In Salzburg, a modern Verdi production tries to say more than Shakespeare could
Nicholas M. Gallagher
In 1773-77 in Salzburg, using amateur musicians who were generally sight-reading the music or court professionals who were often drunk and disinterested, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart premiered many of the most sublime chamber and choral works ever written. In 1922 in Salzburg, director Max Reinhardt, playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, composer Richard Strauss, and other artistic luminaries battled the poverty and despair of post-WWI Austria to create the Salzburg Festival, one of the most important annual cultural events in Europe and a celebration of all that is good and vital in its shared artistic legacy. And in 2023 in Salzburg, Christoph Marthaler used the full resources available to the now-very-prosperous Austria and the now-very-successful festival, including superb singers and the Vienna Philharmonic as his pit orchestra, to put on one of the worst opera productions I have ever seen in my life.
Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff seems virtually made for a festival such as Salzburg. Written by an Italian genius, Verdi, to a libretto drawn from an English genius (Shakespeare, on whose Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, Part I and II it draws), and now performed to a German-speaking audience by singers from every corner of the continent, it evokes exactly the kind of pan-European arts tradition that the founders and sustainers of the festival were keen to promote. And while the opera has a reputation for being difficult musically, dramatically, the possibilities are virtually endless.
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John Falstaff is a hard-drinking British knight, braggart, and self-proclaimed ladies’ man. Down on his luck, he resolves to seduce a few wealthy married ladies to restore his fortune. But not only does he make the mistake of sending the same love letter to two friends, but his prowess with the ladies turns out to be more Don Quixote than Don Giovanni. Instead of swooning, the ladies, their friends, a husband, and even Falstaff’s followers conspire against him. Hijinks, including a famous moment when Falstaff is hidden in a laundry basket and then thrown into the River Thames, ensue.
Or so it is supposed to go. This production did not go as Verdi intended, and it did not go well. That’s because Marthaler produced Falstaff according to a specific style of opera that can in rare cases be great, but in most cases is, like so much modern art, just weird for the sake of weird.
Marthaler’s concept, if that term is not too generous, is set in what appears to be Southern California circa 1970, partly on a film set. (Loosely inspired, emphasis on loosely, by Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, yet another adaptation of Shakespeare’s Falstaff plays.) But things rapidly break down from there. The eponymous merry wives are wearing wintery tweed dresses yet lounge on sun chairs and continually go to dip their (heavily shod) feet in a (completely empty) pool. The bar scenes are shot in what appears to be a studio from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nobody has ever drunk here and, indeed, in this opera, nobody ever will.
In the final act, things veer from pointlessness to complete incoherence: It is supposed to be set in a forest at night, with characters disguised in various costumes, as confusion, surprise, and physical comedy ensue. This version is under klieg lights, with almost all characters dressed as they were, and the only set is some plywood stairs that Falstaff keeps climbing up or tripping over. I have no idea what is going on, and by this point, I strongly suspect that neither does Marthaler.
The one thing that is consistently clear is that if you came here expecting to see Falstaff, screw you. For instance, Falstaff is famously fat. The lead actor here is skinny. But there is a dumb-show actor (playing “Orson W.,” the director in the movie concept that has been superimposed on the opera) who is fat, reminding you that Marthaler knows what a Falstaff should look like. And in case you think this is just a coincidence, Falstaff is offered a fat suit a half-dozen times and refuses, while at the end of the play, “Orson” comes out in a knight’s suit of armor.
And if any of my readers is muttering “subverting expectations,” I will find you. As noted opera authority Margot Robbie (an actress who actually did manage to subvert expectations successfully this summer) remarked, the point of subverting expectations is to give you “the thing you didn’t know you wanted.” Or needed. Or to say something, anything at all. The only point here seems to be that if you came here to see Falstaff, you won’t get that — but you won’t get anything else coherent, either.
It would be merely annoying to conclude that Marthaler wanted to poke his audience in the eye. It is far more disturbing to consider that he considered it his professional duty to do so.
None of this is by accident. There is a tradition in opera production, especially in Europe, that explains what Marthaler was trying to do (though nothing explains why he’d fail so badly in the attempt): Regietheater, the “director’s theater.” Its history, and Germany’s larger history, can explain part of what bedeviled the festival in Salzburg this year. North of the Alps that hedge Salzburg round lies Bayreuth, home of the eponymous festival founded by Richard Wagner. After World War II, the festival faced utter ruin. Wagner himself, though he died well before the war, was an open and notorious antisemite. Hitler, a lifelong Wagner fan, had associated his regime so thoroughly with Wagner’s work as to name some of his most evil decrees after allusions to the composer’s works. And the dictator had been a yearly attendant at the Bayreuth Festival, at which the Wagner family had been enthusiastic friends and admirers. Thus, after the war, Winifred Wagner, the composer’s daughter-in-law and the power in the family at the time, was banned for life from participating in the festival (she never repented), and the theater was shuttered.
But there was a sense, widely shared then and since, that for all this filth, it was impossible to delete Wagner from the artistic canon. Thus, a cleansing was needed. For the time and place, at least, it was found in the form of Wagner’s grandson Wieland, who invented what came to be known as Regietheater. Under this approach, the director’s will could not only reinterpret but override the “text” of the work being produced. Thus, in Wieland’s seminal production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, not only were the Viking horns and shields done away with, but it was performed on a bare white disk. In a later production of Lohengrin, Wieland imposed the device of a static Greek chorus on an opera that nowhere called for one.
Two things should be made clear to avoid any confusion: First, by some accounts, early Regie, such as Wieland’s, was brilliant, liberating stuff. His Lohengrin, for instance, was based on deep research into Richard Wagner, which uncovered that he had been reading Aeschylus while writing the opera, and progressed from there. Second, Regietheater does not mean simply modern adaptations of a classic setting, or left-wing or otherwise political work. Thus, an adaptation of, say, Falstaff set in modern England in which Falstaff bore an obvious resemblance to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for instance, would not be Regie — Johnson is an obviously Falstaffian character, and a lot of interesting things could be said in such a production that was true to the text, or even shed new light on it. The defining characteristic of Regie is that it contradicts the text. Thus, having it be glaringly bright when characters are singing about being in the dark, no liquid in sight when characters are singing about drinking, or, at the more extreme end, having characters who simply aren’t in the script coming onstage to do things that are not in the play and in fact contradict it, to take three examples from Marthaler’s Falstaff.
Once this is seen, it’s not hard to understand why most Regie productions are a failure: To pull it off, you need not only to be able to interpret Wagner, Verdi, or Shakespeare in a nuanced and meaningful way, hard enough on its own, but to say something so brilliant that it’s successful even while fighting one of those titans. No wonder one of the few examples of it going well is essentially a family quarrel.
There is, however, a very powerful cultural tendency supporting Regie on the grounds it is “subversive” no matter how dominant and accepted it becomes — even as its shortcomings on artistic merit are becoming, one hopes, more apparent, and its claims to power correspondingly more threadbare.
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G. K. Chesterton remarked that in writing Falstaff, Shakespeare went beyond crafting a character and created a myth. That is, much like Robin Hood or Santa Claus, Falstaff is a character who is recognizable outside of his original work and whom readers come to believe is in some enduring sense real. “We feel that whenever we hammer on the house of Falstaff, Falstaff will be at home.”
What exactly he would be like when he answered the door is a matter of some debate — Chesterton felt that Falstaff’s essential awareness of his manifest flaws meant that despite or even because of them, the soul of his character was essentially Christian (and even charming). Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, thought Falstaff was a true scoundrel. But both of them (and many others) felt there was something there worth considering and debating. Even in a world in which Falstaff is somewhat less recognizable as a myth than in Chesterton’s time, there are still plenty of boastful, overconfident, inwardly vulnerable, outwardly incorrigible men around causing chaos, arousing pity in some and fury in others, no? Yet people won’t knock on Falstaff’s door or consider how they view him when he answers it if those charged with provoking our thoughts perform their own work so thoughtlessly.
Nicholas M. Gallagher is a lawyer and culture writer.