Falstaff as you've never seen him before

Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff is one of the greatest delights of all music. He only wrote one comic opera (a youthful failure excepted), and he waited until he was 80 to do it. The result is a concise, quick-silver work of incomparable brilliance and splendor. It combines the theme-weaving technique of Richard Wagner with the Italian comic tradition that had produced Mozart's Don Giovanni but had lain neglected, even in Italy, for half a century.

It's impossible to be neutral about Falstaff -- either it doesn't touch you or you adore it. Conductor Arturo Toscanini thought it was Verdi's greatest opera "because it was his most beautiful." Others have seen it as a chamber work that Verdi essentially wrote for himself. Melodies and brilliant inventions flash past at the speed of light, never to reappear. One can only gasp, then go and see it a second time to hear everything you've missed.

Next week's production in Taipei is by Wei Ying-chuan (魏瑛娟), the young director of the Taiwan theater group Shakespeare's Wild Sisters. Everyone concerned is being tight-lipped about what the production will contain, but what can be gleaned is that reference in the initial publicity to the early 20th century modernist painter Piet Mondrian should now be discounted. Instead, the show will be in a high-fashion, 2005 style, with gorgeous youth-culture costumes, and make-up and hair under the guidance of the cosmetics and hair-styling products companies I Prefer, L'Oreal, Govin and Shu Uemura. The style of popular children's paper dolls, with interchangeable two-dimension cut-out dresses, will characterize aspects of both the costumes and the decor.

The plot is taken, surprisingly, from one of Shakespeare's least inspired plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor, reputedly written in a mere 11 days at the command of Elizabeth I. It doesn't matter. What does matter is the music, a veritable treasure-trove of joyous subtlety and wit, especially in the orchestra. Conductor Carlo Maria Giulini once said, only half-jokingly, that the ideal would be Falstaff without the singers, and that incidentally is a phenomenon you can hear that on some tracks of a recording of Toscanini rehearsing (Arturo Toscanini Recording Association 248), spoilt only by his outbreak of fury at one of the soloists once they arrive on the scene.

The opera's plot is that the fat, drink-sodden and antiquated knight Sir John Falstaff sets out to seduce two rich-but-married women simultaneously. The husband of one of them, Ford, sets up a plot to catch him, and although this fails he is nonetheless tipped into the River Thames from a laundry basket. Despite this loss of face, he succumbs to a second plot, to meet Ford's wife Alice at night in Windsor Forest.

The opera's last scene in the forest carries with it memories of a long sequence of night love scenes, from Le Nozze di Figaro via Rigoletto and Un Ballo in Maschera to Tristan und Isolde. It's mysterious, evocative and tenderly lyrical, and in every way a sublime conclusion to Verdi's 50-year career as an operatic composer.

"Falstaff is a comic figure because he thinks he's a great lover like Don Giovanni," said Jukka Rasilainen, the Finnish baritone who will sing the title role, earlier this week.

He believes he's attractive to women but in reality he's just old and fat. Yet he knows how to act and that's, in part, his salvation. He may come from a noble family, but the reality is that he lives off theft -- he just gets other people to do his stealing for him. But it could be that his being a minor aristocrat, even a down-at-heel one, appeals to some of the women he chases.