Robin).
Verdi's masterpiece with a libretto by Arrigo Boito is based on William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and was first performed at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 9 February 1893.
The Conversation on the Opera Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi curated by Dinko Fabris will be available online on the website www.fondazionepetruzzelli.it, on the Fondazione Petruzzelli Youtube channel and on the Teatro's Facebook page.
Falstaff will be repeated at the Petruzzelli Theatre on Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 October at 18.00 pm, Tuesday 13 and Wednesday 14 October at 20.30 pm and Thursday 15 October at 20.30 pm.
The Petruzzelli Theatre Box Office is open continuously from 11.00:19.00 to 080.975.28.10:XNUMX, from Monday to Saturday. (Information: XNUMX).
NOTES and SEMIPRECEPTS,
in counterpoint to deceive and not be deceived. By Mariano Bauduin
What Verdi's melodramatic production and Shakespeare's theatrical production have in common is without a doubt the popular component, meaning by popular the intent to address one's own language and artistic form to a complex and broad panorama of signs and meanings: the sensation of what one witnesses, perceiving even what one does not understand directly and intellectually.
The audiences of the Globe and the audiences of Busseto, the monologues of Henry V and the aria of Manrico, the battles of Agincourt and the Va' pensiero, could be imitated in taverns, inns, common rooms and more.
The conspicuous band production of Verdi's themes is a very important sign of what has been said. And, consider that Shakespeare's theatre has often enjoyed oratory reductions for amateur dramatic companies for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; I recall the translations in melodramatic style by Carcano or Maffei, who referred precisely to the style of Verdi's librettos by Francesco Maria Piave or Salvatore Cammarano.
Verdi often turned his attention to the Shakespearean world of Macbeth, Othello, Falstaff, and an unfinished project on King Lear; what I wanted to activate with this production is a directorial reading that takes all these elements into account: the stage space is an imaginary Elizabethan stage that rises in a fantasy forest, the walls outline the geometry of the Globe Theatre with inconsistent silk, as if the Globe Theatre had appeared like Merlin's castle in Arthur's deeds, from the clouds, and would return to them after the performance; the characters, like old comedians, act out the comedy by activating ancient patterns of carnival farce, or popular representation, all in a style obtained from the fusion of late sixteenth-century and nineteenth-century lines.
The work Falstaff may represent a point of fusion between the plains of the Po and those of the Thames, but why did Shakespeare decide to dedicate three works (Henry IV part one, Henry V and Merry Wives of Windsor) to the character of Jack, or John, Falstaff?, he knew that the character was emblematic, the result of the concealment of a certain Oldcastle – who really existed, and a twisted personality; founder of the sect of the Lullards, dedicated to the pleasure of life, and critical of all the sumptuous pomp and circumstance of the clergy, they had drawn upon themselves the wrath of the Catholic and British church, so much so that they were placed in the order of heretics and burned at the stake. Oldcastle, a corrupt and ambiguous character, represented vices and impurities to be redeemed. Yet, Shakespeare does not make him an unpleasant and guilty character, even if he is an example of outrage to the noble soul and the greatness of ideals, rather, he places him alongside the young Harry, before becoming King Henry V, with a very specific purpose: to give the young King a contact with the lower classes of the English people, a relationship with thieves, swindlers, people of ill repute to whom the young sovereign would appear to know the misfortunes of others and therefore ready to make the right decisions for every circumstance. A people trusts its king, when it knows that its king could be among them.
Giuseppe Verdi's attitude at the end of his career is incredible, in 1897 when Falstaff debuted, the theatre had to deal with the new communication tool: the Lumiere brothers invented the cinema. The aggregating function that melodrama had received a jolt, lost some foundations and discovered that art was a peacock feather, light, fascinating, but unstable and precarious. Verdi understood this and, as if he had to begin a new compositional path, he became a young music student again, a young composer and opened himself to new forms and new expressions, composed Falstaff and, with the help of Boito, developed a subject that was no longer only historical, but extremely poetic and full of meanings, many of which were ambiguous and not at all realistic.
For this new production I replaced the character of the page with the figure of the young Harry, while the innkeeper with that of the landlady; emblematic characters because in the Shakespearean trilogy they are the two poles of Falstaff; emblematic is the farewell that the landlady makes in the prologue of Henry V, she tells us of his death after the King broke his heart by brutally sending him away. In Verdi's opera this sense of death airs, but also a melancholic consideration of life and its precariousness: the honor that makes a man great and a sovereign immense, the "providence for the warriors" is contrasted with the concreteness of John Falstaff, can honor give you a leg? No! Or an arm? No! Or take away the pain of a wound? No!, the impalpable honor that is a luxury for the nobility and the aristocracy for John Falstaff is the abjuration of hypocrisy and lies, he teaches it to the young Harry by showing him the humanity that deceives and cheats even just for fun, and he relies on this game as the last lesson on what a King should be and do. Falstaff belongs to a season of life that is not old age, he is not Don Pasquale, he does not delude himself that he still pleases women because women still like him for all his lust, because he is "alive", he is wildly alive, this pleases women, but also men, poor people and Kings. The pact between Falstaff and King Henry is the tolerance of human wickedness, Harry/Henry is the choice to be neither good nor bad in order to be just, and to do this one must know wickedness and goodness in all possible forms. Falstaff, with his abdominal grandeur, has the purity of the stars, the stars that mark the paths of unwary sailors, the stars that describe the fate of human beings, the stars that tell the stories of the gods, the stars that fall, taking with them the desires of mortals.
Another very important element is the kingdom of the fairies, guardians of loyalty and defenders of chastity. The curious scenes of fairies and goblins contain references to Queen Elizabeth, the Order of the Garter and her Chapel in Windsor. The fairies are used to indicate a moral of chastity: they punish Falstaff for his lust, they are champions of modesty, of a chaste queen and of her pure chivalry; they have the task of working a white magic to safeguard Her and her chivalric order from evil influences. It is clear that the Italian equivalent was to be found in the popular derivation, and this can be found in the beliefs of the Tonali mountains and the Friulian area and of Venezia-Giulia; a panorama linked to the rites and beliefs of the benandanti: farmers and shepherds who, put on trial by the Inquisition tribunal from the 500th to the 600th century, told of Sabbath rites and ancient armed fights between sorcerers and witches to defend the crops; clearly seasonal rites of passage linked to ancient beliefs, yet the anthropological elements – as often happens – create correspondences between geographically distant but culturally very similar cultures. It is worth dwelling on the element of flying with sorghum brooms, clearly hallucinogenic trips, but which activated battles, or armed dances, between “benandanti” men equipped with fennel branches and “witch” women equipped with a sorghum broom, with the aim of wishing well for the plantation and survival of a rural community. Thus in England the rites linked to fairies and nocturnal elves celebrated the seasonal passages linked to chivalric worlds and paladin deeds, such as the events of King Arthur and his knights taken as emblems of purity and good government, something that Elizabeth, and James I later, would use to spread their image of divine sovereign and pure queen.
Falstaff brings all this to the attention of the young King, making himself a sacrificial victim; the narrative plan of this show tells these elements almost as if we were in the last night of John Falstaff, who, in the grip of fever, as in a nightmare, relives all the moments of joy, but also of fear, spent with the young King.
I wanted to tell the story of Falstaff's death because I believe that in it we can assume the true "Requiem" of the imagination, both of Verdi and of Shakespeare, the bard was not a critical philosopher, but a poet of the human heart, and with the death of Falstaff we are made participants in the death of innocence and the innocence of death, he made a holier end than if he were a baptized child, says the landlady in telling of his death. Verdi decides to conclude the opera with an extremely academic form, the composition of the great fugue "Tutto nel mondo è burla", it serves to activate an immediate freezing of the dramatic action, everything can no longer move, the rigidity of the execution forces us to the immobility of the characters, this to want to create a final fresco within which to give the synthesis of the entire theatrical journey, they really seem to be the last active ones before death, perhaps the death of Falstaff, perhaps the death of innocence, or perhaps the death of what from cynically distant becomes profoundly close to each of us, so much so that in place of Falstaff we could find humanity, with all its contradictions and with all its very high sensations.
Sursum corda… everyone fooled!
Mariano Bauduin
Article published on 6 October 2020 - 12:41
