‘Repatriating’ <i>Falstaff</i>: Boito, Verdi and Shakespeare (in Translation)

The 100th anniversary of Verdi’s death, observed in 2001, inspired nearly a dozen academic conferences. At the dawn of his 2013 bicentennial, a celebratory year shared with Richard Wagner, hundreds of recent studies assess Verdi’s life, his works, and his impact. The present article surveys a selection of books and articles published between these two commemorations. A popular topic is Verdi’s role as a national icon, the calculated product of Italy’s search for a postunification identity. His engagement with foreign cultures has also received attention, for his German literary sources, his forays into French grand opera, and his use of exotic settings. Recent studies of Verdi’s operas often focus on the testing of boundaries, whether between genres, genders, or psychological states. While musical analyses still engage with operatic convention, they also examine other features, such as melody, meter, and tempo. Visual aspects of performance (set design, lighting, staging), considered separately in some studies and as a unified concept in others, constitute a newer area of scholarly interest.

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Opera-Film as Television: Remediation in Tony Britten's Falstaff

Citron¹

2017

Journal of the American Musicological Society

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Tony Britten's film Falstaff (2008) is an unusual, even radical opera-film. An updated treatment with a colloquial English translation and a chamber arrangement, and lacking many operatic elements, the film enacts a remediation of opera-film through the medium of television. Remediation, as conceived by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, refers to “the representation of one medium in another,” and its goal “is to refashion or rehabilitate other media.” Britten's Falstaff is strongly influenced by British popular television, especially British situation comedy. Sitcoms that emphasize working-class culture and “lads’ humor”—such as Only Fools and Horses and Men Behaving Badly respectively—resonate conspicuously with this Falstaff. In addition, television features prominently in it by virtue of the fact that protagonist John Falstaff is a former television star. The implications of this remediated opera-film for Verdi and Boito's opera are also of considerable interest. In critical ways associated with music, text, and narrative, the opera is highly suited to Britten's conception. Building on the work of Denise Gallo, I propose that Britten's film marks another moment in the struggle for national ownership of the Merry Wives material. In this sense the film articulates an “Englishizing” of Verdi and Boito's opera. The new kind of opera-film represented by Britten's Falstaff reinforces the idea of “television opera” as a genre that takes advantage of television's medial and aesthetic capabilities, and expands its purview to adaptations as well as new operas.

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‘Repatriating’ Falstaff: Boito, Verdi and Shakespeare (in Translation)

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Falstaff

Falstaff

Verdi at 200: Recent Scholarship on the Composer and His Works

Opera-Film as Television: Remediation in Tony Britten's Falstaff

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