MUSI C
Europe Agog
rr HE new Falstaff at the Staatsoper in Vienna I has Europe mildly agog for three main reasons. In the first place, it is a Luchino Visconti production, with sets and costumes ascribed jointly to him and another, Ferdinando Scarfiotti. Secondly, the name part, sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, marks a further incursion into the Italian repertory by an actor-singer whose art was once thought by some of us to be ineluctably Germanic. Thirdly, the conductor is Mr. Leonard Bernstein, that small, dapper typhoon from New York. Mr. Bernstein con- ducts from memory. Every night an anonymous admirer sends him red roses. These are placed before him on the desk where the score should be —or usually is. I would not go so far as to say that Mr. Bernstein occasionally reads thorns into Verdi's music. What I will say is that his top speeds and orchestral explosions. aggravated by the Staatsoper's rowdy acoustics, not only abraded my own predilections, they also made it harder than ever for four women and five men to get their words and notes across the footlights in the Garden nonet. a notoriously dicey number.
Even so, Mr. Bernstein at his best was the best of an uneven night. When his tempi were not, let us say. contentious, he put a rare patina on Verdi's surfaces or veiled them with a splendid poetic haze. I do not remember ever to have heard the fairy music of the closing scene more finely or lovingly tissued. It was hard to credit that this touch and handling were by the same baton which, earlier on, had made brass and drums go off like fowling-pieces. With Mr. Bernstein and his roses in the pit were the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The woodwind produced for him details and pointings, all of them valid and delightful, which I have• never noticed or encountered before. Time and time again, in tranquil pages as well as glittering ones, the string tone was of the sort .1 often dream about but am too prudent to expect.
Now to Mr. Fischer-Dieskau. All the usual things—sagging paunch, bald head, curly tufts over the ears—had been skilfully taken care of. The difficulty is that it takes more than these to make a Falstaff. Most of the time Mr. Fischer-Dieskau gave me the impression of a grotesque, overgrown boy. Not so much a wag and a rake as an incurable japer. It is true that after the buck basket disaster his lament over the world's wickedness had dark and potent tinges straight from the lieder platform. And I
shall not readily forget his semi-senile circlings around Herne's oak—a finely imagined stroke
of pathos. But this remains a Falstaff of unre- solved extremes and contrasts. As a character he doesn't hang together. Nor did he, on the night I was there, altogether sing himself into the part. Both 'Quand'ero paggio' and his open- ing of the final fugue misfired because sung with exaggeratedly featherweight tone. For the rest, of
course,' his timbre was often rich, his phrasing eloquent. Is there another baritone in the world who can make a falsetto line so luscious and at the same time so funny?
Of the other singers, several are pre- established and admired in Falstaff roles. The Mistress Quickly of Regina Resnik is com- pounded of irony, plebeian digs in ribs and gloriously intimidating organ tones below the stave. Her curtsey and gracious curvings of the hand on the famous 'Reverenza' line had the audience doting rightly so. The Fenton of Juan Oncina, who partners Graziella Sciutti (Nan- nettal, was something of a surprise. Until the last act--where he is made to stroll beneath the trees with hands in belly pockets as if wearing jeans—his tenor had quite a new lustre and ease as compared with what one remembers from Glyndebourne seasons of years ago. Another sur- prise was Rolando Panerai. Panerai's baritone had an edge that wasn't altogether to my taste, but his performance was outstanding in that he ruthlessly cut out the bluster and 'ham' which usually characterise Master Ford and made the man's bewildered fury for once in a way credible and the slightest bit comic.
Finally, the Visconti-Scarfiotti team. Altogether this is a bleak and in some ways odd Falstaff to look at. Two levels in the Garter Inn and Garden scenes is no new idea, but it was always, I submit, a bad idea; and bad is made worse when, as happens in the second of these scenes, you have the four women singing their patter en- semble from a sort of constricted park bench on the upper deck. For the buck basket scene, with its crowdings and scurrying and comicalities, there is abundant elbow room and cold, clear light. What a relief to be free of period brie-à-brae!
But speaking of period, why dress Ford in the blackest of blacks, with broad white collar and a conical hat reminiscent of the conven- ticle? He isn't the only one on the stage who is perplexingly got up as a Puritan. Another pecu- liarity is the last scene. We are supposed to be in woodland depths at midnight, our hair ready to stand on end from spookiness and solitari- ness. But suddenly up go cosy window lights. Something in the nature of a gamekeeper's cottage is revealed in the opposite wing. After this, who can really believe in Falstaff's super- stitious terrors?
CHARLES REID
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