James Hepokoski

Verdi, Giuseppina Pasqua, and the Composition of "Falstaff"

Of all the stories told about Giuseppe Verdis last opera, Falstaff, one of the most frequently repeated is that of the nearly eighty-year-old composer of tragedies finally deciding to write this commedia lirica at his leisure and for his own gratification only. Thus it would seem that at the very end of his career his attitude towards his compositions and their public reception had changed in some significant man-

The second cycle of tone poems

Things suddenly deprived of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so called order of things … make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil’s domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness). For those connoisseurs in the mid and late 1890s who were tracking the latest developments of musical “progress” ( Fortschritt ) in Austro-Germanic art music, there was no doubt. The most innovative orchestral works of the decade were the tone poems of the young modernist, Richard Strauss. Debated everywhere in these circles were the four stunners that comprise his second cycle of tone poems, each of which outflanked its predecessor in extremity and provocation: Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1894–5), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), and Ein Heldenleben (1897–8). (A later work, Symphonia domestica [1902–3], not considered in this essay, may be regarded as an extension to this cycle, as might Eine Alpensinfonie [1915], for which Strauss jotted down a few sketches as early as 1899, considerably before taking up the work in earnest over a decade later.) For listeners today, becoming acquainted with their narrative programs along with a basic history of their composition is a simple task. Such background information is well known and widely available. The more pressing issue is to orient ourselves to the larger artistic purposes that motivated these works in the first place.