Ten composers - Ten operas. Falstaff

Falstaff was the first Verdi opera I got to know.  Looking back that is rather surprising and I can't quite remember why it was this particular opera.  It may have been the Geraint Evans masterclasses again, but it could simply have been that it was in the repertoire of the company touring Norwich at the time.


Whatever the reason it remains one of my very favourite Verdi operas.   From the first chord through to the final fugue Verdi's invention is astonishing and the action never flags.  And what a fabulous use of the orchestra - a whole essay could be written on the piccolo part.  Much as I enjoy the vigour and impact of the early Verdi operas it is almost impossible to believe that the Falstaff is by the same composer.

In an opera of some many wonderful scenes and episodes it is difficult to pick out some highlights.  The scene between Sir John and Mistress Quickly (Dalle due alle tre) is always a joy, but perhaps the single moment that always makes me smile is at the end of Ford's monologue where his pomposity is burst by the descending chromatic scales in the french horns.

I love the fact that Verdi tried to convince everybody that he was writing Falstaff for his own private pleasure and that he didn't actually want it to be performed.  As if the most famous operatic composer of his generation could keep such an opera all to himself.   It is a difficult opera to bring off in the theatre simply because there is so much detail in the score and it can easily get lost in a reverberant acoustic, particular where there is laughter going on and in many ways it is the idea opera to listen to on CD or DVD.

Ten composers -Ten operas. 3:Les Huguenots

It is hard now to think that Les Huguenots was once a mainstay of the operatic repertory(the Paris Opera reached its 100th performance of the work in 1906).  Indeed had you turned up at random at any opera house between 1850 and 1900 the chances that you would be seeing Les Huguenots or Faust must have been very high.



Yet now Les Huguenots is a beached whale of an opera - its aesthetic far removed from what we expect an opera to be like.



It is easy to point out what is lacking in Meyerbeer.   Sometimes his harmony can be astonishing crude (I remember at university listening to a recording of Robert le Diable and seeing one of my fellow listeners - now a distinguished composer - literally wince at the gauche chord progression in the opening bars and I could see him thinking -"how many hours of this have I got to listen to!").  Equally he could never be regarded as master of transition: some of the links between numbers are perfunctory in the extreme.





But that is only one side.  On his own terms the operas work!   The big moments in Les Huguenots - such as the consecration of the swords, are thrilling - he certainly knew how to use a chorus, soloists and orchestra together to great effect, and there rage of colours and moods is extraordinary. The bathing scene in act 2 may have been put into please the men in the audience whose reasons for attendance may not have been entirely musical, but the colour in the music and the charm of the melody are still hugely affective  (as a bassoon player I would love to have a chance to play this).

But there is some genuinely great music here.  The big duet at the end of Act 4 has a melody to die for (literally as it turns out) and Verdi must have heard echoes of it when he came to write the end of Aida.  But there is much to admire elsewhere.  It was a tradition for many years to end the opera with Act 4 - this seems very odd indeed given that there is so much interesting music in Act 5, particularly the extraordinary recitative and trio with accompaniment by solo bass clarinet and the use of the offstage voices singing the chorale melody.  Wagner, for all his jibes about Meyerbeer, must have absorbed this scene into his musical DNA.


Les Huguenots will surely never return to the operatic repertoire other than as an occasional curiosity - tastes have changed.  But that it is pity.  So much of the later 19th century operatic repertory would have been very different without this opera - indeed part of my enjoyment when listening is identifying the pre-echoes of later works. I've already mentioned Wagner and Verdi, but you can also hear glimpses of composers as diverse as Sullivan and Mussorgsky.   And there are not that many other things linking those two.


It is remarkable that aural evidence of the great tradition of Meyerbeer performances still exists.  This is one of the famous Mapleson cylinders, recorded live from the stage of the Met in the early years of the last century.  If you have never heard one of the cylinders before you will need to get used to the very heavy surface noise, but if you persist you will be able to hear a surprising amount of the performance.  This is the end of the Queen's aria in Act 2 - one of the great show stoppers of the repertory.  Controversy still remains over whether or not this singer is Melba, or the less well known Susan Adams, but whoever she is she was on blistering form.     Surely this is what the 19th century operatic experience was all about

Ten composers - Ten operas. 2:Don Pasquale

Several of my 10 operas are comic opera of one sort or another - and I start with one of the best - Donizetti's Don Pasquale.  I would't call myself a Donizetti enthusiast - indeed I only really know the famous bits from the other opera - but I've always loved Don Pasquale.  I am pretty certain that what introduced me to the opera was one of the superb Geraint Evans master classes in the 1970s but maybe time has played tricks with me: but I have certainly known it from an early age and it was of the first operas I purchased on LP  (there was a shop selling second hand classical LPs in Norwich in my youth and I built up a good collection on the cheap from there).













Don Pasquale has it all. Moments of high comedy, pathos, and drama.  There are arias a plenty, but it is the ensembles which really stand out. Two of the many highlights to note. First of all the big E major ensemble at the end of Act two when Don Pasquale realises what married life to Norina will actually be like.  The superb wide-ranging melody must have left its mark on Verdi when it came to the ensembles in Falstaff (more of that later).  And then by contrast the great buffo duet between Pasquale and Matalesta which never fails to bring the house down and always make me laugh out loud.  Here is Geraint Evans in fine form.

But there is another reason for my choosing Don Pasquale - it was my route into historic recordings.  I purchased an ultra cheap LP of excerpts from the opera not really realising that it was of historic recordings.  But I was hooked.  It was my first encounter with Caruso among others, but what really grabbed my attention was the famous old recording of the patter duet with de Luca and Corratetti.  Of course the two of them ham it up shamelessly and as pure singing it doesn't compare with the Geraint Evans version.  But who cares.  Scratchy the sound may be and the piano accompaniment is crude but the character and the fun just leap out of the loudspeaker.

Its sobering to think that this recording is now much closer to Donizetti's time than it is to ours.






Don Pasquale is sometimes seen as cruel, and I expect audiences of the time were probably very happy to see Don Pasquale humiliated and a figure of fun, whereas nowadays we see him more sympathetically.  But however you look at it, this is a marvellous comic opera which comes up fresh as a daisy in every performance.

Ten composers - Ten operas. 1:Peter Grimes

How on earth did Britten do it?

That's always what occurs to me when I listen to Peter Grimes.  

My rhetorical question has two limbs

The first is how a composer growing up in the inter-war years could find such a strong individual operatic voice.  There were of course operas by English composers before 1945 but nothing in them could possibly have been seen to lead up to Grimes.  I think that now, from an early 21st century perspective we can see that there are elements of that extraordinary melting pot of early 20th century opera - Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Puccini, Janacek, Berg and others - threaded through the language of Grimes, but in 1945 most of this would have been completely outside English musical discourse.   It remains a miracle that an Englishman could have absorbed all of this, fused it within an native tradition and produced a masterpiece that holds the stage all over the world.

But the second limb is more personal - where did Britten the man find the means to produce such a score.  I've never believed the "happy composer writes happy music - sad composer writers sad music" school of thought, but there has to be some link between the man and the music.

One of the most fascinating recordings I know is the rehearsal tape (secretly recorded, much to Britten's annoyance) of the Decca recording of the War Requiem.  Britten comes across as an affable, slightly effete prep school master directing a group of talented but inexperienced pupils.    Over the years I have played in ad hoc performances conducted by such individuals.  They tend to produce enthusiastic, if rough and ready performances without much in the way in excitement or energy.  So listening blind to Britten rehearsing one might expect something similar - and then you get this extraordinary energy and intensity, in some cases savagery of the music.  It really is hard to connect the one with the other.

It is the same with Grimes.   How could that elegant , softly spoken, reserved man have conjured up the terrifying choral outbursts as the crown hunts down Peter Grimes.  The roots of creativity and inspiration are truly incomprehensible.

Grimes is not I think a perfect masterpiece.  Britten himself is supposed to have said that it was full of howlers - though I shudder to think how this notoriously thin skinned man would have reacted if somebody had pointed out one of them!  Some of the music for the minor characters , such as Mrs Sedley and Hobson, can be tedious and there are times when things drag, but these are small matters. Time and time again Britten's inspiration is red hot.    I've already mentioned the hounding of Grimes.  Those chorus shouts of "Peter Grimes" are in a good performance among the most thrilling, and terrifying moment in the operatic repertoire, but perhaps even more notable is the mad scheme, with the offstage choir now reduced to a whisper and the low moaning of the tuba in the distance.  To reduce the texture at the most critical point of the opera was a extremely courageous step, but it works!

Finally a personal recollection.  I attended a concert in the Norwich festival in the early 1970s.  I went to hear Stravinsky's Firebird and Symphony of Psalms, but sandwiched between them Peter Pears sang the Britten Nocturne.   Britten was in the audience and stood up to acknowledge the applause.  But shamed as I am to admit it now, not much of the applause was from me!  I'd come to hear the Stravinsky and I found the Britten very hard going and uninspiring.  I know better now.  But at least I did see Britten in person.

 There are wonderful moments elsewhere in Britten's operas - the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream  is my favourite - but I don't think that he ever quite achieved the level of consistent inspiration that he achieved in Grimes......and all in his early 30s.