Some Verdian thoughts

This comes from a presentation script I wrote to introduce Verdi’s Falstaff, going out on RTE Lyric fm next Saturday… inspired (partly) by an ill-managed edition of the Late Review on BBC2 a few months back, when they tried to sound off on Verdi’s Macbeth.  All I want to say here is that Verdi’s Shakespeare isn’t the same as the RSC’s (or anyone else’s) Shakespeare, and provides a valuable lesson on the ebb and flow of cultural traces across borders.  Once it’s out there, that’s it…

Verdi’s work as a whole reflects a deep awareness of community, both literally with his audience and the wider society in which he lived, as well as the imagined community of writers and artists from the past whose work so inspired him.  These included well-known figures such as Victor Hugo and Friedrich Schiller, as well as others like Guttierez and Saavedra.  But chief amongst these for Verdi was the English dramatist William Shakespeare.  It’s significant that the last two operas Verdi composed were both adaptations of Shakespeare plays, with Otello from Othello, and then Falstaff from the comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor.  It’s a common and understandable mistake nowadays to assume that Verdi’s love of Shakespeare included within it an appreciation for the Shakespearean performing traditions within English theatre.  However, we have to realise that, like most well-read Italians of his generation, Verdi would have known Shakespeare in the prose translations of Carlo Rusconi, possibly supplemented with some of the new Shakespeare criticism then emerging from leading writers of the day, most of whom were not English but German.  It’s fair to say that part of what drew Verdi to Shakespeare was not only the works in themselves, but also the fact that Shakespeare himself was such a cosmopolitan writer, whose works among other things betray a deep awareness of their roots in Italian and Latin theatre.  Strip Falstaff of its Elizabethan English setting, and what you have is a classic farce of the commedia dell’arte tradition.  Verdi’s not so much paying homage to a foreign writer from the damp north, but rather giving him a new home, re-integrating Shakespeare’s dramatic style even more deeply into Italian theatre.