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?