Learning to love Falstaff

It’s taken me a shockingly long time to realise how great Verdi’s Falstaff is, and I still wouldn’t agree that it is his greatest opera, which fully paid-up Verdians tend to think. It may be a measure of my progress, though, that I got a lot of pleasure out of the new production at Covent Garden, by Robert Carsen, even while recognising that it is a shallow, wilfully unsearching account of a work much of whose magic is extraordinarily subtle, not only for Verdi, but for anyone.

Carsen’s production, and the musical side, too, are on a level with the Shakespeare play from which Falstaff derives, which is agreed by everyone to be a potboiler. Verdi and his librettist Boito were interested in the class aspects of the intrigues and humiliations and triumphs of the characters, but still more interested in Falstaff’s anguished ageing, and in his understanding, like Wilde after him, that the tragedy of age is not that we grow old but that we remain young.