Half measures

Falstaff
Glyndebourne

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Jawad Iqbal

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There was an interesting, startled article in the Independent a couple of weeks ago in which the writer recorded that, contrary to the expectations of everyone in ‘the media’, as the credit crisis squeezes harder, its victims, instead of turning to ever more feather-brained sources of enjoyment and consolation, are bewilderingly trying an escape into seriousness, with ‘heavy’ plays and operas, long taxing books, etc., being what they are headed for, rather than the jolly irrelevant frolics that they might have been expected to favour. Really that should have come as no surprise, since seriousness or anyway a plausible imitation of it is so much more absorbing, and therefore agreeably demanding, than tripping the light fantastic and driving all over the country in search of forgotten operettas set in Ruritania. ‘Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment,’ as Samuel Johnson remarked, with characteristic casual penetration, and it is a lesson that patrons seem in some measure to have learned, even if managements and artistic administrators haven’t.

That was a preamble to thinking about how successful Glyndebourne’s new production of Verdi’s Falstaff is. How serious a work is it? Is its message that all the world’s a joke, the message purveyed by the final fugue, something we are meant to believe or something the inhabitants of Boito–Verdi’s opera sing to cheer themselves up, after many of them have made fools of themselves? It’s a question one expects a production at least to try to answer, since this work is susceptible to immensely different interpretations, from Toscanini’s brutal-cum-gossamer brilliance to the pondered, strenuously sad Giulini — and that is only the musical side. Richard Jones, atypically, has decided to sit on the fence, so that there are few laughs in his production, until after the interval, when the audience’s reaction was gales of laughter and even applause in response to pretty well everything.