STAGE AND SCREEN
OPERA
The Latest Verdi
BY a happy chance it was possible to hear on consecutive evenings last week Verdi's two last operas, his tragic master- piece, Otello, at Sadler's Wells, and his comic masterpiece, Falstaff, broadcast from Rome. It is usual to regard these final creations of that amazing old brain as being more com- plex and more difficult for an audience to grasp than the popular works of his middle period. And so, in one sense, they are. The long melodies, square-cut to an eight-bar pattern, that could be seized by the memory at once and carried away from the opera-house, had given place to a more flexible and subtle style. The tunes no longer begin and end with an obvious signal ; they tend to melt into one another, and the distinction between recitative and aria grows fainter until in Falstaff the music becomes a continuous arioso, the melodies dissolving and reshaping in new forms with a swiftness that keeps the most athletic brain always panting at the heels of the music. And there is, too, a new complexity of orchestral texture, which is the necessary counterpart of this more symphonic style with its brief themes.
But, from another point of view, these last operas of Verdi are of a great simplicity. If you look at the vocal line, you will find that it contains an astonishingly large proportion of monotoned phrases—that is, repetitions of a single note. The most moving passage in Otello's own music, "Dio mi potevi scagliar" (Boito's version of " Had it pleased heaven to try me with affliction "), consists throughout its three verses of a declamation on the tonic and dominant until the last line is reached, when the voice rises, instead of falling, in an astonish- ing modulation that never fails to affect the hearer however little it may surprise him. For the rest, the melodies rarely consist of anything more elaborate than an arpeggio followed by a phrase of less widely spaced notes, as in the " Willow Song " of Desdemona, whose " Ave Maria " is another study in monotone—as one might say in monochrome.
How, then, is it that these operas give such a strong impression of individuality in characterisation? The result is achieved partly by a close attention to exactness in declama- tion—that is, the precise accord of accent and of rise or fall in the notes with the meaning of the words—so that the singer, provided he is faithful to his text and respects the dynamic markings, can hardly fail to produce automatically the right emphasis and tone of voice. In part, and perhaps in the greater part, it is due to the subtlety of the orchestral colouring. With the exception of Mozart, no composer has produced scoring so translucent in texture, and to this lim- pidity must be added a sure sense of the colour required by the dramatic action or the character to be depicted. Verdi may use exactly the same means to portray the ugliness of lago's soul and the more venial villainy of Falstaff. Shakes, appoggia- turas and sharply defined rhythms of detached notes (e.g., in " Va vecchio John ") are the common characteristics of their music. But no one would mistake for a moment the harsh cynicism of the lean Iago with Falstaff's paunchy chuckles. And it is the instrumentation that does the trick, just as it helps to turn the triumphant march of " Va, vecchio John," in Act II into the dirge to which those words are repeated after Sir John's ardour has been cooled in the Thames.
The performance of such music demands an exceptional degree of care and of intelligence on the part of its inter- preters. The Sadler's Wells Company is to be congratulated not merely upon their courage in undertaking a new produc- tion of Otello in present circumstances, but upon achieving what is, taken all round, the best performance of it that has been seen in London for a very long time. Miss Cross's voice and style are ideally suited to Desdemona's music. Mr. Llewellyn is a most intelligent Iago and, though not quite convincing as an incarnation of evil, does not fall into the error of making the damnable faces of conventional villainy. And Mr. Wright, most noble in aspect, has all the makings of a great Otello. The chorus work was, perhaps inevitably, less good than it used to be, and the orchestral playing could do with more suppleness, and more light and shade. The new scenery is the weakest element in an excel- lent production, which should certainly attract the public in
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