PARADISE to some may be lying on a palm-fringed beach, sipping a mai tai at dusk. But ask author Bradley Winterton his idea of heaven, and the reply is: Verdi's Falstaff.
'The minute I heard that the opera in the Macau International Music Festival in 1994 was going to be Verdi's Falstaff,' says Winterton, 'I sat down and wrote out an outline for a book, where I followed it through the whole month of preparations.' Listening to the opera, he says, is 'paradise' to him. 'It always has been. It's got a mixture of incredible exhilaration, of underlying sadness, because Verdi wrote it when he was 80 and knew he was dying. And I just wanted to hear every rehearsal. ' With the performance involving an unusual blend of performers from Italy and China, Winterton then convinced the Macau Government to sponsor the project, and spent a month travelling between Shanghai, Beijing and Macau, documenting the lead-up to the first performance in Asia of Verdi's final opera.
Falstaff was staged at the Macau Forum last October, 101 years after its premiere at La Scala in Milan in 1893.
The resulting 156-page book Falstaff in Macau, with illustrations by artist Terence Roe, looks at the trials and tribulations behind staging a full-scale operatic production which brought together a cast and crew who did not speak each other's language.
Winterton describes it as a fly-on-the-wall account of the developing production, with narrative sections mixed with musings from the journal he kept from rehearsal to performance.
Apart from the essential thumbnail histories of the main players - Falstaff director Paolo Trevisi, conductor Renato Palumbo and Joao Pereira Bastos, the artistic director of the 1994 Macau International Music Festival - Winterton has avoided detailed biographical lists about the cast.
