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Verdi's "Falstaff" at Italy's Fin de Siècle
Author(s): Emanuele Senici

Source: The Musical Quarterly , Summer, 2001, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 274-
310
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600914
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Verdi's Falstaff at Italy's Fin de Siecle
Emanuele Senici
On assiste, comme finale d'un siecle, pas ainsi que ce fut dans le demier, a des boule-
versements; mais, hors de la place publique, a une inquietude du voile dans le temple
avec des plis significatifs et un peu sa dechirure.
Mallarme, "Crise de vers," 1895
Two months after the premiere of Verdi's Falstaff at La Scala, Milan, in

February 1893, the publisher Ricordi issued a collection of hundreds of
reviews of the opera that had appeared in both Italian and foreign news-
papers.1 This little book makes embarrassing reading nowadays-at least
for Italians, including myself. Consider this representative excerpt from
the daily newspaper L'Italia del popolo:
We feel happy and proud to be Italians. Not a single bitter feeling spoils
our joy. We join the entire Italian people in offering homage to the com-
poser, in shouting evviva to Giuseppe Verdi.... He is the unforgettable
example of a virtuous, severe, and serene life, a life that once again tells
the beloved old story: ancient valor is not yet extinguished in Italian
hearts.... Cheers and glory to you, o great Italian! Today the immortal
genius of our fatherland and of the great Latin tradition shines on his ele-
vated, serene face.2
I doubt that my unease at this kind of nationalistic rhetoric was shared

by readers of L'Italia del popolo in 1893, at least judging from the ubiquity
of such sentiments in reviews of Falstaff. But another kind of embarrass-
ment becomes apparent after reading a number of these reviews. This is
on the part of the critics, who had to report the reactions of an occasion-
ally less than enthusiastic audience. The critic of La perseveranza was
among the most explicit:
The public hasn't yet discovered all the wonderful details in this most in-
teresting scene [act 1, scene 1], but this will surely come.... I repeat that
future hearings will wipe away the puzzled reaction of the uninitiated,
The Musical Quarterly 85(2), Summer 2001, pp. 274-310

? 2001 Oxford University Press 274

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Falstaff at Italy's Fin de Siecle 275
they will rip off the veil and discover the arcane beauties and the en-
chanting subtleties of this entire act [the third]. I don't mean to say that
the evening became less successful as it went on; on the contrary, there
were always sincere interest and profound and intense pleasure, especially
on the part of the many musicians present.3
The startled, even cool reaction of the audience to at least parts of the
opera was clearly a source of difficulty for the critics, who reported it
only to insist that it would disappear after repeated hearings. But it was
also a symptom of embarrassment on the part of the audience itself, who
evidently found Falstaff difficult to understand-much more difficult, for
example, than Otello, whose links with the preceding tradition of Italian
opera and specifically with Verdi's earlier works are stronger and more
easily detectable, and whose immediate reception therefore did not be-
tray the puzzled unease that would emerge six years later.
Falstaff was received, then, with both inflated nationalistic rapture,
as a sublime manifestation of italianita, and puzzlement at its novelty and
lack of immediate appeal to the general public-those who had the mis-
fortune to be uninitiated. Although these responses might initially seem
unrelated, I suggest that they are profoundly connected. Moreover, I be-
lieve that exploring their connections will lead us to confront both the
opera's unique musicodramatic characteristics and its position within
Italian fin-de-siecle culture. I will begin by drawing together a few signif-
icant features of this culture, then take a closer look at the opera's verbal
and musical text, and, finally, offer an interpretation of the results of this
twofold exploration.
Making Italians
Following in the footsteps of Benedetto Croce, standard histories of Italy

have usually considered the decades between 1861 (the proclamation of
the kingdom of Italy) and 1914 as a single period, characterized by com-
mon concerns and attitudes. Recently, however, historians have sug-
gested that around the late 1880s Italian society and culture underwent
a profound if not immediately obvious transformation. The issue at the
center of public discourse in the preceding decades was the construction
of a society that could meaningfully be called "Italian." The famous 1861
pronouncement by the politician and intellectual Massimo D'Azeglio
that "we have made Italy, now we have to make Italians" echoed for the
next twenty years as the guiding principle of the young nation.4 It is not
difficult to recognize in this maxim the imperative to "imagine a com-
munity" theorized in recent literature on nationalism: D'Azeglio's

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276 The Musical Quarterly
message shows an awareness of the crucial role played by cultural homo-

geneity in the creation of the modern nation.5
One of the fundamental ways of imagining a national community is
the invention of a tradition in which the new nation can root itself.6
Perhaps the most important example of this effort to give the Italian na-
tional present an Italian past was the commemoration in 1865 of the six-
hundredth anniversary of the birth of Dante. This occasion encouraged
a nationwide celebration of the greatest of national poets and thus im-
plicitly served as a public declaration of faith in the present-and
future-of the young nation. Dante was made to embody the myth of a
poet who could inspire an entire nation, and in whose cult all literary as
well as political factions could meet.7 One of the grandest manifestations
of this cultural politics was the commission of a Dante statue to be
placed in front of the church of Santa Croce in Florence. Santa Croce
was fast becoming the temple of Italy where monuments to the glories of
the nation were to be erected, on the model of Westminster Abbey. The
unveiling of the statue in 1865 was publicized on a scale never before
seen in Italy and became a political ritual for the entire nation.8
The 1865 Dante celebrations constituted a model for subsequent
ritual enactments of the cultural effort to "make Italians." Among others
that centered around Santa Croce, two seem particularly significant. In
1871 the remains of the poet Ugo Foscolo, who had died in exile in Lon-
don in 1827, were moved there and solemnly placed in a newly commis-
sioned funereal monument. If Dante had been hailed as the poet-
prophet, Foscolo was celebrated as the poet-soldier who had actively
contributed to the making of the nation and gloriously died in the
process.9 Sixteen years later, in 1887, however, the entombment of
Rossini's remains, moved from Paris to Florence after the death of his
wife, Olympe Pelissier, did not equal the eclat accorded to Dante and
Foscolo: Rossini had died relatively recently (in 1868), and his ambigu-
ous politics could not be included under the nationalistic banner as eas-
ily as those other, untainted patres patriae. Perhaps it was not just lack of
funds that delayed the inauguration of the Rossini memorial monument
until 1902.10
The musician who most actively contributed to this effort of in-
venting a national tradition was of course Verdi. The project for a Messa
per Rossini in 1869 and the Requiem Mass in memory of Alessandro
Manzoni of 1874 are conspicuous monuments to Italian artists, intended
not only as past glories to be commemorated, but also as examples to be
imitated. Verdi was fully aware of the value of political ritual that the
performance of these works could acquire; witness his remarks to the
conductor Angelo Mariani on the Messa per Rossini: "You should have

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understood that my 'I' has disappeared, and that now I am just a pen to
write down a few notes and a hand to offer my contribution to the orga-
nization of this Patriotic festival. .... What does it matter, then, that the
composition lacks unity?... It's enough that the day comes, the cere-
mony takes place, and, in short, that the Historic fact-mark well, the
Historic fact-exists."' But Verdi did much more than contribute to the
making of Italians through the enactment of musical celebrations of
such patres patriae as Rossini and Manzoni. He actively collaborated in
the enterprise of turning himself into a pater patriae right from the very
beginning, by accepting Prime Minister Camillo Cavour's invitation in
1861 to became a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the new king-
dom. Many well-known nationalistic pronouncements would follow, es-
pecially regarding music education and the "corrupting" foreign influ-
ences on Italian composers of the younger generations.12
By the 1880s, however, the climate was changing. New.figures ap-
peared who had not taken part in the process of unification, and new so-
cial formations emerged-first among them the socialist party, officially
constituted in 1892 from the fusion of various local and regional work-
ers' associations-that caused previously unknown kinds of political un-
rest, most importantly a series of strikes. The construction of national
homogeneity was thought by many to be over; inevitably attention
turned to what had been accomplished. The conclusions were not posi-
tive. It was with grim satisfaction that the famous historian Pasquale Vil-
lari wrote in the preface to the 1885 edition of his Lettere meridionali,
originally published in 1875-78: "At first it seemed as if my strange and
impotent aim were to plant the seed of unrest and diffidence in a tran-
quil and happy country; to evoke the specter of social injustice in the
only place in Europe where it did not exist. But soon enough other writ-
ers started to publish accounts that proved that I was not dreaming." He
concluded that Italy suffered from "a chronic illness that would be im-
possible to hide or deny."13 In 1882 the poet Giosue Carducci published
a collection of poems written between 1867 and 1872, Giambi ed epodi,
that has been called a historiography in verse, an attempt to reposition
the grand heritage of Italian culture in the context of the new nation
and to present this culture as at the same time aristocratic and popular.
But in a bitter, ranting preface Carducci proclaimed that "the beautiful,
legendary era of Italian democracy is over.... The whole nation is en-
tering a phase of agitation and evolution, a phase that will need a great
deal of prose, perhaps bad prose, but certainly not poetry."14 In other
words, the cultural effort to appropriate the past in order to construct na-
tional myths had to give way to a phase of critical scrutiny of the pres-
ent, the troubled present, of the nation. Again in 1882 the poet did just

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that in a famous speech commemorating Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of

the Risorgimento, who had just died. Carducci mourned Garibaldi's
death as the death of the ideals of unification and the years immediately
following it: "Let us weep and lament the destiny of our fatherland. The
revelation of glory that appeared to our childhood, the epic struggles of
our youth, the ideal vision of our adulthood have disappeared for ever."15
Naturally, the rhetoric of the 1860s and 1870s did not change radi-
cally, but merely modulated into new tones. If previously the concern
had been how to build a national conscience, now the issue, at least
from a political point of view, became how to project this national con-
science onto the international stage. This does not mean that there was
agreement on the fact that a national conscience had been securely im-
planted in the people; quite the contrary. The effort to present Italy to
the world as an adult nation can be interpreted as an attempt to silence
voices that seemed to deny it from within. If in the 1870s Villari had
been considered "strange and impotent," during the subsequent decade a
growing number of intellectuals started listening to him, especially after
Italy's attempts at shaping an international and colonial profile turned
into a series of embarrassing defeats and perhaps even more embarrassing
compromises.
An episode in the publication history of Gabriele D'Annunzio's
first novel, II piacere, can be interpreted as a telling symptom of this
political and cultural malaise. One of the problems that delayed the
book in 1889 was the insistence of the publisher, Emilio Treves, that
the author remove a disparaging remark with which the protagonist,
the "decadent," "modern" Andrea Sperelli, greets the public outcry at
the bloody defeat of Italian troops in Dogali, East Africa, in January
1887, during Italy's first, disastrous colonial campaign. Less than a
month after the battle of Dogali, however, D'Annunzio had published
a poem commemorating the dead soldiers in which nationalistic, even
revanchist sentiments were prominently aired.16 The ideological com-
pactness behind the agreement between politicians and intellectuals
that had characterized cultural projects like the Dante celebrations was
being eroded, turning eventually into mutual diffidence. Earlier, in the
years immediately following unification, art had had a clear purpose: to
contribute to the making of Italians. By the 1880s this was no longer
obvious. Gone was the confident ring; in its place there was a growing
suspicion that the gulf between the official image of the nation and its
reality was becoming too wide. Euphoria gave way to disillusion and
disenchantment.
Falstaff arrived at precisely this time. Here are a few more sentences
from the review in L'Italia del popolo with which I opened:

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Today is like one of the great days we witnessed when we were young, the
great days of struggle for national independence, when everything looked
beautiful, rosy, promising.... For a moment we forget the constant sorrow
of our existence, of seeing our fatherland so different from how we would
like and had dreamed of. Verdi, one of the oldest Italians, proves that
there are still examples of perennial youth in our old race.... O youth,
who hear us, men of little faith, despair so often about our fatherland and
its future, follow this example! 0 youth, lear and remember.17
Verdi, the bard of the Risorgimento, the last surviving witness of the
struggle for Italian independence, and one of the chief protagonists of
the cultural politics of national homogeneity, was invoked as the sacred
name who could inspire Italy to action once again, and in whose cult all
literary and political factions could once more unite; in other words, he
was invoked euphorically as an antidote to disenchantment.
In this light, the premiere of Falstaff can be interpreted as the prod-
uct of a massive effort to stage another festa patria, a patriotic festival
similar to the Dante celebrations, or to the imagined first performance of
the Messa per Rossini and the real one of the Requiem for Manzoni. No
special coordinating committee like the one put together for the Messa
per Rossini was needed, of course; the commercial stakes for La Scala and
especially Ricordi were too high for them to miss the ideological boat,
and they rode hard.18 But possibly higher ideological stakes compelled
even politicians to act: the senate unanimously passed a motion pre-
sented by one Senator Moleschot to send Verdi a telegram of congratula-
tions.19 The performances in Rome in April were hailed as an opportu-
nity to salute the new masterpiece of Italian art and to pay homage to its
author in the capital of the nation, in the presence of King Umberto and
Queen Margherita. Despite his coy, staged recalcitrance, Verdi knew
that he simply had no choice: he had to go to Rome, and he did.20
This massive concerted effort seems to suggest a general awareness
that it was much more difficult to stage a patriotic festival in the 1890s
than it had been in the 1860s or 1870s. A sensitive reading of the re-
views published by Ricordi reveals the inflated, slightly desperate tone of
the nationalistic reception of Falstaff. No amount of careful editing
could possibly free the collection of this, so deeply embedded is it in the
discourse surrounding Falstaff.21 Such anxiety makes sense only if heard
in counterpoint with the disenchantment that characterized the Italian
fin de siecle. In this context, the doubts manifested by the occasionally
cool reactions of the audience could acquire deep resonances. These res-
onances constituted an embarrassment for the critics because they might
cast a shadow on much more than just a few scenes of the opera. They
might give voice to the doubt that perhaps there was not much scope for

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celebration in a country plagued internally by political scandals and so-

cial unrest and internationally by military and diplomatic defeats-the
suspicion that the effort of making Italians had failed, or that even Verdi
was no longer able to speak to the entire nation, or perhaps that he did
not intend to speak to the entire nation, despite his repeated nationalis-
tic pronouncements and his posing as the musical father of Italy.
An Old Song Newly Intoned
Discussions of the music of Falstaff have involved various analytical

stances, from large-scale tonal planning to minute motivic scrutiny. An
especially fruitful strand has addressed the repeated appearances in the
opera of previous musical styles, forms, genres, and specific works-not
only operatic, and not only by Verdi. While the first critics were seldom
specific, twentieth-century commentators have been more generous with
details. The hypothesis that the first scene of act 1 might be constructed
as a kind of sonata form has been given repeated airings, some suggesting
that this scene might function musically as the overture to the opera.22
The final fugue has of course attracted a great deal of attention, the
name of Bach appearing perhaps most insistently.23 After haunting Fal-
staff criticism for a century, the phantom of Die Meistersinger von Niirn-
berg has finally been given some presence by Julian Budden, who has
pointed to the finale of that work's act 1 as the model for the act 1 finale
of Verdi's opera, going as far as to call it "Verdi's most substantial debt to
his great contemporary."24 Roger Parker has added Beckmesser's act 2
serenade as an intertextual reference for Falstaff's attempted seduction of
Alice in act 2, scene 2-and, I would suggest, it seems only appropriate
that a pair of men of a certain age trying to seduce younger women in a
vocal style that sounds like a caricature of eighteenth-century opera, and
therefore decidedly out of fashion, fail rather miserably.25 Finally, many
have repeatedly pointed to Verdi's own previous works as a frequent in-
tertextual presence.26 Indeed, Falstaff is perhaps most distinctively char-
acterized by its complex, multi-layered intertextual network, one thus far
not sufficiently interrogated from an aesthetic and ideological point of
view.27 This is what I would like to do, by examining in some detail a
few moments especially rich in interpretative potential.
Mozart has appeared relatively seldom in Falstaff criticism, and yet
his presence might prove the most intriguing. References to Le nozze di
Figaro that have been noted include the duet between Susanna and Mar-
cellina in act 1 in connection with the exit of Falstaff and Ford at the
end of act 2, scene 1, and Figaro's mythological references in the section

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of the act 4 finale beginning "Tutto e tranquillo e placido" in relation to

Falstaff's invocation to Jove wearing horns for the sake of Europa's love
in act 3, scene 2.28 To the network of cuckoldry, wearing fake horns, and
the sound of French horns in the orchestra I would add Figaro's aria
"Aprite un po' quegli occhi" and Ford's "jealousy" monologue in act 2,
scene 1. There is also a possible intertextual reference in Falstaff's fa-
mous "honor" monologue in act 1 to the Count's brief musing on honor
at the beginning of act 3. The Count asks rhetorically "L'onore ... dove
diamin l'ha posto umano errore!" (Honor ... what human weakness
does to it!), and Falstaff follows his rhetorical lead, expanding "Pu6
l'onore riempirvi la pancia?" (Can honor fill your belly?), and conclud-
ing "E per me non ne voglio!" (I don't want any of it!). Finally, Roger
Parker's invocation of Mozart for the wedding minuet in act 3, scene 2,
of Falstaff might be pursued a little further in connection with Figaro.
In a letter of 1889 to the composer, Boito insisted on the necessity
of the wedding scene before the ending: "There have to be nuptials;
without weddings there is no happiness ... and Fenton and Nannetta
must marry. I like that love of theirs; it serves to make the whole comedy
more fresh and more solid."29 These words are perhaps reminiscent of Fi-
garo's suggestion in the act 2 finale of Le nozze di Figaro, "Per finirla lieta-
mente e all'usanza teatrale, un'azion matrimoniale le faremo ora seguir"
(in order to close it [i.e., this scene] according to theatrical custom, we
must have a wedding scene now). Indeed, Mozart's opera features an ex-
tended wedding scene at the end of act 3, opened by a wedding march.
Boito's final text includes a sentence comparable to Da Ponte's: "Coro-
nerem la mascherata bella cogli sponsali della Regina delle Fate" (Let's
crown this merry masquerade with the wedding of the Queen of the
Fairies). But Dr. Cajus's and Bardolfo's subsequent entry, introduced by
Ford's words "Gia s'avanza la coppia degli sposi" (Here comes the wed-
ding couple), is accompanied by a minuet with significant musette traits,
not by a march, as on- and off-stage practice would require. Verdi's non-
wedding march seems appropriate when an old pedantic doctor marries a
drunkard. But it might also be viewed as an ironic comment on the
topos of the wedding march, perhaps even as a more specific reference to
Le nozze di Figaro.30
An even richer harvest is reaped by examining the connections be-
tween Falstaff and Don Giovanni, starting of course with Sir John and
Don Giovanni, the protagonists' names. The clues pointing to a reading
of Falstaff as a parody of Mozart's opera are numerous and significant. In
the opening scene Falstaff reminds Dr. Cajus that the one sin he has not
committed is forcing himself on the Doctor's housekeeper-note that
Leporello's "sforzar la figlia" is echoed by Dr. Cajus's "sforzata la mia

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casa," to which Falstaff responds, "ma non la tua massaja." Sir John has
not one servant, but two Leporellos, Bardolph and Pistol, who are not
entirely willing aides-de-camp to their general in his seduction cam-
paigns. Just like their predecessor, they seem to take more than a little
pleasure in telling Ford that "Falstaff le occhieggia tutte, che sieno belle
o brutte, pulzelle o maritate" (Falstaff ogles them all, whether they are
beautiful or ugly, maidens or married), and that "ha voglie voraci il Ca-
valier" (the Knight has voracious desires)-compare Leporello's catalog
aria. Alice and Meg mask themselves to catch the protagonist in fla-
grante delicto, like Anna and Elvira, but of course Falstaff, unlike Gio-
vanni, has not had the chance to lay a finger on them. Both men have
an insatiable appetite, but the body of old Falstaff shows its grim conse-
quences: if in act 1 his "immensity" means that his large belly can con-
tain a thousand tongues announcing his name to the world, in act 3 he
admits that he is getting too fat. As for their appetite for women, Fal-
staff's is far from Giovanni's "ben natural": he needs the women's money.
Finally, when asked to repent by "supernatural" voices, Falstaff gives in
immediately ("Di' che ti penti! / Ahi! Ahi! Mi pento! .. . Riforma la tua
vita! / Tu puti d'acquavita!" [Say that you repent / Ouch! Ouch! I re-
pent! ... Reform your life! / You stink of brandy!]), unlike Giovanni
("Pentiti, cangia vita! ... / No no ch'io non mi pento" [Repent, change
your life! ... / No! I won't repent!]),31 and while Giovanni's refusal
causes real fire and sulfur to appear, Falstaff's "Nitro! Catrame! Solfo!"
are but interjections to signal his surprise and rage when he recognizes
Bardolph.
The most significant connection comes at the end, however. The
fugue that closes Falstaff, "Tutto nel mondo e burla," has become an
obligatory stop for critical tours of the opera, and more generally of late
Verdi. It is therefore surprising that in this context Mozart's name has
been mentioned only occasionally: surprising because surely this fugue
refers intertextually to the fugato at the end of Don Giovanni, "Questo e
il fin di chi fa mal."32 In both cases the display of contrapuntal complex-
ity accompanying a moralizing text is introduced as a prelude to dinner,
and, more important, by a metatheatrical remark: in Falstaff, "Un coro e
terminiam la scena" (A chorus and we'll end the scene); in Don Gio-
vanni, "E noi tutti, o buona gente, ripetiam allegramente l'antichissima
canzon" (Let us all, good people, merrily repeat the very old song).
These remarks highlight the stylistic difference, both verbal and musi-
cal, from what has come before, and announce the fugal sections as com-
mentaries on the preceding action. Mozart's use of learned style can of
course be read as the musical equivalent of the "very old song" of the li-
bretto, and perhaps also of the moralizing tone of the text and its possi-

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ble associations with religion. Falstaffs text, penned by Arrigo Boito,

who was not simply a librettist but a famous composer and poet in his
own right, acquires richly ironic resonances when read in counterpoint
with Da Ponte's:
Don Giovanni, final scene
Zerlina, Masetto, Leporello: E noi tutti, o buona gente,

ripetiam allegramente
l'antichissima canzon.
Tutti: Questo e il fin di chi fa mal:

e de' perfidi la morte
alla vita e sempre ugual.
[Zer. Mas. Lep. Let us all, good people, merrily repeat the very old song.
All: Such is the end of evildoers: the death of villains is always the same
as their life.]
Falstaff, final scene
Falstaff: Un coro e terminiam la scena.
Ford: E poi con Falstaff, tutti, andiamo a cena.
Tutti: Tutto nel mondo e burla.

L'uom e nato burlone,
la fede in cor gli ciurla,
gli ciurla la ragione.
Tutti gabbati! Irride
l'un l'altro ogni mortal,
ma ride ben chi ride
la risata final.33
[Fal: A chorus and we'll end the scene. Ford: Then let's all go to supper
with Falstaff. All: Everything in the world is jest. Man is born a jester, in
his heart faith and reason always waver. All mocked! All mortals taunt
one another, but he laughs well who has the last laugh.]
In the light of the proverbial tone of the two texts, the connection set
up by Boito with the moral of Don Giovanni serves to highlight the dif-
ference between the beliefs of the past and those of the present. Mod-
erns know better than to count on the ultimate punishment for evil
deeds; they have learned that everything is a joke. In fact, the first two
lines of the text are the only ones that the music allows to be understood
by the listener: Verdi makes room for episodes in which the words can
be deciphered, but these words are "tutti gabbati" (all mocked), not the

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final couplet, "he laughs well who has the last laugh." That the moral of
Don Giovanni is not only profoundly ironic in itself but was also very sel-
dom performed in the nineteenth century makes Falstaffs parodic gloss
double, impinging both on the text of the opera (the pitiful illusion of
those characters not realizing that Don Giovanni's disappearance has
left them "senza un briciolo di sale," without a grain of salt, as Falstaff
would say) and its reception (those equally pitiful audiences not realizing
that textually, generically, and aesthetically Don Giovanni needs that fi-
nal bit of desperate moralizing).34
If Boito's text is the ironic reversal of, or expansion upon, a very
old proverb, then Verdi's music can be interpreted as an equally ironic
gloss on old music, in which distortion plays an important role. The cru-
cial first couplet is set to a melody that plays havoc with its prosody, es-
pecially in the over-stretching of "l'uom" and the threefold repetition of
"burlone." The result is a three-measure-long fugue subject: an unbal-
anced, unclassical subject, just like the human being that it stretches in
so ungainly a manner and then pushes over the edge to make it tumble
down in an equally unseemly fashion toward the dominant (Ex. 1).
The unfolding of the piece offers more examples of "distorted" text
setting. The first appearance of the final couplet, "Ma ride ben chi ride la
risata final," happens on a cadence into the far-from-final key of E major
(rehearsal no. 5935). These words are immediately repeated on what
sounds like a dominant preparation to the final cadence in C major; but
this leads instead to E-flat major, new episodes, and a reprise of the ini-
tial text, "tutto nel mondo e burla"; the end is again not quite in sight
(from 9 mm. after rehearsal 59 to 4 before rehearsal 60). Indeed, the last
couplet disappears until a massive crescendo in A minor that veers un-
expectedly to a fortissimo diminished-seventh chord on the word "final,"
the loudest and harmonically most emphatic moment of the fugue thus
far (rehearsal nos. 62-63). A sonorous silence follows, emphasized by
Verdi's instruction that the chord be "tronco" (truncated): nothing
could be less final. Eventually Falstaff, unaccompanied, intones "tutti
gabbati" un po' piu' lento, all the men repeat these words, the orchestra
f ^- p legg._- 3 3
Tut-to nel mondo e bur-la. L'uom e na-to bur-lo-ne,bur-lo-ne,bur - lo-ne,
Example 1. Verdi, Falstaff, final fugue, subject

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picks up from their final G, and the dominant preparation, this time
real, gives everybody one last chance to repeat "all mocked." There is no
final coming together of final words and final music. There is no truly
final laugh.
The textual and musical connections between Don Giovanni and
Falstaff acquire added significance when placed in biographical and his-
torical perspective. Don Giovanni haunted Verdi for his entire composi-
tional career, starting in the early 1830s in Milan: his teacher Vincenzo
Lavigna was apparently obsessed with the work, and even Mozart's son
Karl, who lived in the city and was an acquaintance of Verdi's, asked the
composer to play the opera at the piano for him-or at least this is the
tale that Verdi and his biographers repeated, significantly, in the later
decades of his life.36 As Pierluigi Petrobelli has argued, the musical ghost
of Don Giovanni appeared repeatedly in Verdi's operas, starting at least
from Un giorno di Regno and casting his long shadow especially on Mac-
beth and Rigoletto.37 Not only for Verdi, but for nineteenth-century Ital-
ian and indeed Western musical culture, Don Giovanni represented the
apex of a "classical" past that embodied formal perfection. In a review of
the opera dating from 1859, the influential music critic Francesco D'Ar-
cais recalled his first composition lesson with Luigi Rossi, who surprised
him by putting in his hands the score of Don Giovanni:
Telling me that it would have been more useful than any treatise or rule,
adding: "This was my only teacher; I gained the science into which you
ask me to be initiated from this source, which, if you listen to me, you
should choose as your guide and model." Not only did I have the opportu-
nity to see the truth of these words, but, the deeper I studied Don Gio-
vanni, the stronger my belief that this is the most perfect musical work
ever conceived by human mind.38
Don Giovanni was not only regarded as "the most perfect musical
work ever conceived," it was also the oldest opera still in the repertory of
European opera houses, including Italy. To name just one significant in-
stance, it was performed in alternation with the first production of the
revised version of Simon Boccanegra during the spring season at La Scala
in 1881. The role of Don Giovanni was a warhorse of Victor Maurel,
who sang Simone in this production, and for whom Verdi composed the
role of Falstaff.39 Finally, Don Giovanni was almost exactly one hundred
years old when Verdi started composing Falstaff. Don Giovanni was a
masterpiece of the past that was very much present in fin-de-siecle Italy,
and this presence had the distinctive advantage of not evoking one single
national operatic tradition. True, Mozart was a "German" composer, but
the abate Da Ponte was Italian, the language of the libretto is Italian,

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and the work belongs to the Italian genre of opera buffa. In this respect,
Don Giovanni can be meaningfully compared with The Merry Wives of
Windsor, a play by a writer who happened to be English, but who had
also long ascended to the ethereal spheres of "universality"-and who
had made matters even easier by basing his comedy on an Italian source,
a novella from Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's II pecorone, and by coming
from a country whose musical tradition looked less than threatening
from the point of view of late-nineteenth-century Italy.40
The particular historical resonances of the choice of Don Giovanni
as an intertextual foil for Falstaff, especially its conclusion, as well as the
position of the fugue at the very end of the opera, encourage a further
interpretative move. I would claim that "Tutto nel mondo e burla" is the
moment in which the discourse of intertextuality that runs through the
entire opera finally takes center stage and becomes, as it were, its own
subject. The numerous signposts that place the fugue outside the narra-
tive frame encourage its interpretation as a self-referential moment, in
which both the text and the music reflect on the very fact that they are
the text and the music of an opera. A musical procedure marked as "old"
is used to establish an intertextual connection with an "old" opera. This
connection functions not as a way of elevating Falstaff to the same high
plateau of the "classic" Don Giovanni, but rather as a way of measuring
the distance between the past and the present, the old and the new, the
classic and the modem. The sense of distancing is achieved through dis-
tortion of significant traits like the proportions of the fugue subject, its
wrecking havoc with the prosody of the text, and the lack of coordina-
tion between final words and final music. Thus, "Tutto nel mondo e
burla" can be heard as embodying some of the most significant aspects of
modernity: the experience of separation from the past and the belief in
the necessity of confronting this past.
I will return to the question of Falstaffs relationship with
modernity later. For the moment I want to expand my interpretation
of the final gesture of the opera to make it bear on the entire opera. If,
in the fugue, words and music reflect not only on what precedes them,
but also on themselves, in the ways I have just suggested, then it is
tempting to hear "Tutto nel mondo e burla" as the verbal and musical
moral of the opera. This musical moral points toward a reading of Fal-
staff as an act of parodic distancing from the past that it incessantly
takes as its subject. The relationship with the past of Falstaff is a
modern one precisely because it acknowledges that the distance from
this past is so wide it cannot be bridged. Yet, in order to be truly
modern one must confront this past, one must confront tradition;
without this confrontation, there is no possibility of creating anything

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truly new, there is no chance of critically overcoming the past-the ul-

timate goal of modernity.
Song and Aria, Words and Music
Falstaff confronts not only the musical and operatic past, but also the
theoretical and aesthetic foundations of opera, specifically the debate
over the relationship between words and music that has accompanied
the genre since its "invention"-a debate that indeed spured this in-
vention. The libretto abounds in words and images referring to music,
giving Verdi ample opportunity for moments in which the music be-
comes self-referential without resorting to intertextuality. It cannot go
unremarked that the two most obvious instances of this musical self-
referentiality come at the beginning and the end of Falstaff. The opera's
opening "sonata form," mentioned above, is verbally articulated by ex-
pressions such as "Ecco la mia risposta" (Here is my answer) at the be-
ginning of the presumed second subject, and "Non e finita" (It's not
over) at the beginning of the development. Its conclusion is signaled by
Bardolfo's and Pistola's chant of "Amen," to which Falstaff responds,
"Cessi l'antifona, la urlate in contrattempo" (Stop the antiphon, you are
shouting it off the beat), a description of the lack of synchronization be-
tween the voices of his two companions. As I pointed out earlier, more-
over, the final fugue is announced by Falstaff's exhortation "Un coro e
terminiam la scena" (A chorus and we'll end the scene).
This discourse on music in the libretto is paralleled by a musical
metadiscourse that becomes especially prominent in act 3. The most ob-
vious instance is probably Boito's extravagant verbal divertissement on
the word "trillo" in scene 1, which receives an appropriately excessive
setting, a massive crescendo of trilling instruments that ends in what the
text describes as "una demenza trillante" (a trilling dementia). Among
other examples are the "blando suon" (soft sound) of Nannetta's song
(first violins and harp playing harmonics), and "scrolliam crepitacoli,
scarandole, nacchere!" (let's shake rattles, clappers, castanets) of the tor-
ture scene (the orchestra does exactly what the text says). These are
among the most startling instances of a pervasive musical mimesis of
verbal images never previously attempted by Verdi.41 This exploration is
not limited to the practical possibilities of coupling words with music,
however, but it also includes at least one moment of abstract, theoretical
reflection on this coupling: I am referring to Fenton's sonnet at the
opening of the last scene of the opera, "Dal labbro il canto estasiato
vola," an extended description of the act of singing.

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II parco di Windsor. Nel centro la gran quercia di Herne. Nel fondo l'argine
d'un fosso. Fronde foltissime. Arbusti in fiore. E notte. Si odono gli appelli lon-
tani dei guardia-boschi. II parco a poco a poco si rischiarera coi raggi della luna.
Fenton, poi Nannetta vestita da regina delle fate . . .
Fenton: Dal labbro il canto estasiato vola

pe' silenzi nottumi e va lontano
e alfin ritrova un altro labbro umano
che gli risponde colla sua parola.
Allor la nota che non e piu sola
vibra di gioia in un accordo arcano
e innamorando l'aer antelucano
con altra voce al suo fonte rivola.
Quivi ripiglia suon, ma la sua cura
tende sempre ad unir chi lo disuna.
Cosi baciai la disiata bocca!
Bocca baciata non perde ventura.
Nannetta (di dentro, lontana e avvicinandosi): Anzi rinnova come fa la luna.
Fenton (slanciandosi verso la parte dove udi la voce):
Ma il canto muor nel bacio che lo tocca. (Fenton vede Nannetta che entra e
la abbraccia).42
[Windsor Park. In the center, the great oak of Herne. In the rear, the bank of a
ditch. Very thick boughs. Flowering shrubs. It is night. The distant calls of the
forest guards can be heard. The park will gradually be illuminated by the rays of
the moon. Fenton, then Nannetta, dressed as the Queen of the Fairies...
Fen.: From the lips the song flies, in ecstasy, through the nocturnal si-
lences and goes far, and finally discovers another human lip that replies to
it with its words. Then the note, which is no longer alone, vibrates with
joy in a strange chord, and, bewitching the antelucan air, with another
voice flies back to its source. Here it regains sound, but its concern tends
always toward uniting who disunites it. Thus I kissed the desired mouth!
A kissed mouth doesn't lose luck.
Nan. (from within, far off, coming nearer): Rather it's renewed as the moon is.
Fen. (running toward the direction where her voice was heard): But the song dies
in the kiss that touches it. (Fenton sees Nannetta entering and embraces her.)]
Wolfgang Osthoff has linked this text with previous sonnets, notably
Shakespeare's, that explore the same imagery of love, kissing, and song.43
While this is convincing, I would argue that there are other, less imme-
diate but potentially farther-reaching connections.
The very fact that "Dal labbro il canto" is a sonnet invites thought,
given that sonnets were almost never included in Italian opera libretti.

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Falstaff at Italy's Fin de Sicle 289
A recent introduction to Italian literature describes this form or genre in

revelatory terms: "The sonnet is generally considered the most charac-
teristic metrical genre of Italian literature. Indeed, it can be said that the
sonnet accompanies it from its organic formation (with the Sicilian po-
etic school) to some of its most recent products."44 The sonnet's status
was-and apparently still is-enhanced by the fact that it was invented
in Italy in the thirteenth century and appropriated by France, Britain,
Spain, and Germany, thus making it one of Italy's greatest contributions
to Western literary culture. In the nineteenth century the ongoing de-
bate over its origins reached a new point when metricologists promoted
the theory-later proved false-that it was not a literary invention, but
originated in popular poetry.45
The sonnet was not only the ultimate Italian literary form, made
even more prestigious by its supposedly popular origins, however; it was
also considered especially suited to the treatment of the loftiest themes,
such as reflection on the nature and essence of poetry. What is more, its
name derives from suono (sound), and it has long been known that origi-
nally the word indicated simply poetry to be set to music. In short, Ital-
ian literature found its mythical origins in a poetic form or genre bor
out of the coupling of poetry and music. It is not difficult to imagine that
Boito saw it as the perfect mold in which to cast a description of singing
meant to be set to music, nor why he gave an ancient-sounding patina to
its vocabulary and syntax. More specifically, the proverblike first two
lines of the last tercet, "Bocca baciata non perde ventura. / Anzi rinnova
come fa la luna," come from Boccaccio's Decameron, and therefore from
the Trecento, that fabled century of Italian literature, the century not
only of Boccaccio, but also of Dante and Petrarch, both prolific authors
of extraordinarily famous sonnets.46 The fact that this couplet has al-
ready been heard twice in the opera, at the end of the two brief duets be-
tween Fenton and Nannetta in act 1, scene 2, helps explain the striking
similarity in style and imagery between these duettini and Fenton's son-
net.47 These moments seem to address issues of mimesis and representa-
tion, ones I would like to examine in some detail.
The duettini and the sonnet have in common not only the themes
of kissing and singing, but also the actions of kissing and singing. Thus,
the action taking place on stage is the object of elaborate description in
both act 1 and act 3: while the double trajectory in act 1 is from kissing
and lovemaking to singing-the Boccaccian couplet is exchanged as a
fragment of song between Fenton and Nannetta, physically separated by
the arrival of other characters-the sonnet comes to an end when Fen-
ton is eventually able to kiss Nannetta, and therefore his song must die,
as the final line announces: "Ma il canto muor nel bacio che lo tocca."48

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The progression may be from kissing to singing (from body to voice), or

from singing to kissing (from voice to body), but what both duet and
sonnet seem to posit is a separation of body and voice, the impossibility
of simultaneity between them. The only sound that Fenton's and Nan-
netta's bodily activity, their lovemaking, can produce is the fateful "ba-
cio sonoro," the sonorous kiss that launches the act 2 largo concertato.
But this sound can be neither "written" nor "voiced." The libretto
indicates:
Nannetta e Fenton si danno un bacio sonoro nel posto del verso marcato
dall'asterisco.
(*)!
In questo punto e cessato il baccano e tutti sentono il susurro del bacio.49
[Nannetta and Fenton give each other a sonorous kiss at the place in the verse
marked by an asterisk. At this point the din has stopped and everybody hears the
whisper of the kiss.]
In the printed score the kiss is indicated with a diamond-shaped minim

on each of Fenton's and Nannetta's staves: Verdi clarifies this notation
by writing "(bacio)."50 Boito makes the kiss count as a syllable toward
the doppi senari scansion of the passage-hence the positioning of the as-
terisk approximately two-thirds to the right of the page, the second
senario tronco of the verse being "Briccon!! / (*)! / C'! / C'e!")-Verdi
wants the music "sempre a tempo," but the representational means at
the disposal of the poet and the composer ultimately fail them, since
these means have no way of imitating a kiss. The sound of the body can-
not be voiced, at least mimetically; it can only be described analogically
or evoked metaphorically.
The duettini and the sonnet present a crucial difference in this re-
spect, however; while in the former the description of kissing is-must
be-interrupted by the action, in the sonnet the act of singing and its
description take place at the same time, both ending in kissing. The text
and action of the sonnet explicitly perform not only the irreconcilability
between the sphere of the voice and that of the body, but also, and per-
haps most importantly, the ultimate self-referentiality of describing the
act of singing in an opera. In this sense, the aptest intertextual context
for the sonnet at the beginning of act 3, scene 2, is a corpus of poems,
among them many sonnets, written over the previous twenty years and
recently published in collections: the poems of Stephane Mallarme.51
Mallarme's poetry is of course centrally concerned with the collapse of

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traditional systems of representation in fin-de-siecle art-that is to say,

with modernity. More than this, Fenton's sonnet can be read in terms
not too different from those engendered by Mallarme's poetry. The ab-
stract textual imagery and the "difficulty" of both vocabulary and syntax
prevent any precise mimetic correspondence between description and
object described, between text and reality.52 The gap is thematized as a
gap between singing and kissing, between voice and body, not only in
the different trajectory of the sonnet vis-a-vis the duettini, but within the
text of the sonnet itself. The last verse of the first tercet, "Cosi baciai la
disiata bocca!" which comes immediately before the Boccaccian couplet,
abruptly transfers the poetic description of the act of singing in the pres-
ent tense on to the act of kissing, the sphere of the body, temporally lo-
cated in the past. But the abruptness of the move is foregrounded in such
a way as to question its viability, its performability, and ultimately the
system of representation on which it rests: "cosi baciai" (thus I kissed).
How thus?
The setting of the sonnet has often been discussed in isolation, but,
given that it is music about sound, the orchestral introduction that im-
mediately precedes it assumes an important function. The scene begins
with an unaccompanied solo for natural French horn, meant to repre-
sent the calls of the forest watchmen. Verdi's insistence that the instru-
ment be "senza chiavi" (natural), and his careful indications regarding
the placement of the instrumentalist-"at stage level and far off in the
wings"-attempt to reproduce as realistically as possible the echoes and
reverberations of sound in a natural space.53 The subsequent interjec-
tions of the orchestra, playing fragments of the music to which Fenton
and Nannetta had exchanged the Boccaccian couplet in act 1, scene 2,
dissolve into echoing trills, music sounding somewhere in the distance,
from which only fleeting fragments reach us. The result is a blurring of
the boundary between stage music (the horn calls) and "unheard" music,
music of which the characters on stage are unaware (the orchestral inter-
jections). This distinction-one that is fundamental to opera, as has
been repeatedly argued-is complicated even further by the earlier status
of the "bocca baciata" music as stage song, which has now apparently
descended into the orchestra pit and become "unheard." Similarly, the
transition between the last horn call and the beginning of Fenton's
sonnet is accomplished by the repeated E-flat-F of the English horn,
an echo of the repeated A-flat-B-flat of the French horn two measures
earlier. The English horn is placed not onstage, with the French horn,
but with the rest of the orchestra, and therefore its sound should not be
heard as stage music. However, the facts that it echoes the French horn,
and that its E-flat-F seems to "give the note" to Fenton, point once more

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toward a blurring of the distinction between stage music and unheard

music, between the music of reality and the music of opera (Ex. 2).
The nature of Fenton's singing is left ambiguous, then: is his a stage
song? Perhaps not, for there is no trace of the verbal or visual clues that
traditionally introduce sung songs in nineteenth-century opera: no one
announces that a song is about to be sung, and no one picks up a harp or
a guitar.54 However, the orchestral introduction as well as the fact that
Nannetta answers Fenton in the last tercet, and therefore hears him,
would point toward an affirmative answer: his is a stage song. Indeed,
Fenton's second quatrain finally takes on the telltale sign: the harp
enters-for the first time in the opera-to accompany him, and, as if to
make certain it is noticed, takes pride of place in the orchestra for his
second tercet. Moreover, the very fact that the text and music of this ter-
cet were heard earlier in the opera is a characteristic of stage songs in
nineteenth-century opera. "Dal labbro il canto," not quite a stage song
and not quite an aria, seems to straddle the boundary between "real" mu-
sic, music that would be music in a spoken play, or in real life, and "oper-
atic" music, music unheard by the characters on stage, and the essential
element of the genre of opera-the music that makes opera opera.
The sonnet has a complex compositional history. Verdi made
changes to it in November 1892 while correcting proofs of the vocal
score and teaching the role of Fenton to its first interpreter. One change
seems especially significant. The revision at the beginning of the first
tercet introduces the first and only musical reprise in the entire piece,
the varied repetition by the English horn of the opening vocal phrase.
This happens at the words "with another voice [the note] flies back to its
source. Here it regains sound." Verdi's revision can be interpreted, there-
fore, as a way of giving the note (the by now rather distant subject of the
second quatrain), gone back to its source, that is, the lips, another voice,
that of the English horn, at the moment when it "ripiglia suon"-both
regains sound and begins again.55
This is not only the sole musical reprise in the piece, but also the
moment where mimesis can be (and has been) invoked most explicitly
as the principle according to which the text of the sonnet is set to music,
the most overtly imitative passage in the piece. Was Verdi trying to say
something about the entire sonnet through his revision? Encouraged by
this passage, we might want to turn to the rest of the sonnet in search
of other imitative moments, as some have done.56 Can we justify the
progressive lengthening of the rhythmic values at "e va lontano" with "the
'distancing' of the sung melody from the lover's lips"?57 Can we link the
entrance of the harp at the beginning of the second quatrain with the note
being no longer alone ("allor la nota che non e piu sola")? Or can we

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ANDANTE t 8 (Como intero molto lontano)
ANDANTE 3y 3 morendo
r >>
3
3 > > > 3 > >
-___ ^>>^>>3 J > 3- - 3 -

133
( > 3 3 ---
a 9 bb b w ' 3-- r- 3-
b
(entra Fenton)
v~~~~~~~~\ ~~~~~~~~7 ~~~morendo

f 3 3
> > > r >f lunga
FENTON dolcissimo
Dal lab-broil can-toe-sta - si - a - to
? 7
i Q b J g ^ j J J , -
dolciss.
oFEN 6^, r ' R io

vo - la Pei si-len-zi not - tur-nie va Ion - ta
' j-j^ j-~ni]

~~~~~ b"lb i~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~7 bll b P "i~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ t P r~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~t--
r r .:
Example 2. Verdi,
Example 2. Verd

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consider the change in orchestration and the sudden shift from D-flat ma-
jor to E major in the middle of the second quatrain, at "e innamorando,"
as a belated sounding of the "accordo arcano," the strange chord men-
tioned in the preceding line? We could continue our quest for mimetic
moments and collect a substantial number of cases that might exhibit an
imitative connection between text and music, but then again, might
not-cases in which the musical setting of the words is far from obeying a
single constructive principle, in which no firm answer is given to the ques-
tion "why this music with these words?" What can all this mean in a piece
that is a musical setting of a textual description of the act of singing, and
therefore by its very nature a mimetic act, or rather a metamimetic one?
How does one set to music words about music "musically"?
Here Verdi is experimenting with coupling words and music in a
piece that is precisely about their conjunction. The sonnet, then, ex-
plores not so much the relationship between one text and its musical
setting, but rather the nature of the relationship between words and
music. In this sense, the sonnet functions as a reflection on the self-
referential nature of the musical imitation of words describing music.
The sonnet, poised on the thin line separating stage music and so-called
unheard music, that is, song and aria, is also poised between the musical
imitation of reality and the musical imitation of music. And I would ar-
gue that, as in the case of Boito's choice of a poetic form or genre that
stood at the beginning of literature and was supposedly born out of a
popular impulse to bring text and music together, Verdi's music is an ex-
ploration of the origins of (vocal) music and its relationship with words,
that is to say, the origins of opera-a relationship that in the past had
been rooted in an unquestioned link between body and voice. In this
sense, the pastoral setting might be read as an evocation of the pastoral
beginnings of opera, a sort of representational age of innocence, when a
"natural" link between body and voice, gesture and singing, words and
music, was implicitly assumed and did not need to be questioned.
But, the sonnet seems to say, this tradition has reached its end.
"Dal labbro il canto" can be heard, therefore, as a deeply skeptical inter-
rogation of the relationship both between words and music and song and
aria, reality and opera, body and voice. The outcome of this interroga-
tion is a set of questions in its turn. Crucially, no clear answer is given,
no ready-made recipe for coupling words and music, for separating song
from aria, for voicing bodily sounds. After the musical mimesis of verbal
images and gestures has been explored and exploited in depth through
the opera, the music of the sonnet, aligning itself with the text, performs
a critique of the representational assumption supporting this mimesis.
The sound of the body cannot be voiced mimetically; not even the

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sound of sound is set to unquestionably mimetic music. Here the circu-

larity of music imitating words imitating music does not guarantee the
survival of a watertight representational system, but rather unmasks the
shaky ground on which this representational system is built and ulti-
mately points toward its collapse. The body cannot make any sound that
can be meaningfully translated into either words or music; no bodily
sound can be voiced. Words can only imitate themselves, refer to them-
selves, mean themselves-as they famously do in Mallarme's poetry. And
the same applies to music, three centuries of opera notwithstanding.
This loss of faith in the traditional answers given to the question of
words and music, of song and aria, and ultimately to the question of
opera casts the genre as in need of a thorough reexamination. The son-
net's disenchantment with traditional systems of representation aligns it
on the modem front, alongside not only Mallarme's sonnets, but also
"Tutto nel mondo e burla" and its disenchantment with traditional sys-
tems of belief and of closure, dramatic and theatrical as well as moral.
Intentions of Modernity
Let us return to the early reviews of Falstaff, this time to highlight an-
other significant contemporary reaction. According to one Venetian
critic, no Italian opera had ever been "conceived and composed with
such an intention of being moder, making no concession whatsoever to
the taste of the public, as Falstaff."58 For this critic, then, Falstaffs
modernity is linked to its lack of concern with its reception. But, as I
have suggested, Falstaff is also distinctively modem because it acknowl-
edges the impossibility of a direct, unmediated relationship to the past,
because it strives to interrogate anew the theoretical foundations of the
relationship between words and music, an issue at the very core of its
genre. Falstaffs modernity acquires historical meaning when placed in
the context of its early reception, precisely because it might seem to be
unconcerned with it.
Adriana Guarieri Corazzol has recently argued that the massifica-
tion of the production and reception of opera in Italy between about
1870 and 1915 engendered a disintegration of the "levels of culture,"
and consequently a hierarchization of operatic works into the socioaes-
thetic categories of "high," "medium," and "low." According to her,
Falstaff is an experimental work, belonging to a "high" level of style, and,
as such, "located in an abstract listening space (a theatrical non-site where
the author faces primarily himself), and whose language tends to create its
own rules, against or outside any rhetorical determination of genre."59 I

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would temper this resolute placing of Falstaff in an abstract listening space

and outside genre in the light of J. Peter Burkholder's redefinition of musi-
cal modernity: "Music written by composers obsessed with the musical
past and with their place in music history, who seek to emulate the music
of those we call the 'classical masters,' measuring the value of their own
music by the standards of the past. 'Modern' is an apt term for this music,
for both composers and listeners conceive of it in relation to the music of
the past and are self-conscious about its modernity."60
Burkholder points out the paradoxical requirements of composi-
tion in this aesthetic climate. On the one hand, "composers sought to
write new music that would find a place in the tradition of steadily
ageing immortal masterpieces, demanding of each piece that it visibly
participate in that tradition while proclaiming its own distinctiveness."61
On the other, they were faced with "the requirement that a work
demonstrate lasting value, rewarding frequent rehearings and becoming
more loved as it becomes more familiar, and yet at the same time have
enough immediate appeal to move the listener to seek out a second
hearing."62 I would suggest that Falstaff represents one of the first Italian
operas that participated in this cultural and aesthetic climate, with full
understanding of its potentially negative consequences on the opera's
immediate reception.
Falstaffs theatrical modernity emerges most clearly, therefore,
when considered from critical angles centrally concerned with reception
and systems of communication between stage and audience. In his fa-
mous essay on Bertolt Brecht, "What Is Epic Theatre?," Walter Ben-
jamin argues that one of the reasons why Brecht's epic theater is truly
modem, why it addresses the problem of modernity head on, is that its
implied audience is "a relaxed one, following the play in a relaxed man-
ner," adding that this relaxation arises because "practically no appeal is
made to the spectator's capacity for empathy."63 One of the requirements
of theatrical modernity, then, is the shunning of affective identification
as a goal, and its replacement with a relaxed, detached attitude that
questions the relationship of what is represented on stage to the reality
experienced by the audience. This questioning is encouraged by a style
of production whose goal is not illusion, but rather an unmasking of the
devices on which traditional theater relies. In Benjamin's words, these
productions are "transparent as to [their] artistic armature"; they show
the actors to be actors, that they are playing a part, not "being" a charac-
ter.64 And the transparency is moder because-famously in Brecht-it
breaks the contract of illusion essential to the aesthetics of traditional
theater, thus shocking the audience into recognizing what theater is
made of, inviting them to question its conventions.

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I do not mean to suggest that Falstaff is Brechtian epic theater

avant la lettre, of course. But Benjamin's critical vocabulary might nev-
ertheless help us understand what is modern about Falstaff. If we sub-
stitute for the concept of production that of composition, for example,
we can fruitfully apply the notion of a transparency of artistic armature
not simply to Verdi's multilayered intertextuality, but, perhaps more
interestingly, to the critical distance that Verdi puts between Falstaff
and its past, as in the fugue, or Falstaff and its genre, as in the sonnet.
In this sense Falstaff does indeed question the assumptions on which
traditional opera relies, such as the distinction between stage music
and unheard music, or the conventions governing the coupling of
words with music. The recurring presence of metatheatrical remarks at
crucial narrative as well as structural moments-think of the way the
fugue is introduced, for example-contributes to the breaking of the
theatrical illusion and invites the audience to recognize the illusion-
making devices of traditional opera. Benjamin invites us to imagine
what it means to "play at acting" as a way of understanding Brecht;
Falstaff "playing at opera" might encapsulate what is modern about this
much more unlikely work. This kind of "play" is of course a character-
istic of the genre of comedy in Western theater, and this is one of
the crucial reasons why Boito and Verdi chose comedy for their self-
consciously opus ultimum, as the medium that would permit trans-
parency. A "modern" kind of comedy, then, was the medium through
which Boito and Verdi could not only approach modernity, but address
it, in Falstaff.65
James Hepokoski and Roger Parker have subtly explored what
Hepokoski has called "the central paradox of Verdi's later years," that is,
"the gap between his written opinions and his own musical practice."66
Parker has probed the ambiguities of what he calls the "public genesis"
of Falstaff, on the one side Verdi's repeated proclamations that he was
composing the opera for his own private enjoyment, on the other the
careful staging of the public announcement that he was indeed working
on it. Parker also suggests the presence of possible contradictions be-
tween, on the one hand, Verdi's warnings against the danger of foreign
influences on young Italian composers and his emphasis on the virtues
of the "old Italian school," often epitomized by Palestrina, and, on the
other hand, his compositional practice in Falstaff.67 Yet, occasionally
Verdi's words came close to describing his compositional practice. The
famous letter to Hans von Builow of April 1892, less than one year
before the premiere of Falstaff, might be one of these rare occasions.
Responding to von Biilow's "Hail Verdi, the Wagner of our dear allies!"
Verdi wrote:

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If the artists of the North and South exhibit different tendencies, they
should indeed be different! They should all preserve the characteristics spe-
cific to their own nation, as Wagner quite rightly said. You are fortunate in
still being the sons of Bach! And we? We too, sons of Palestrina, used to
have a great tradition ... and our own! Now it has become bastardized
and threatens to collapse altogether! What if we could go back to the
beginning?!68
Falstaffs reexamination of the foundations and history of the genre

of opera might indeed represent an attempt to go back to the beginning:
the beginnings of Italian literature, of the coupling of words and music,
of opera. Tornare da capo, going back to the beginning, is not the same as
tornare all'antico, or, to use Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon's re-
cent formulation, Falstaffs intertextual parody is not primarily a "reca-
pitulative" one. To their suggestion that Falstaff brought the Italian op-
eratic tradition to its completion, I would respond that the opera seems
to say that this tradition had already reached completion and was in
need of a thorough reexamination. This is of course a distinctly modem
attitude, one of simultaneous involvement and detachment, immersion
and distancing: Falstaffs is a critical stance, ironic and perhaps even sub-
versive, yet deeply embedded in what it seems to want to subvert.
Assuming a modem attitude, however, meant shunning affective
identification as a goal, making "practically no appeal... to the specta-
tor's capacity for empathy." But empathy, identification with the charac-
ters, is precisely what the nineteenth-century tradition of Italian
opera-not by chance a more and more serious tradition as the century
progressed-considered its highest goal, its very raison d'etre, what the
audience expected and longed for. They could only be puzzled by Falstaff
and its self-conscious commentary. Carducci-who, as seen above, might
have been sympathetic to what he would have called Falstaffs "prosaic"
aesthetics-left the first performance of the opera in Bologna confessing
to a friend, "I don't understand it at all."69 Initially very few dared voice
their doubts, but slowly more and more commentators started making
anti-Falstaff noises, which eventually grew into a critical commonplace,
one subscribed to by such committed Verdians as, for example, Bruno
Barilli in his influential II paese del melodramma (1930), and, famously,
Stravinsky.70
According to Burkholder, searching for musical modernity meant
running the risk that composers, "in appealing to the past for inspiration
and the future for acceptance . . . ignored the goal which composers they
sought to emulate had kept uppermost in their minds: creating music
which had current value for an audience in the present and fulfilled a so-
cial role above and beyond its value as art."71 In the case of Falstaff this

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risk was significant, as the opera's reception proves, and yet it could not
be admitted. At stake was not simply the reputation of Italy's leading
composer or of Italian art on the international stage. It was not just a
matter of aesthetics, it was one of ideology and politics.
Unmaking Italians?
A comparison of Falstaff with Die Meistersinger in the light of recent crit-

icism of Wagner's opera might help to throw the ideological and politi-
cal aesthetics of Verdi's work into relief. Falstaff seems to resist the inter-
pretation of the dialectic of anticipation and fulfillment in Die
Meistersinger recently proposed by Arthur Groos and Lydia Goehr,
among others, despite the many generic, textual, musical, and aesthetic
similarities between the two operas.72 Wagner and Verdi chose comedy
as the genre that allows and indeed promotes the deployment of a com-
plex web of intertextual references for the construction of a discourse
about art and history through a metadiscourse about text and music,
both within and without opera, from Bach's chorales to nineteenth-
century ensemble writing, and from Mozart's minuets and finales to
Bachian fugues. But the differences in the placement, manipulation, and
framing of these references point toward different interpretations of the
discourses about art and history.
Let us consider, for example, Sachs's "Wahn" monologue in act 3 of
Die Meistersinger and the final burla of Falstaff. In the first case, a reflec-
tion on the madness, or illusion, that seem to be ever present in the
world brings about a turning point in the drama: Sachs's decision "to
guide Wahn subtly to perform a nobler task." In Falstaff, as we have seen,
a reflection on the madness that rules the world concludes the opera. No
hymn to German art here-indeed, no hymn to any art. Wagner had
employed fugato writing for the riot at the end of act 2, while the corre-
sponding moment in Falstaff, "Se t'agguanto, / se ti piglio" in act 2,
scene 2, is the last of Verdi's larghi concertati. The fugue in Falstaff comes
at the end, and, in the light of act 2 of Die Meistersinger, looks even less
like a musical gesture of all-embracing conciliatory resolution.
I would argue that the most significant difference between Die
Meistersinger and Falstaff is that Wagner's opera was composed in the
1860s and premiered in 1868, on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war and
the proclamation of the German empire at Versailles, while Falstaff came
to life, after a four-year gestation, in 1893, more than thirty years after
the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy and more than twenty after
the annexation of Rome. The consequences could not emerge more

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clearly than in the operas' ideological appropriations-or lack thereof-

by Nazism and fascism. Whereas Hitler could address the crowds in
Nuremberg, then drive up to Bayreuth for a performance of Meistersinger,
and experience the ultimately smooth slippage from the political to the
aesthetic, it is rather difficult to imagine Mussolini walking up the Via
Nazionale after one of his comizi from the fateful balcony of Palazzo
Venezia to attend a performance of Falstaff at the Teatro Reale del-
l'Opera in Rome and experience any meaningful connection. It may be
not entirely coincidental that, as mentioned above, one of the most elo-
quent attacks on Falstaff came from the nationalist and occasional fascist
sympathizer Barilli in 1930, "anno IX" of the "era fascista."
One cannot believe that the diverging ideologies of Die Meis-
tersinger and Falstaff are due solely to the national, cultural, and political
contexts in which these two operas came to life, of course: it was, after
all, perfectly possible to compose nationalistic, Meistersinger-like works
in 1890s Italy.73 Witness Alberto Franchetti's Cristoforo Colombo and
Ruggero Leoncavallo's I Medici, which premiered in October 1892 and
November 1893 respectively-that is, right at the time of Falstaff-and
their nationalistically inspired attempts to portray the great deeds of Ital-
ian heroes through "Italian" textual and musical forms and styles.74 And
witness especially Mascagni's attempt at reviving the Italian tradition of
commedia dell'arte, his "commedia lirica e giocosa" Le maschere, whose
simultaneous premiere in seven different Italian theaters on 17 January
1901 resulted in six fiascos and one success (Rome, where the composer
conducted). Luigi Illica's libretto offers countless parallels with Boito's
but diverges at crucial points, most notably the end, a tutti invocation of
the maschera italiana whose unmistakable Sachsian genealogy echoes
most resonantly in the last stanza:
O Tu risorta, sempre vera e umana

Col fascino immortale e trionfale,
L'inganno infrangi esotico e fatale,
E toma a fecondar, Grande e Italiana!75
[O You, resurrected, always true and human, with your immortal and tri-
umphant charm, break the fatal exotic spell, and return to fecundate,
Great and Italian!]
Mascagni set this text as an emphatic choral hymn, the kind of unison
excess that has given him a bad name, but that did not save him from
the boos of an unprecedentedly large audience in 1901. Franchetti and
Leoncavallo had not fared much better, highlighting not only what Luca
Zoppelli has called the "dramaturgical incoherence" of these

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Falstaff at Italy's Fin de Sicle 301
attempts at nationalistic music theater, but also the widening gap be-
tween their ideological agenda and the climate of 1890s Italy.76
Yet, it is precisely to the worrying perception of a consonance be-
tween this climate and Falstaff that the early reception of Verdi's opera
responded. It was not only a matter of fin-de-siecle disillusion over the
present state and future prospects of the nation, as suggested earlier, but
also of a suspicion that Falstaff was not a celebration of the grand tradi-
tion of Italian opera, which at this point was practically synonymous
with Verdian opera. Verdi the prophet of the Risorgimento and its last
surviving witness stood for an age in which opera was the product of a
unified society and a unified culture, an age in which the artist could ef-
fortlessly address his fellow artists and the public, Kenner and Liebhaber,
at the same time, and aesthetically as well as politically. It is this fiction
that the critics tried to keep alive when they saluted Falstaff as a master-
piece of Italian art. The slippage from the aesthetic to the political is
crucial to this critical move, as it is to Italian cultural politics of the
post-unification years in general. These cultural politics were centrally
concerned with inventing a tradition for the new nation in which Ital-
ians could find themselves as Italians, in which they could make them-
selves into Italians. Dante, Rossini, and Manzoni were presented as na-
tional heroes whose example was relevant for the Italy of the present.
Against a cultural and ideological tradition that claimed an unbroken
continuity between past and present, that founded the present on the
past, it is no wonder that Falstaff embarrassed audiences and critics: it
was not an Italian opera of the known kind, nor was it a celebration of
Italian opera; on the contrary, it participated in the discourse of doubt
and questioning that characterized the Italian fin de siecle. In short, it
was moder. And it was precisely by being moder that Falstaff cast
doubt on the myth-making enterprise to which Italian culture (Verdi
conspicuously included) had devoted itself in the post-unification
decades. In this sense, Falstaff belongs fully to the Italian fin de siecle.
But it is precisely by espousing doubt, that is, by being modem, that it
also belongs to us, partaking equally as richly in the history of our own,
recently deceased century.
By way of conclusion, I would like to make a few gestures toward a
study of Falstaff and the twentieth century. In 1895 Richard Strauss sent
the score of Guntram to Verdi "as a token of my sincere admiration ...
[since] I can find no words to describe the impression made on me by the
extraordinary beauty of Falstaff."77 He found much more than words in
the fifty years to come: just think of Ariadne auf Naxos and, especially,
Capriccio, in which a sonnet accompanied by harp is the mold in which
he casts a debate over the relationship between words and music in

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opera. Stravinsky famously disliked Falstaff, pronouncing instead Rigo-

letto Verdi's highest achievement. Was he perhaps trying to keep probing
eyes from discovering that Falstaff had left traces on some of his most fa-
mous neoclassical scores-from Dumbarton Oaks, whose second move-
ment's initial melody comes straight out of Verdi's opera, to Jeu de cartes,
whose three parts are opened by a fanfare that is a rhythmic augmenta-
tion of Falstaffs fugue subject?78 And, finally, what about this fugue as
the missing link between "Questo e il fin di chi fa mal" and "Good
people, just a moment," the moral of The Rake's Progress? It is here that
Baba the Turk, the most Verdian of the opera's characters, states her
credo that "all men are mad: all they say or do is theater"-that is to say,
"tutto nel mondo e burla, l'uom e nato burlone." Falstaffs brand of oper-
atic modernity might well be found at the core of one story of twentieth-
century opera, a story that sees as its main characters-besides Ariadne
auf Naxos, Capriccio, and The Rake's Progress-Gianni Schicchi, Turandot,
Die Dreigroschenoper, L'Enfant et les sortiliges, Candide, Le Grand Macabre,
and La vera storia. Verdi might not have been entirely displeased with
this progeny.
Notes
Previous versions or parts of this article were read at Columbia, Bristol, and Comell; at
the International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, Royal Holloway, Univer-
sity of London, June 2000; at the conference "The Politics of Opera," European Humani-
ties Research Centre, Oxford, July 2000; and as a response to the position paper by Linda
Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, " 'Tutto nel mondo e burla': Rethinking Late Style in
Verdi (and Wagner)," at the Verdi 2001 Centenary Conference, Parma, New York, and
New Haven, Jan.-Feb. 2001. Many thanks to the audiences at these airings for their re-
sponses and suggestions, several of which have found their way into the written version,
as well as to Laura Basini, Alessandra Campana, Suzie Clark, Sarah McKibben, Roger
Parker, David Rosen, and Michael P. Steinberg for their comments on earlier drafts. I
translate the epigraph as follows: "As finale to a century, we witness upheavals, but un-
like those of the last one; it's rather-outside the public square-a fluttering of the veil
of the temple, with meaningful wrinkles and a little rending."
1. "Falstaff," commedia lirica in tre atti di Arrigo Boito, musica di Giuseppe Verdi. Giudizi
della stampa italiana e straniera (Milan: Ricordi, pl.n. 96423 [1893]).
2. "Ci sentiamo lieti ed orgogliosi d'essere italiani. Non un solo amaro sentimento
guasta la nostra gioia. Noi ci uniamo al popolo italiano tutto quanto nel rendere omag-
gio, nel gridare evviva a Giuseppe Verdi ... esempio mai piu dimenticabile d'una vita
virtuosa, severa, serena, che rifulge tra i presenti ad annunziare ancora una volta questa
cara e vecchia novella:-che l'antico valor negli italici cor non i ancora spento....
Salute e gloria, o grande italiano! Su quella sua fronte alta e serena s'irradia oggi il genio
immortale della nostra patria e del gran nome latino." "Falstaff' . . . Giudizi, 48. For a
summary of Falstaffs reception, see James A. Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi: "Falstaff' (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 138-44.

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3. "II pubblico pero non ha avvertito, come avverra in seguito, tutti i particolari bellis-
simi di questo interessantissimo quadro.... Ma, ripeto, le successive udizioni dovranno
pei profani togliere i punti interrogativi, squarciare il velo di recondite bellezze, di finezze
incantevoli, di cui tutto quest'atto va adomo. Non intendo con cio dire per altro che il
successo sia andato declinando: che l'interesse e sempre stato vivo, ed il godimento, da
parte soprattutto dei molti musicisti, profondo ed intenso." "Falstaff" ... Giudizi, 7, 13.
4. See Bruno Tobia, "Una cultura per la nuova Italia," in Storia d'Italia, ed. Giovanni
Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto, vol. 4, I nuovo stato e la societa civile, 1861-1887 (Bari:
Laterza, 1995), 428. It seems that D'Azeglio actually never said these precise words:
"Fatta l'Italia, bisogna fare gl'italiani" is how in 1896 Ferdinando Martini, who had been
minister for education (and who had attended the first performance of Falstaff in this of-
ficial role), summarized the moral of D'Azeglio's I miei ricordi, published posthumously in
1867.
5. The reference is of course to Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections

on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). For two studies
that explicitly acknowledge the foundational value of D'Azeglio's pronouncement in the
Italian context and elaborate its historiographical implications in the light of Anderson's
and other recent reflections on nationalism, see Umberto Levra, Fare gli italiani. Memoria
e celebrazione del Risorgimento (Turin: Comitato di Torino dell'Istituto per la Storia del
Risorgimento italiano, 1992) and Fare gli italiani. Scuola e cultura nell'Italia contempo-
ranea, vol. 1, La nascita dello stato nazionale, ed. Simonetta Soldani and Gabriele Turi
(Bologna: II Mulino, 1993), especially the editors' introduction, 9-33.
6. See Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions," and "Mass-Producing

Traditions, Europe 1870-1914," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and
Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-14 and 263-307;
and John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), especially the editor's introduction, "Memory and
Identity: The History of a Relationship," 3-24. For a recent critical overview of theories
of nationalism, see Lloyd Kramer, "Historical Narratives and the Meaning of National-
ism," Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997): 525-45.
7. See Carlo Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1967),
255-303. The celebratory poetry generated by the 1865 commemorations was later col-
lected as part of the Poesie di mille autori intoro a Dante Alighieri, edited by Carlo Del
Balzo: it filled five of the fifteen volumes of this anthology.
8. See Tobia, "Una cultura per la nuova Italia," 510, and Tobia, Una patria per gli italiani.
Spazi, itinerari, monumenti dell'Italia unita (1870-1900) (Bari: Laterza, 1991).
9. See Tobia, "Una cultura per la nuova Italia," 511.
10. For a significant publication monumentalizing this event, see Onoranze florentine a
Gioachino Rossini, inaugurandosi in Santa Croce il monumento al grande Maestro (XXIII
giugno MCMII) (Florence: Galletti e Cocci, 1902). The nearly hysterical demonstrations
with which the train carrying Bellini's remains from Paris to his native Catania in 1876
was greeted throughout Italy can be understood only partially within the nationalistic
rubric; see John Rosselli, The Life of Bellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 5-6.
11. "Avresti dovuto anche prima d'ora capire che il mio Io e sparito, e che ora non
sono che una penna per scrivere alla meglio quattro note ed una mano per offrire il mio

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obolo all'effettuazione di questa Festa patria. ... Cosa importa allora che il componi-
mento manchi d'unita? ... Basta che il giorno arrivi, che la solennita abbia luogo, infine
che il Fatto storico, intendi bene: Fatto storico, esista"; Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro
Luzio, eds., I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan: Commissione esecutiva per le onoranze
a Giuseppe Verdi, 1913), 211-13 (Verdi to Angelo Mariani, 19 Aug. 1869); partially
translated in David Rosen, Verdi: "Requiem" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 3. The translation in Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Verdi: A Biography (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1993), 561, does not do justice to Verdi's emphatic tone.
12. For Verdi's participation in the construction of his own image as a father of the na-
tion, see Roger Parker, "Arpa d'or dei fatidici vati": The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the
1840s (Parma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1997), 19-37.
13. Pasquale Villari, Le lettere meridionali ed altri scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia, 2d
ed. (Turin: Bocca, 1885), xxiv-xxv; quoted in Luisa Mangoni, "Gli intellettuali alla
prova dell'Italia unita," in Storia d'Italia, ed. Giovanni Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto,
vol. 3, Liberalismo e democrazia, 1887-1914 (Bari: Laterza, 1995), 443.
14. "Fini la bella eta leggendaria della democrazia italiana ... tutta la nazione entra in
una fase d'agitazione e d'evoluzione, che avra bisogno, e abondanza [sic], di prosa, magari
brutta, e niente affatto di poesia"; Giosue Carducci, preface to Giambi ed epodi [1882],
Edizione nazionale delle opere di Giosue Carducci, 30 vols. (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1935-40),
24:170. Unfortunately, no more readily available edition of these fascinating pages exists.
For an evaluation of this and related documents, see Alberto Asor Rosa, "Carducci e la
cultura del suo tempo," in Carducci e la letteratura italiana. Atti del convegno di Bologna,
11-13 ottobre 1985, ed. Mario Saccenti (Padua: Antenore, 1988), 9-25.
15. "Piangiamo, e lamentiamo i fati della patria. La rivelazione di gloria che appari alla
nostra fanciullezza, la epopea della nostra gioventu, la visione ideale degli anni virili, sono
disparite e chiuse per sempre"; Giosue Carducci, "Per la morte di Giuseppe Garibaldi"
[1882], in Carducci, Opere scelte, ed. Mario Saccenti, 2 vols. (Turin: Utet, 1993), 2:276.
16. Eventually Sperelli's infamous remark, "Per quattrocento bruti, morti brutalmente!"
([All this] for four hundred brutes who died brutally!), was kept. D'Annunzio's Per gli
italiani morti in Africa was published in the magazine II Capitan Fracassa on 19 Feb. 1887;
see Gabriele D'Annunzio, Prose di romanzi, ed. Ezio Raimondi, Annamaria Andreoli, and
Niva Lorenzini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), 1:287, 1129, 1229-30.
17. "Ci pare oggi uno dei bei giorni, da noi veduti quando eravamo giovani, della lotta
per la indipendenza nazionale, quando tutto appariva bello, roseo, promettente.... Per
un momento dimentichiamo il dolore costante della nostra esistenza, di vedere la nostra
patria cosi diversa da quella che la vorremmo e l'avevamo sognata. Uno dei piu vecchi
ormai fra gli Italiani, egli sta a far vedere quali esempi di gioventi perenne ci possano es-
sere in questa nostra vecchia razza.... O voi, giovani, che udite noi, uomini di poca
fede, cosi spesso diffidare della patria e del suo avvenire:-specchiatevi!-O voi giovani,
imparate e ricordate"; "Falstaff' . . . Giudizi, 48-49.
18. James Hepokoski has thoroughly documented the unprecedented effort that went
into the preparation of the first performance and publication of the opera under Giulio
Ricordi's general guidance: see James A. Hepokoski, "The Compositional History of
Verdi's Falstaff: A Study of the Autograph Score and Early Editions" (Ph.D. diss., Har-
vard University, 1979), esp. 1-207; "Under the Eye of the Verdian Bear: Notes on the
Rehearsals and Premiere of Falstaff," Musical Quarterly 71 (1985): 135-56; and "Overrid-
ing the Autograph Score: The Problem of Textual Authority in Verdi's Falstaff," Studi

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verdiani 8 (1992): 13-51. The publication of the collection of reviews was of course an
important aspect of Ricordi's publicity machine.
19. For a report of the parliamentary session, see "Falstaff' . . . Giudizi, 292.
20. For the exchange between Verdi, Ricordi, and Boito on the subject of the com-
poser's presence in Rome, see Hans Busch, Verdi's "Falstaff' in Letters and Contemporary
Reviews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 381-93, which presents previ-
ously unpublished correspondence. Especially interesting are Boito's and Ricordi's long
letters (19 Mar. and 4 Apr. 1893) trying to persuade Verdi that he had to be in the
capital, originally published in Carteggio Verdi-Boito, ed. Mario Medici, Marcello
Conati, and Marisa Casati, 2 vols. (Parma: Istituto di Studi Verdiani, 1978), 1:215-16,
2:431-32.
21. Most of the main reviews were left relatively intact, as sample comparisons with
the originals have proved.
22. See in particular Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 3, From "Don Carlos" to
"Falstaff," rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 445-49, which expands on
previous suggestions by Pierluigi Petrobelli and David Linthicum; and Klaus-Giinter
Werer, Spiele der Kunst: Kompositorische Verfahren in der Oper "Falstaff' von Giuseppe
Verdi (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1988), 19-63; see also Hepokoski, "Falstaff," 90-91, for a
more skeptical view.
23. Starting with George Bernard Shaw's implicit (and therefore not always compre-
hended) mockery of the 1894 London audiences for listening to it "with deep reverence,
as if Verdi, in his old age, had clasped hands with Sebastian Bach." Shaw, "Bor-Again
Italian Opera (23 May 1894)," in Shaw's Music, ed. Dan H. Laurence, 3 vols. (London:
Bodley Head, 1981), 3:219.
24. Budden, 471.
25. See Roger Parker, "Falstaff and Verdi's Final Narratives," in Leonora's Last Act: Es-
says in Verdian Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 113.
26. See especially Marco Beghelli, "Lingua dell'autocaricatura nel Falstaff," in Opera e
libretto II, ed. Gianfranco Folena, Maria Teresa Muraro, and Giovanni Morelli (Florence:
Olschki, 1993), 351-80.
27. Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon have described Verdi's "late style" in Fal-
staff in terms of "recapitulative intertextuality" with parodic intent ("Rethinking Late
Style").
28. See Jeremy Tambling, "The Laughter of Falstaff: Comedy and Italian Politics," in his
Opera and the Culture of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 95; and David
Cairns, "'Full of Nimble, Fiery and Delectable Shapes,' in "Falstaff," ed. Nicholas John,
ENO Opera Guides (London and New York: Calder-Riverrun, 1982), 41 n.
29. I matrimonj ci vogliono, senza le nozze non c'e contentezza.... e Fent. e Nan. de-
vono sposarsi. Quel loro amore mi piace, serve a far piu fresca e piu solida tutta la com-
media"; letter dated 12 July 1889, in Carteggio Verdi-Boito, 1:150; translation modified
from Busch, 11, and The Verdi-Boito Correspondence, trans. William Weaver (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 145-46.
30. Budden, 527, hears echoes of the minuet in act 1 of Don Giovanni. I am not persuaded
by the musical similarity (which does not seem to go beyond a general "minuetness"), but, if
Budden were right, then parody would be at work even more deeply, since in Mozart the

131.130.169.5 on Mon, 10 Apr 2023 07:27:02 UTC
minuet comes immediately before Giovanni's attempted rape of Zerlina-not exactly a con-
ciliatory wedding scene. Another famous Verdian minuet, one that has been connected
conclusively with Don Giovanni's, is in the first scene of Rigoletto, when the Duke tries to se-
duce the Countess of Ceprano. See Pierluigi Petrobelli, Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi
and Other Composers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 34-47.
31. This parodic connection has been noticed by Guido Paduano, Il giro di vite. Percorsi
dell'opera lirica (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1992), 158.
32. Shaw's ears are again among the most perceptive; see "A Word More About Verdi
(March 1901)," in Shaw's Music, 3:578, in which he also mentions Beethoven and
Berlioz (without naming specific works, however). See also Michele Girardi, "Fonti
francesi del Falstaff. Alcuni aspetti di drammaturgia musicale," in Arrigo Boito musicista e
letterato, ed. Giovanni Morelli (Florence: Olschki, 1994), 407-8, n. 20, followed by
Hutcheon and Hutcheon, "Rethinking Late Style."
33. The texts are taken from the philologically sophisticated Libretti d'opera italiani,
ed. Giovanna Gronda and Paolo Fabbri (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), 842, 1569; transla-
tions mine (Don Giovanni) and modified from Seven Verdi Librettos, trans. William
Weaver (New York: Norton, 1975), 533. Verdi set different versions of verses 2 and
5-6: "Poi con Ser Falstaff tutti andiamo a cena" and "Nel suo cervello ciurla / Sempre la
sua ragione."
34. For a reading of the moral of Don Giovanni as "showing six people's aimless future"
and thus undoing "any pretense to closure or symmetry," see Michael P. Steinberg, "Don
Giovanni against the Baroque; or, The Culture Punished," in On Mozart, ed. James M.
Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 203.
35. Rehearsal numbers refer to Giuseppe Verdi, Falstaff, full score (Milan: Ricordi, pl.n.
P.R.154 [c. 1954]).
36. See Marcello Conati, Verdi. Interviste e incontri, rev. ed. (Turin: EDT, 2000), 404-5:
the section on Don Giovanni in Boito's notes for a projected biography of Verdi is headed
by the words "La persecuzione del Don Giovanni" (The Persecution of Don Giovanni).
For a documentary assessment of Verdi's exposure to the music of the Viennese classics
during his early years, see Roger Parker, "'Classical' Music in Milan during Verdi's Forma-
tive Years," Studi musicali 13 (1984): 259-73.
37. See Petrobelli, Music in the Theater, 34-47; and Petrobelli, "Don Giovanni in Italia.
La fortuna dell'opera e il suo influsso," in Colloquium "Mozart und Italien" (Rom 1974),
ed. Friedrich Lippmann, Analecta Musicologica, vol. 18 (Cologne: Amo Volk and Hans
Gerig, 1978), 42.
38. "Dicendomi che desso mi avrebbe tenuto luogo di tutti i trattati e di tutti i precetti.
'Questo, egli mi soggiunse, fu l'unico mio maestro; da questa fonte attinsi la scienza a cui
mi chiedete di venir iniziato, e questo, se mi date ascolto, vi eleggerete ognora a guida e
modello.' Non solamente ebbi campo a riconoscere la verita di tali parole, ma quanto piu
minutamente considerai D. Giovanni, tanto piu si raffermo in me il convincimento che il
medesimo sia l'opera musicale pii perfetta uscita sinora da mente umana." Review from
the Turin newspaper L'opinione, 21 Mar. 1859; quoted in Alberto Basso, "II Don Giovanni
sulle scene torinesi nell'Ottocento," in Colloquium "Mozart und Italien" (Rom 1974), ed.
Friedrich Lippmann, Analecta Musicologica, vol. 18 (Cologne: Aro Volk and Hans
Gerig, 1978), 54.

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39. In 1896 the baritone even published a book on the mise-en-scene of Mozart's
opera: A propos de la mise en scene de Don Juan. Reflections et souvenirs (Paris: Dupont,
1896); see Petrobelli, "Don Giovanni in Italia," 35-36.
40. Excerpts from this novella were printed in the special issue of the magazine L'illus-
trazione italiana devoted to the premiere of Falstaff, with the title "Una fonte italiana del
Falstaff di Shakespeare" (Verdi e il "Falstaff' [Milan: Treves, 1893], 4-6). The following
year Verdi reminded Jules Huret, a journalist on the staff of the Parisian daily Le Figaro,
of II pecorone, making the extravagant claim that Boito had gone directly to Shake-
speare's source and translated from "ancient Italian"-perhaps it is not entirely coinci-
dental that Verdi pointed to this "Latin" source in connection with the French premiere
of the opera. See Conati, Interviste, 294.
41. I have explored the subject of the mimetic relationship between words and music
in Verdi's operas in "Words and Music," in The Cambridge Companion to Verdi, ed. Scott
Balthazar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
42. Libretti d'opera italiani, 1555, translation modified from Seven Verdi Librettos,
509-11.
43. See Wolfgang Osthoff, "II sonetto nel Falstaff di Verdi," in II melodramma italiano
dell'Ottocento. Studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, ed. Giorgio Pestelli (Turin: Einaudi,
1977), 157-83.
44. Sandro Orlando, "La metricologia," in L'italianistica. Introduzione allo studio della let-
teratura e della lingua italiana, ed. Giorgio Barberi Squarotti et al. (Turin: UTET, 1992),
393.
45. This theory found one of its most forceful proponents in the literary historian
Leandro Biadene, who published a book on the origins of the sonnet in 1888, five years
before the premiere of Falstaff; see Leandro Biadene, Morfologia del sonetto nei secoli
XIII-XIV (Rome: Loescher, 1888).
46. See Osthoff, 160; and Hepokoski, "Falstaff," 29.
47. Thomas Bauman has explored the musical and dramatic trajectory of the young
lovers through the opera, from the act 1 duets to the act 3 solos; see "The Young Lovers
in Falstaff," 19th-Century Music 9 (1985-86): 62-69.
48. But compare Verdi's note, made during rehearsals for the premiere, that "alla fine
del sonetto non dovrebbero baciarsi perche interrotti da Alice" (at the end of the sonnet
they ought not to kiss because they are interrupted by Alice); Hepokoski, "Under the
Eye of the Verdian Bear," 154-55.
49. Libretti d'opera italiani, 1537; the text layout has been checked against the first edi-
tion of the libretto, "Falstaff," commedia lirica in tre atti di Arrigo Boito, musica di Giuseppe
Verdi (Milan: Ricordi, 1893), 73.
50. Verdi, Falstaff, 278. In the autograph score Verdi draws a cross surrounded by dots
on Fenton's stave and writes "bacio a tempo"; Giuseppe Verdi, "Falstaff," fac-simile del-
l'autografo (Milan: Ricordi, [1951]), f.243v.
51. Mallarme's first two substantial collections were both published in 1887: Les Poesies
de Stephane Mallarme (Paris: Editions de la Revue Independante) and Album de vers et de
prose (Brussels and Paris: Librairie Nouvelle). In 1893 a larger collection appeared,
Vers et prose (Paris: Didier Perrin). See Mallarme, Oeuvres, ed. Yves-Alain Favre (Paris:

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Gamier, 1985), liii-lvi. There can be no doubt that Boito knew at least some of Mal-
larme's poems, which had been appearing in Le Parnasse contemporain since 1866.
52. The reference is to Malcolm Bowie, Mallarme and the Art of Being Difficult (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). The literature on mimesis and representation
in and around Mallarm6 is of course immense, but one cannot fail to mention Jacques
Derrida, "The Double Session [1970]," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 173-285, on which see Geoffrey Benning-
ton, "Derrida's Mallarme," in Meetings with Mallarme in Contemporary French Culture, ed.
Michael Temple (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), 126-42.
53. "Sul palco; intemo molto lontano"; Verdi, Falstaff, 353. "Como sulla scena in la b
basso senza chiave molto lontano"; Verdi, "Falstaff," fac-simile dell'autografo, f.309.
54. The harp is of course the most frequent accompanying instrument for stage songs in
nineteenth-century Italian opera, from the Willow Song in Rossini's Otello, one of the
most famous arias of the century, to Verdi's own first experiment in full-blown stage song,
Medora's romanza "Non so le tetre immagini" in his 1848 II corsaro.
55. See Gugliemo Barblan, "Spunti rivelatori nella genesi del Falstaff," in Atti del I con-
gresso interazionale di studi verdiani (31 luglio-2 agosto 1966), ed. Marcello Pavarani and
Pierluigi Petrobelli (Parma: Istituto di Studi Verdiani, 1969), 16-21; Osthoff, 169-73;
Hepokoski, "Falstaff," 46-47.
56. See Osthoff, 168-74; Budden, 511-13; Hepokoski, "Falstaff," 46, 89.
57. Hepokoski, "Falstaff," 89.
58. "Nessuna opera italiana fu concepita e scritta con intendimenti di modernita,

facendo nessuna concezione al gusto del pubblico, come il Falstaff." Review by A.
Ricchetti in the Venetian daily L'adriatico, in Giudizi, 128. "[I]ntendimenti di modern-
ita" can be translated as both "intentions of/towards modernity" and "wish for modern-
ity." The discourse of modernity and newness runs leitmotivically not only through the
early reception of the opera (for related passages, see "Falstaff' . . . Giudizi, 20, 25, 55,
84, and 98), but also in the pronouncements of its authors-or their relatives: see
Giuseppina Verdi's letter to her sister Barberina Strepponi of early Feb. 1893: "I went
to a rehearsal for the first time last night, and judging with my head, and on first im-
pression, it appears to be a new genre, even the beginning of a whole new art of music
and poetry!"; Franco Abbiati, Verdi, 4 vols. (Milan: Ricordi, 1959), 4:472, trans. in
Busch, 355.
59. Adriana Guamieri Corazzol, " 'Fate un chiasso da demoni colle palme e coi tal-
loni!'. La disgregazione dei livelli di cultura nell'opera italiana tra Ottocento e Nove-
cento," Opera e libretto II, ed. Maria Teresa Muraro and Giovanni Morelli (Florence:
Olschki, 1993), 384; reprinted as "II compositore e il librettista" in Corrazol, Musica e let-
teratura in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento (Milan: Sansoni, 2000), 98.
60. J. Peter Burkholder, "Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music," 19th-Century

Music 8 (1984-85): 76-77.
61. Burkholder, "Brahms," 79.
62. Burkholder, "Brahms," 81.
63. Walter Benjamin, "What is Epic Theatre? [second version, 1939]," in Benjamin,
Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 15, 18.

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Many thanks to Alessandra Campana for suggesting that I read Benjamin's essay in con-
nection with Falstaff, and to Michelle Duncan for sharing her Benjaminian insights.
64. Benjamin, 16.
65. At this point I should acknowledge the (rather disparate) texts that have shaped
my understanding of modernity and Falstaffs position within or against it: besides the
ones already cited, they include Leo Bersani, "Boundaries of Time and Being: Ben-
jamin, Baudelaire, Nietszche," in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1990), 47-101; Michael P. Steinberg, "The Musical Absolute,"
New German Critique 56 (spring/summer 1992): 17-42; John Deathridge, "Wagner and
the Post-Modern," Cambridge Opera Journal 4 (1992): 143-61; Richard Taruskin, "Back
to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology," 19th-Century Music 16 (1992-93): 286-302;
John Jervis, Exploring the Modem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Gary Tomlinson, "Nietzsche:
Overcoming Operatic Metaphysics," in Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 109-26; T J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes
from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); and Christo-
pher Prendergast, The Triangle of Representation (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000).
66. James Hepokoski, Verdi: "Otello" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),
49; see also Hepokoski, "Falstaff," 29, 33-34.
67. See Parker, "Falstaff and Verdi's Final Narratives," esp. 104-13.
68. "Se gli artisti del Nord e del Sud hanno tendenze diverse, e bene sieno diverse! Tutti
dovrebbero mantenere i caratteri proprj della loro nazione, come disse benissimo Wagner.
Felici voi che siete ancora i figli di Bach! E noi? Noi pure, figli di Palestrina, avevamo un
gioro una scuola grande ... e nostra! Ora s'e fatta bastarda e minaccia rovina! Se potes-
simo torare da capo?!"; Copialettere, 376; translation modified from Marcello Conati, En-
counters with Verdi, trans. Richard Stokes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 153.
69. "Io non ci capisco niente," as reported in 1927 by Cesare Pascarella to Emilio Cec-
chi, who mentions the episode in his Taccuini, ed. Niccolo Gallo and Pietro Citati (Mi-
lan: Mondadori, 1976), 441.
70. See Bruno Barilli, II paese del melodramma [1930] (Milan: Adelphi, 2000), 18-19;
for a summary of Stravinsky's anti-Falstaff remarks, see Angelo Cantoni, "Verdi e
Stravinskij," Studi verdiani 10 (1994-1995): 127-54.
71. J. Peter Burkholder, "Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream in Music of the
Last Hundred Years," Journal of Musicology 2 (1983): 120.
72. See Arthur Groos, "Constructing Nuremberg: Typological and Proleptic Commu-
nities in Die Meistersinger," 19th-Century Music 16 (1992-93): 18-34; Lydia Goehr, The
Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998), 48-87.
73. It is precisely its insistence on a direct connection between Falstaff and Italian poli-
tics, one that sees the former as a unmediated reflection of the latter, that makes Jeremy
Tambling's otherwise interesting interpretation in his "Laughter of Falstaff' ultimately
unconvincing.
74. See Luca Zoppelli, "The Twilight of the True Gods: Cristoforo Colombo, I Medici,
and the Construction of Italian History," Cambridge Opera Journal 8 (1996): 251-69; see

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also Carlo Piccardi, "Ossessione dell'italianita. II primato perduto tra nostalgia classicis-
tica e riscatto nazionale," in Nazionalismo e cosmopolitismo nell'opera fra '800 e '900. Atti
del 3o convegno internazionale "Ruggero Leoncavallo e il suo tempo," ed. Lorenza Guiot and
Jiirgen Maehder (Milan: Sonzogno, 1998), 25-57.
75. Text taken from the piano-vocal score, Le maschere, commedia lirica e giocosa in un
prologo e tre atti, soggetto di Luigi Illica, musica di Pietro Mascagni (Milan: Sonzogno, pl.n.
E1034S [1901]).
76. Zoppelli, 269.
77. "Voglia benignamente accettare in segno d'omaggio ed Ammirazione... non

trovando parole per esprimere la grande impressione, che mi fece la straordinaria bellezza
di Falstaff'; letter in Italian dated 18 Jan. 1895, in Carteggi verdiani, ed. Alessandro Luzio,
4 vols. (Rome: Reale Accademia d'Italia and Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei,
1935-47), 4:35; Verdi asked Ricordi whether this Strauss was the same as the composer
of waltzes, and then sent him a superficially polite thank-you note (both letters in
Conati, Interviste, 331-32).
78. See Cantoni, "Verdi e Stravinskij."

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Verdi's "Falstaff" at Italy's Fin de Siècle

Author(s): Emanuele Senici

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600914

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Two months after the premiere of Verdi's Falstaff at La Scala, Milan, in

I doubt that my unease at this kind of nationalistic rhetoric was shared

The Musical Quarterly 85(2), Summer 2001, pp. 274-310

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Following in the footsteps of Benedetto Croce, standard histories of Italy

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message shows an awareness of the crucial role played by cultural homo-

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that in a famous speech commemorating Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of

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celebration in a country plagued internally by political scandals and so-

An Old Song Newly Intoned

Discussions of the music of Falstaff have involved various analytical

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of the act 4 finale beginning "Tutto e tranquillo e placido" in relation to

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ble associations with religion. Falstaffs text, penned by Arrigo Boito,

Don Giovanni, final scene

Zerlina, Masetto, Leporello: E noi tutti, o buona gente,

Tutti: Questo e il fin di chi fa mal:

Falstaff, final scene

Falstaff: Un coro e terminiam la scena.

Ford: E poi con Falstaff, tutti, andiamo a cena.

Tutti: Tutto nel mondo e burla.

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Tut-to nel mondo e bur-la. L'uom e na-to bur-lo-ne,bur-lo-ne,bur - lo-ne,

Example 1. Verdi, Falstaff, final fugue, subject

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truly new, there is no chance of critically overcoming the past-the ul-

Song and Aria, Words and Music

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Fenton: Dal labbro il canto estasiato vola

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A recent introduction to Italian literature describes this form or genre in

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The progression may be from kissing to singing (from body to voice), or

In questo punto e cessato il baccano e tutti sentono il susurro del bacio.49

In the printed score the kiss is indicated with a diamond-shaped minim

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traditional systems of representation in fin-de-siecle art-that is to say,

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toward a blurring of the distinction between stage music and unheard

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sound of sound is set to unquestionably mimetic music. Here the circu-

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would temper this resolute placing of Falstaff in an abstract listening space

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