"Chimes" in Sarasota

Margaret writes to tell us that the new Criterion version of Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles's unique rendering of Falstaff, will soon be available at our libraries:

Five copies of Chimes At Midnight were ordered by the Sarasota Library system on 7-22-16 - one for each branch. I'm #2 on the reserved list. The reviews and cast Are excellent!

I saw the film many years ago - despite the wear of time and tape, it was unforgettable.

The New Yorker's Richard Brody offers some remarks that might apply to Verdi and Boito's Falstaff as well:

Falstaff is great—at “nothing,” in Shakespeare’s phrase—but a nothing which, as Falstaff himself knows and says, is “all the world.” He flaunts the open maw of desire, the sumptuous thrill of pleasure. He embodies the brazenly lighthearted and insolent, proud and arrogant hero, the very soul of illicit dreams—the principle of life itself, of a vitality that knows no shadow, that itself casts a dazzling artificial light that overwhelms reason even as it sharpens wit.

 Looking forward to the Criterion edition. Once again the trailer:

A bit of Falstaff

Maestri as Falstaff

Verdi's last opera didn't come easily. With Arrigo Boito, the composer worked on Falstsaff in fits and starts for three years. Verdi turned 80 before it was complete.

At one point in a letter he described the opera as a madman that he had to subdue:

The Big Belly ["pancione" -- the name given to the opera before the composition of Falstaff became public knowledge] is on the road to madness. There are some days when he does not move, he sleeps, and is in a bad humour. At other times he shouts, runs, jumps, and tears the place apart; I let him act up a bit, but if he goes on like this, I will put him in a muzzle and straitjacket.[28]

The first performance, at La Scala, was a hit: 

at the end the applause for Verdi and the cast lasted an hour

A brief snip with Ambrogio Maestri as Falstaff at Covent Garden:

Too bad the whole production isn't yet available online. Here's a complete production of Falstaff at La Scala, conducted by Ricardo Muti, again with Maestri.

A few resources:

• Italian Libretto. 

• English translation here.

• Some background.

Verdi directing Falstaff

"I believe it will take years and years before the general public understand this masterpiece, but when they really know it they will run to hear it like they do now for Rigoletto and La traviata." - Arturo Toscanini

Summer divagation

Macbeth Royal Opera

Our reading group has hit the pause button on Paradiso for the summer, and John Goodman's lectures on Verdi and Shakespeare offer a superb distraction from the rigors of the Commedia.

John Goodman

The infinite resources of the web here offer a bi-lingual libretto of Othello, the next opera Mr. Goodman will tackle. 
        Here is La Scala's production /Muti, Domingo, Frittoli, Nucci, Ceron: 

  

• An annotated edition of Shakespeare's Othello can be downloaded here as a pdf.

• A simple online text of the play in modern English is here.
• Some background on the opera.

Boito and Verdi

Milton's Hamlet?

From a review of Harold Bloom's latest book, The Anatomy of Influence.

“The Anatomy of Influence” is Bloom’s effort — his last, he says — to recalibrate his great theory, only shorn of its “gnomic” obscurities and written in “a subtler language that will construe my earlier commentary for the general reader and reflect changes in my thinking.” One of those changes is that over time his notion of influence has become more orthodox, growing closer, in its sensitivity to echo and allusion, to the approach of the hated New Critics.

In a superb chapter, “Milton’s Hamlet,” Bloom shows how the Satan of “Paradise Lost” is the offspring of Hamlet, each a soliloquist who stands at a remove from the tragedy that engulfs him, puzzling out eloquent conundrums that press toward “depths beneath depths,” limitless self-consciousness. “It does not matter that Satan is an obsessed theist and Hamlet is not,” Bloom writes. “Two angelic intellects inhabit a common abyss: the post-Enlightenment ever-augmenting inner self, of which Hamlet is a precursor, intervening between Luther and Calvin, and later Descartes and Spinoza.”