SFO Offers Verdi’s Only Successful Comedy

Alice Ford (Ainhoa Arteta) and Mistress Quickly (Meredith Arwady) hiding Falstaff (Bryn Terfel) in the laundry basket that eventually gets thrown into the Thames (courtesy of San Francisco Opera)

Over the course of his career, Giuseppe Verdi composed only two comic operas. The first of these was very early, the second of the 29 he completed. Un giorno di regno (a one-day reign) was a failure when it was first performed in 1840 and almost put Verdi off of composing any more operas. The other comedy was his final opera, Falstaff; and, like its immediate predecessor, Otello, it set a libretto by Arrigo Boito, who had a keen sense of how much to rely on Shakespeare and how much to support operatic expectations. The Shakespeare sources were drawn primarily from The Merry Wives of Windsor. However, there is a brief excerpt (in my Examiner.com article, I called it “a passing out-of-context nod”) taken from the “honor” monologue in the first part of Henry IV.

This weekend’s streamed Opera is ON offering presented by the San Francisco Opera (SFO) is Frank Zamacona’s video account of the last time the company performed this opera in a series of eight performances in 2013 between October 8 and November 2. The production, created by Olivier Tambosi, was owned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago. SFO Music Director Nicola Luisotti conducted. Bass-baritone Bryn Terfel gave a totally engaging larger-than-life account of the title character. However, Boito did not allow the “merry wives,” Alice Ford and Meg Page, to be upstaged; and they were given vividly engaging accounts by soprano Ainhoa Arteta and mezzo Renée Rapier, an Adler Fellow at the time. Similarly, contralto Meredith Arwady held her own as Mistress Quickly, never allowing herself to be upstaged in her confrontations with Falstaff.

Among the lesser parts, I was particularly impressed with bass Andrea Silvestrelli’s treatment of Falstaff’s henchman, Pistola (Pistol in Shakespeare’s text). Over the course of the decades I have spent going to SFO performances, I have encountered Silvestrelli frequently. I have consistently enjoyed the ways in which he highlights the sinister qualities of the assassin Sparafucile in Verdi’s Rigoletto; and his approach to Hagen in Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, which can be seen in the last of the four operas to be presented by Opera is ON next month, is one of the most informed that I have encountered. In that context I have consistently welcomed the few opportunities I have had to see him do comedy. He does not quite steal any scenes as Pistola, but he still manages to draw attention to the character!

Finally, one cannot overlook the dynamite account of Luisotti’s work in the orchestra pit. The second article I wrote for Examiner.com in 2013 shifted attention from the stage to the pit, pointing out the highly imaginative approaches to instrumentation that advanced the emotional context of the narrative as richly as the vocal work did. Indeed, this was one of the few occasions when I felt members of the orchestra needed to be called out by name. Since I still feel that way, those instrumentalists again deserve recognition: Shawn Jones on cimbasso, Rufus Olivier on bassoon, and Stephanie McNab on piccolo.