The last works of both Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) were written in a final burst of creative energy called up after each of them had, he thought, retired.

At the time of his intended retirement in 1890, Brahms had published exactly 20 chamber works[1].  No fewer than nine of these – the three violins sonatas, the second cello sonata, the three piano trios[2] and the two string quintets — were written in the ten-years that ended in 1890, during the period of his full maturity as a composer.  With the publication of the second String Quintet, Op. 111, the great man said he was tired and had decided to leave composition to “the young folk”.

But in 1891, Brahms heard Richard Mühlfeld (1856 – 1907) play the clarinet and became enchanted with the beautiful sound that the younger man drew from the instrument.  The two became friends – some modern commentators suggest (or want to believe) that they were extremely close friends.  The result was that Brahms came out of retirement to write four final chamber works, all for the clarinet.  These are the Clarinet Trio (clarinet, cello, piano), Op. 114; the Clarinet Quintet (string quartet plus clarinet), Op. 115; and the two Clarinet Sonatas (clarinet and piano), Op. 120.

The trio is a wonderful work, but its dark tone has placed it in the shadow of the quintet.  I personally would rank the quintet among the very finest musical works we have.  Brahms uses the tonal resources of the clarinet to the highest advantage.  The woody, reedy lower register of the instrument, its liquid middle range, and its brilliant upper register are used sometimes as a counterweight to the strings or a commentary on their activity.  At other times, the clarinet combines with one or more of the string instruments while the others either rest or conduct their own conversation. The work has an air of mystery, of autumnal sadness and resignation, particularly in the two outer movements.  The second movement is among the most beautiful that Brahms ever wrote.  It demonstrates his ability to hold us in suspense while he draws out the musical line.  The third movement provides a moment of frolic in an otherwise solemn piece.  The fourth movement is a theme and variations, a favorite genre of Brahms and one that he used throughout his career.  The mysterious theme that opened the work reappears at the end to close it, although it has been just below the surface throughout.

You wouldn’t think that the combination of clarinet and piano would work.  Our intuition is that the piano would overwhelm its partner, particularly considering the typical density of Brahms’s writing for the piano.  But the two go together like ham and eggs.  After hearing the two sonatas, you would think that the clarinet and piano were the most natural pairing in the world.

The two sonatas provide a nice contrast to each other.  The first, in a minor key, is in four movements.  The second is in the gentle key of E-flat major in three movements.  The first is dramatic and declamatory, at least in its outer movements.  The second exudes charm, warmth, and geniality.  The second ends with a delightful theme and variations, a final nod by the composer to a format he loved so well.

All of Brahms’s late chamber works are a distillation of the style he developed over a lifetime of composition.  The final four works for clarinet represent the perfection of that style, the finial, the capstone of his career.  In contrast, Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff, is a departure from his previous style and practice in at least three ways.

First, right up through his intended retirement following the production of Aida Verdi wrote operas against a commission.  He saw himself as an artisan, a master, who worked his craft to meet the requirements of his client.  All the great Verdi operas up to the final two were created to meet contractual obligations.  Otello and Falstaff were written in response to the cajoling of both his librettist and publisher, not in response to a commission.

Second, Falstaff is a through-composed opera.  The classic Italian opera style was to string together set numbers (usually a recitative and an aria, sometimes a set piece for two, three, four or more), each one followed by wild audience applause and then by another number.  During Verdi’s time, Wagner had discarded this practice north of the Alps as did later Italian composers, but Verdi had retained it right through Aida (he is abandoning it already in Otello).  Consequently, the orchestra plays a role in Falstaff unlike that in earlier Verdi operas.  It does not just provide the overture and accompany the singers.  It becomes a comic chorus, underscoring the humor and absurdity parading on stage.

Third, Falstaff is a comedy.  Verdi wrote one comic opera in his youth that I confess I have never seen or heard.  There are comic moments in a couple of his dramatic operas, but in general Giuseppe Verdi was not a man to play a scene for laughs.  His operas are full to overflowing with curses, gruesome deaths, witches’ spells, revenge, and ardent love sundered by death.  Yet, this master of the grotesque chose to say farewell to the theater by bringing us the person of Sir John Falstaff.

But which Sir John to present?  The character who bestrides the first part of Henry IV is one of the great comic creations of all time.  In the second part, he is less endearing, but entertains us through his endless capacity for over-statement and his taste for complicated, earthy metaphors.  However, if you are looking for a comic story in which to place him, you need to look beyond the Henry plays.  The two parts of Henry IV cannot be played for any laughs other than the ones Falstaff provides.  Unfortunately, the comedy in which Falstaff appears, The Merry Wives of Windsor, is not reckoned among Shakespeare’s finest works and the Falstaff in the lighter play is more a lecher than the comic Roman candle of the Henry plays.[3]

The solution was to import the Falstaff of the Henry IV plays into the comedy.  The broad outline of the Merry Wives plot is retained, but the Falstaff is the more interesting fellow we got to know in Henry IV Parts One and Two, particularly Part One.  Any number of his speeches find their way into the opera, but in entirely new contexts.

To take one example, in Henry IV Part One, Falstaff and Prince Hal (the future Henry V) are about to go into battle.  Falstaff asks Hal if they can stay together during the battle.  Hal has his own work to do, reminds Falstaff that he owes God a death, and leaves the stage, where Falstaff proceeds to soliloquize.  Falstaff acknowledges that he owes God a death, but sees no reason to pay the debt ahead of the due date.  He decides to push ahead for the sake of honor, because honor “pricks him on”.  He continues:

Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I
come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or
an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no.
Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is
honour? a word.

And on in that vein until he has persuaded himself that he needs to abandon honor or risk getting himself killed.

In the opera, Falstaff writes identical letters to the two Windsor wives that he plans to seduce, Meg and Alice (pronounced Ah-LEE-che in the opera). He hands a note to each of his drinking companions Bardolph and Pistol, directing them to the respective wives.  The two refuse.  They each consider the delivery of such a note to be beneath their honor.

At that point, Falstaff launches into a tirade against the two on the theme of honor, letting them know that thieves such as they can have no concept of it.  To make his point, he incorporates the very speech that Falstaff gave to convince himself that too close an adherence to honor would result in his early death.

It’s a remarkable coup, to use virtually the same words (in a different language, of course) in the mouth of the same character, in two wildly different contexts.  It works seamlessly, and Verdi pulls this off repeatedly throughout the three acts of the opera.

He pulls it off with a heavy assist from his librettist, Arrigo Boito (1842-1918)[4], who also wrote the libretto for Otello and persuaded Verdi to come out of retirement – twice, once for Otello and again for Falstaff –  to write operas that have been a joy to music lovers ever since.  Verdi resisted powerfully both times, pleading his great age (he was nearly 80 when he finished Falstaff), his fear of leaving the work unfinished, and the like.  Reading about the incident, I get the feeling that Verdi wanted to write these operas in the worst way, but wanted the assurance that came from the constant pleading of his librettist and his publisher that they truly wanted him to do it.

Another delightful feature of the opera is Verdi’s playful use of counterpoint, rhythm, and ensemble.  Again, to take only one example and not to belabor it too much, in Act I, Scene 2, there is a moment when the wives of Windsor realize what a cad Falstaff is (after they compare the identical notes he sent them) and start to plan their revenge. In a separate group, the men of Windsor learn about Falstaff’s plan to cuckold them and have their own conversation about what they plan to do to him.  Eventually, the two choruses sing about their plans at the same time, but the two choruses use different rhythms and are out of synch with each other.  The whole thing should sound chaotic but it’s held together by a tenor voice that rises above the fray and somehow brings order out of chaos.  The tenor is Fenton, the male half of a pair of young lovers.  His passionate but unconsummated affair with Nannetta provides an ongoing subplot throughout the work.  Verdi keeps pulling these rabbits out of his hat throughout the performance and caps the whole thing with a twelve-part fugue at the end.  The effect seems magical, but we know it is the result of the skill of a genius who interrupted his retirement for no purpose other than to entertain us.

If you don’t know these works and are interested in exploring, I’ll mention some favorite recordings.  I have never heard a bad recording of any of the Brahms pieces mentioned, but still there are some standouts.  Brahms Piano Trios:  Try the Stern-Rose-Istomin trio.  The recording is nearly 50 years old, still sounds great, and the performances are flawless.  Brahms Violin Sonatas: I like Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy.  Brahms Cello Sonatas: Leonard Rose and Jean-Bernard Pommier.  (I believe this was the last recording Rose made.)  Brahms String Quintets:  Look for a recording by the Boston Chamber Music Society.  Brahms Clarinet Trio and Quintet: Again, look for Boston Chamber Music Society (the two pieces are on one disc).  For the Clarinet Sonatas, I am drawn to Karl Leister and Gerhard Oppitz.

There are a lot of recordings of Falstaff.  The quality is a bit more uneven than with the Brahms pieces.  Two that I favor are each long in the tooth.  Herbert von Karajan recorded the opera twice.  I strongly prefer the earlier of the two with Tito Gobbi as Falstaff.  It was recorded in 1956, but don’t let that put you off.  Recording engineers knew what they were doing back then and the sound is absolutely fine.  Von Karajan can be eccentric in the Austro-German music that you would think would be in his wheelhouse, but set him down in an Italian opera and he shines like almost no one else.

I was listening to that recording a few days ago.  It stopped playing near the end of the first act.  The disc had gotten scratched.  I’m going to replace it but in the meantime, I took down from the shelf a 1950 mono recording by Toscanini.  There is applause after each act, so it’s a live performance but I think it must have been live in the studio, not on stage.  The remastered sound has a remarkable immediacy and you get to hear one of the greatest conductors of all time in one of his favorite operas.  One critic says that this is the finest opera recording ever made.

[1] He had written more than that.  He was highly self-critical and held his work to the sternest standards.  As a result, he burned numerous manuscripts of chamber music just before his death.  The loss is to be deeply regretted.  The works may not have met his standards, but they would have given great pleasure to countless listeners.  I have often wondered why, if he was so intent on destroying any chamber work that was less than perfect, he allowed the Piano Quartet No. 2, Op. 26 to survive the flames.

[2] We should put an asterisk next to one of the piano trios.  The first one was a work written in Brahms’s youth, Piano Trio No. 1, Op. 8.  He had never been happy with it and in his later years put the work through an extensive revision.  He thought about keeping both versions in the catalog, numbering the newer version as Op. 108.  He changed his mind and retained the original number for the revised work (and used Op. 108 for the third violin sonata).  Consequently, a work with the very early number Opus 8 is in fact the fruit of his ripest maturity.  It is one of the great treasures of the chamber music literature.

[3] The story, which might be true, is that Queen Elizabeth was so taken with the Falstaff of the Henry IV plays that she decided she wanted to see him in love.  She expressed this wish aloud and the word was passed to Shakespeare’s company.  When Queen Bess wanted a play, she got one, and the story goes that Shakespeare dashed the play off in a week to meet the demands of his sovereign.  Falstaff does not appear in any later play, but he is mentioned again in Henry V, where one of the characters recounts his death.  Apparently, Shakespeare wanted to get Falstaff out of the way so that he could work at his day job without fear that the Queen would find yet another situation for Sir John.

[4] Boito is the answer to a trivia question that underscores the complete dominance of Verdi in the Italian opera of his time.  Take the period from the end of the bel canto era – roughly the early 1840s – to the start of the verismo period – say 1890 – a period just shy of half a century.  Then look at the Italian operas in the standard repertoire composed during that nearly fifty-year period.  There are only a handful that were composed by anyone other than Verdi, and for those, Boito was either the librettist or the composer or both.  He wrote the book and music for Mefistofele (based on Faust) and for Nerone and even that one should be listed with an asterisk because it was left unfinished at Boito’s death.  It was not completed and performed until 1924.  Finally, he wrote the libretto for La Gioconda.  Anyone have an example of a non-Verdi opera of this period in which Boito did not have a hand?

Some twenty years ago America was asked whether the kind of foul language that Donald Trump has used and the revolting behavior that he is accused of are acceptable in a public official.  The answer was: Yes.  It’s OK.  Bill Clinton was forgiven for the same or worse.  Instead, the Congress that impeached him was punished.  A two-term president usually suffers serious losses in both houses of Congress in his second off-year election.  Reagan lost the Senate in 1986.  George W. Bush lost both houses in 2006.  In 2014, Barack Obama lost 13 seats in the House (already in Republican hands) and saw the Senate switch to Republican control.  Yet, in 1998, the Democrats gained four seats in the House and lost no net Senate seats in the wake of the impeachment of President (Bill) Clinton.

The nation was persuaded that the sexual misbehavior of which Bill Clinton was credibly accused was separate and distinct from his ability to perform the functions of his high office.  Even the charge of rape, sufficiently credible to persuade NBC to hold the story until after the impeachment trial had ended, has never produced more than a yawn from the public.  How is it that the people who gave Bill Clinton a pass reach for the smelling salts when the less appealing Mr. Trump turns up covered with the same pitch?

I don’t see the adolescent conversation as particularly disqualifying for Donald Trump.  I agree that the alleged sexual harrassment would be disqualifying if the accusations proved to be true.  For the same reason, I think Bill Clinton should have been removed from office for his goings on in the White House.  In the case of Mr. Trump, he was already unqualified to serve as president, so the alleged behavior would make him even more fully disqualified than many sensible people thought he was in the first place.  But let’s remember that there is a whole boat load of public officials with similar resumes, some of whom served without any complaints from their constituents.  Teddy Kennedy died in office.  Larry Craig chose not to run for re-election but served out his term.  The list of reprobates is much longer, needless to say.

In my humble opinion, someone who cannot govern himself or herself has no business governing others.  Why on earth would you for a moment allow policy on taxation, or trade, national defense, public health, or anything else of importance to be decided by someone who governs his conduct by soliciting sex in a public bathroom (to mention a Republican senator) or receiving oral sex in the work place (to mention a Democratic president)?

Rational people would not turn over political power to such individuals.  I would put each one of them out of office if I could.

But that’s just me.  The American public came to a different conclusion.  Bill Clinton left office with a very high approval rating.  He lost some ground when the public judged that he sold pardons at the end of his time in office.  He founded the various Clinton charities to rebuild his reputation and at this point his financial and sexual transgressions in office seem to have been forgotten even as later ones of both varieties have been overlooked.

And let’s remember that the inability to govern oneself can be displayed in ways other than sexual misconduct.  Financial corruption, lying, contempt for legal standards and requirements, these too are symptoms of an un-self-governed personality, one that is unfit to govern others.  Polling at time of writing suggests that a plurality at least of the American voting public is not moved by such considerations.

The Trump incidents point out the staggering incompetence of his primary opponents.  The taped conversations that NBC released after a decade in the vault were between Trump and a fellow named Billy Bush.  We understand that he is a cousin of Jeb, or rather Jeb!  The two of them could have worked together to bring the tapes to our attention back when Jeb was still a candidate.  But perhaps Billy could see ahead to the trouble he would be in if the taped conversations were made public.  Also, Jeb! might have felt that gentlemen of his age, class, and station in life do not engage in gutter politics.

But such a constraint was not binding on Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or Scott Walker, to name but three of the mighty 16 that Trump ultimately defeated.  I understand that Trump was a frequent guest on Howard Stern’s program in the 1990s and 2000s, where he engaged in the kind of adolescent summer camp monologues that we have become so familiar with in recent weeks.  The material to do him in was readily available.  You didn’t need a cousin at NBC to manage the job.

Was there no one among the 16 non-Trump Republican candidates prepared to do whatever it took to be rid of him?  We now know that it would have been easy to do, once this material was exposed.  When Henry II became exasperated at the insubordination of Thomas à Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, he said (or is supposed to have said) “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”  He said it in the presence of four of his loyal followers and days later Becket was dead, stabbed in his own cathedral, his blood flowing over the cold stone floor.

Could Christie, who some say can close great bridges through a wink to a subordinate, not find a way?  Marco Rubio’s forebears defied a Communist dictator and found a new home in a free country.  Surely the hot blood that fueled their determination is not completely diluted in his veins.  Scott Walker stood up to an organized takeover of his state capitol by angry demonstrators.  And yet not one of those three or any of the other competitors could turn to a trusted aide and say, “I want him out of the race.  Find a way.  Don’t tell me how you did it.”

Now, if one of them had taken Mr. Trump out of the race, it would not have been clear sailing for the eventual winner of the nomination.  Remember that Mitt Romney, who appears to have led a blameless life, was accused of having been part of a group in high school that might very well have forcibly cut the hair of a student who might possibly have been gay.  And of course, this kind of anti-gay bias is something that stays with a person forever.  Romney was also held responsible for the death of a former employee’s wife some years after the employee separated from service at a company that Romney’s firm acquired.  And Harry Reid charged Mitt with failure to pay federal taxes for a decade.  Reid made his accusation on the floor of the Senate, where he is immune from charges of libel and slander.

Bridgegate would have made Christie an easy target as the nominee.  Scott Walker could have been portrayed as a crazed anti-union fanatic, in the pocket of the Koch brothers.  In his autobiography, Marco Rubio fuddled the dates of his family’s move from Cuba, so that would have made him a target.  Incidentally, that kind of inaccuracy cannot be compared to Secretary Clinton’s reports of gunfire in Sarajevo or Senator Clinton’s eyewitness account of events on September 11, 2001 that didn’t actually take place – those are “brain freezes” and a cause for a warm chuckle among friends.  Who knows what corrupt deals Marco may have done as Speaker of the Florida state house of representatives?  And as a protégé of Jeb Bush, Rubio could have been charged with any number of Jeb’s missteps when he was Florida’s governor.

So, if someone had taken out Donald Trump in the primaries, the eventual Republican nominee would have run into some rough treatment.  It wouldn’t have been clear sailing.  But at least the Republican party would have avoided the embarrassment of losing to the Clintons over a sex scandal.

Edited 10/22/16 to correct a typo.