Four Wives

Shakespeare has provided a lot of inspiration to all kinds of creative artists through the centuries, and composers are no exception.  It would be easy to write an entire book about all the music inspired by, or based on Shakespeare's plays and sonnets.

One of my favourite Shakespeare plays is The Merry Wives of Windsor.  In some respects, it is much more "modern" than many of the Bard's works.  For one thing, royalty and nobility play a very minor role indeed, with the ascendant English middle class dominating the proceedings.  As well, the structure of the plot is set in such a way that most of the action is initiated by, and controlled by, the women -- a very rare situation in a predominantly paternalistic society!  Indeed, both men and parents get their comeuppance before the play is over.  Although the Great Experts would have you believe that The Merry Wives is one of Shakespeare's weaker plays, the world's composers obviously disagree.  At least three that I know of have converted this riotous, middle-class domestic comedy into opera. 

The sad thing is that although all three produced fine operatic scores with great stage potential, only one has become well known.  So, setting aside Verdi's well-known and justly admired comic masterpiece, Falstaff, it's time to give the other two their due.

Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor includes dialogue, which brings it into the German tradition of the singspiel.  To die-hard opera fans, this makes it no opera at all.  All I can say to that is, "It's your loss!"  I believe it still gets staged at times in Germany and Austria, but it's a rare bird indeed anywhere else -- and certainly so in recordings.  Nicolai's score is packed full of melodious beauty, with so many highlights I couldn't possibly mention them all.  The text is skilfully adapted and compressed in the translation to German, and the music never outstays its welcome.  One of my favourite moments is the love aria of Fenton.  The tenor sings in duet with a trilling lark represented by the flutes.  The effect is so similar to the lark's song in the last of Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs that Strauss, the lifelong opera conductor, must have consciously imitated it -- and with good reason.  The aria is magical.  But equally fine are the robust comic moments -- such as the scene where Falstaff, dressed as an old lady, gets beaten and chased out of the house by Ford.  The Decca recording conducted by Rafael Kubelik gets pulled out and listened to a good deal by yours truly.

The real hidden treasure among Falstaff operas is Sir John in Love by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.  I could rhapsodize about this wonderful score for hours on end, and probably will if you ever ask me in person!  What makes this opera work so well, I think, is that Vaughan Williams arose out of the same social class in the same country as Shakespeare, and therefore also shared that class and country (if not the era) with most of the characters.  Vaughan Williams composed Sir John in Love in the 1920s, when he was still very much in love with the treasures of English folk music that he had uncovered in preceding decades.  Although the score uses only a smattering of genuine folk tunes, the rhythms and inflections of the folk style are thoroughly absorbed into the musical material.

The result is one splendid tune after another, all beautifully orchestrated.  This is an opera to love, and to set you humming the melodies over to yourself long after you hear it.  The composer's gorgeous orchestral treatment of the traditional tune Greensleeves originates here, but in this context it doesn't particularly stand out, being only one of many similar lyrical glores in the entire score.  Vaughan Williams created the libretto himself, and again the varied incidents and dialogues of the play are skilfully compressed without being ripped apart.  The composer also selected lyrics by various Elizabethan poets to provide arias and choral numbers, and these are all most apt to their purpose.  It's in these numbers that he created some of the most beautiful music of the twentieth century -- yes, I know those are fighting words, and I say them fully realizing that fact!

Meredith Davies gave this opera its first full recording in the 1970s, on EMI, and copies of this one in CD reissue may still be floating around.  More recently, Richard Hickox on Chandos came through with an equally fine version in a typically splendid Chandos digital soundscape, and this is readily available for downloading.

Either of these operas will give much pleasure, as much for you (I hope) as they do for me.  Sir John in Love stands as one of my all-time favourite operatic works.  I hope it will become one of yours as well.