Falstaff
WNO
Paradise Moscow
Royal Academy of Music
Verdi’s last opera Falstaff is also for many people his greatest. I went to see it in Cardiff this week, having heard Radio Three’s broadcast of his previous opera Otello from the New York Met a couple of evenings before. Otello I found, as I always do in a good performance, and that was, thanks to Semyon Bychkov’s conducting, an outstanding one, a work which puts me into a greater state of agony about the limitless human capacity for self-torment than almost any other. Falstaff, also admirably performed, left me, as again it nearly always does, impressed by its brilliance but otherwise unaffected. It too concerns human folly, but also resilience; Falstaff is what would nowadays be called more emotionally intelligent than Otello. Despite his grotesque vanity, he realises when he has made a fool of himself, and without, so far as we can tell, any resolution to be more careful in future, points out that everyone else is a fool too, and at least he can make a jest of it.
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