Overture to The Merry Wives of Windsor
Otto Nicolai (1810-49)
William Shakespeare’s Falstaff, the only one of his characters to appear in four plays (albeit off-stage and dead in one of them), has fascinated several composers. We have Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, Falstaff; Edward Elgar’s Symphonic Study, also called Falstaff; Ralph Vaughan Williams’s opera Sir John in Love; and Otto Nicolai’s opera, Die lustigen Weiver von Windsor. Although Nicolai died before he could see a staged performance of his masterpiece, he included the overture in a concert that he conducted with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The orchestra still devotes one concert each year to Nicolai’s music and to his memory because he was its co-founder in 1842, and served as its first musical director. Being German, Nicolai followed the German tradition of comic opera, or Singspiel, where recitative is replaced by spoken dialogue as in The Magic Flute by W.A. Mozart and Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss. The spoken sections in The Merry Wives are outshone by the music, which is written in the ‘Italian Style’, akin to that of Gioacchino Rossini: full of bounce and humour.
The overture opens slowly and quietly, borrowing the midnight woodland music from the final act of the opera. This gives way to faster and more boisterous themes suggesting something special may be round the corner. And that is the case because almost halfway through this ten-minute work, the ‘big tune’ appears. Everyone knows it and everyone loves it. Nicolai must have loved it too because, once it arrives, it hardly leaves the stage. Nicolai blends it cleverly with some of the other themes, fragments it and re-harmonises it to ensure that our interest is sustained. In line with the tradition of the time, the melodies in the overture are taken from the opera itself; all but this one, that is. The ‘big tune’ belongs to the overture alone, so if you ever see the opera, enjoy the melody when it occurs because it is not going to come back.
Otto Nicolai (1810-49)
William Shakespeare’s Falstaff, the only one of his characters to appear in four plays (albeit off-stage and dead in one of them), has fascinated several composers. We have Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, Falstaff; Edward Elgar’s Symphonic Study, also called Falstaff; Ralph Vaughan Williams’s opera Sir John in Love; and Otto Nicolai’s opera, Die lustigen Weiver von Windsor. Although Nicolai died before he could see a staged performance of his masterpiece, he included the overture in a concert that he conducted with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The orchestra still devotes one concert each year to Nicolai’s music and to his memory because he was its co-founder in 1842, and served as its first musical director. Being German, Nicolai followed the German tradition of comic opera, or Singspiel, where recitative is replaced by spoken dialogue as in The Magic Flute by W.A. Mozart and Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss. The spoken sections in The Merry Wives are outshone by the music, which is written in the ‘Italian Style’, akin to that of Gioacchino Rossini: full of bounce and humour.
The overture opens slowly and quietly, borrowing the midnight woodland music from the final act of the opera. This gives way to faster and more boisterous themes suggesting something special may be round the corner. And that is the case because almost halfway through this ten-minute work, the ‘big tune’ appears. Everyone knows it and everyone loves it. Nicolai must have loved it too because, once it arrives, it hardly leaves the stage. Nicolai blends it cleverly with some of the other themes, fragments it and re-harmonises it to ensure that our interest is sustained. In line with the tradition of the time, the melodies in the overture are taken from the opera itself; all but this one, that is. The ‘big tune’ belongs to the overture alone, so if you ever see the opera, enjoy the melody when it occurs because it is not going to come back.