Giuseppe Verdi was in his late 70s and thinking about retirement when his librettist Arrigo Boito suggested they make an opera from The Merry Wives of Windsor. Verdi had set two plays by Shakespeare before – Macbeth, which was one of his first great successes in the 1840s, and Otello, which he completed in 1887, at the age of 74.
Verdi was initially reluctant. He worried that he was too old. He had given up on adapting King Lear, an idea that had occupied him for many years – but had wanted to write a comedy, and Boito persuaded him. The story of two women from Windsor running rings around Shakespeare’s great comic character, Sir John Falstaff, was too tempting to resist.
Verdi and Boito were always looking for the most arresting way to tell the story, and if that meant taking liberties, so be it. Shakespeare’s Othello begins in Venice, where we are introduced to the characters and hear that Desdemona has eloped with a mysterious Moorish general. The operatic version opens with Othello’s ship caught in a powerful storm and onlookers watching from the shore – the darkest point of the night, the world inhabited by the evil Iago. Although Verdi’s opera Falstaff is a very different piece, it also throws us straight in. Boito cuts the cast right down and there’s no overture: we’re immediately into a scene in Windsor where Falstaff is drinking with his companions, concocting a plan to make his fortune by playing off the two wives, Mistresses Page and Ford, against each other. It’s totally different from anything Verdi had written before. Not all of it is The Merry Wives, either: Sir John’s great sarcastic aria on honour, L’Onore! Ladri, derives from Henry IV, Part One.
There’s a real lightness to the way Verdi writes the music – though this Falstaff is still fat (in letters the composer called him pancione, or “pot belly”), he’s not a buffoon. In a way, that’s part of the joke – he’s a knight, and knows what elegance and refinement should be. But although Falstaff is a comic opera, there’s a huge amount of melancholy here, too.
Sir John is a man of 55, not elderly, but he seems to know that life is over. There’s a moment at the beginning of act three I particularly love: Sir John has been cajoled to hide in a laundry basket, then thrown into the Thames, a very funny and hectic scene. He’s drying off, recovering himself from the humiliation, and Verdi gives him a solo, Ehi! Taverniere! He’s calling to the innkeeper for wine to warm himself up. “Tutto declina,” he sings. “Everything is crumbling.” It’s full of regret and nostalgia; he knows that his followers will desert him. It’s hard not to feel that Verdi, who was 80 when he finished the piece, was in some ways writing about himself. It’s as if he’s saying farewell.
When we staged a new production of Falstaff at the Royal Opera House, London, in 2012, the director, Robert Carsen, decided to set it in the 1950s instead of the 1590s: a very English world, with the Garter Inn as a hotel and Ambrogio Maestri, who was our Falstaff, wearing a tweed jacket. Mistress Ford had a wonderful kitchen that was coloured bright peach. We made it funny, but not too much so. I liked it when audiences smiled rather than laughed. There’s bitter kind of tenderness in the piece. That’s the real message.
People in England are understandably proud of Shakespeare and think of Sir John being quintessentially English, but as far as we know, Shakespeare based The Merry Wives of Windsor on an Italian source. The Renaissance writer Ser Giovanni writes a similar story of a woman who gets her own back on a man who is two-timing her. Shakespeare’s Falstaff happened to be born in England – but he’s Italian as well.
