Word: zeffirelli
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...Britain's National Theater, decided it needed a thorough overhaul. To thin out the verbal thickets, they called in Poet-Classicist Robert Graves, who made over 300 changes from obscure to understandable Elizabethan. To give the plot a new lift, they unleashed the talents of Director Franco Zeffirelli, whose earlier beatnik Hamlet had the hero intone, "To be or not to be-what the hell...
Bernstein and Zeffirelli got along like Gold Dust twins. "We are of the same generation," the 38-year-old Zeffirelli would say, "and we see things in the same light." That meant seeing Falstaff, quite uniquely, as a tragedy-an expression of absurdity, an old man's revenge. "This is Verdi's monument to the ungenerosity of people," said Zeffirelli of Verdi's last opera and his only comedy.* "It really isn't funny...
Coming from Zeffirelli, such talk is not to be taken lightly. He turned Romeo and Juliet into reckless, bopping teen-agers for the Old Vic three years ago, and Rome is still absorbed in his beat vision of Hamlet: "To be or not to be-what the hell?" says Zeffirelli's sulky prince (TIME, Dec. 27). And Falstaff turned out to be the perfect candidate for the young director's fine Italian hand. Falstaff's metamorphosis from boozy squire to oily seducer to triumphant rube is a fine argument in favor of the Fat Knight...
Fear of Flops. Zeffirelli had planned to match Verdi's canny humor by having all the scenery jerked away in the opera's final moment while the cast tore off their wigs and pointed mocking fingers at the audience. "This is a very disturbing opera, and you should be reminded at the end that it is disturbing," he argued. "Everything is a big joke! You've all been cheated!" But Met Manager Rudolf Bing didn't get it-he figured it would look like a grotesque error by the boys backstage. So he spared his audience...
Such artistic daring has been the prime reason for Zeffirelli's top rank among opera directors. "We must make a crusade against boredom in the opera," he says, and in the past he has done so with a flourish and grandeur spent the ten best years of my life doing opera," he says wearily, "and now I will do it only for special events. I'll concentrate more on the theater. If I have flops, I won't regret them. The size of a man is known by the size of his flops...