Nicolai's Sir John Falstaff first appeared on the operatic stage two and a half centuries after his domination of Shakespeare's play The Merry Wives of Windsor. The Bard's introduction of the rotund knight had come in Henry IV, Part 1, where he played a short but memorable role. Still, it was his central role in Shakespeare's sole domestic comedy that made him a figure of legend. So potent a character and so finely drawn was he that many composers sought to work him into sung drama. Antonio Salieri set him in his Falstaff in 1799, enjoying 24 performances at Vienna's Kämtnertor-Theater as his reward. That opera shares with the operas of Nicolai and Verdi the distinction of having a viable life after its premiere; composers not so fortunate include Papavoine, Ritter, Ditters von Dittersdorf, Mercadante, Balfe, Thomas, and Adam. In the twentieth century, Ralph Vaughan Williams composed Sir John in Love, an opera with some merit, though nothing like the mercurial work of genius Verdi achieved.

As with Verdi's Falstaff, Nicolai's opera offers its cast members more opportunities for ensemble playing than arias for vocal display. The most frequently heard aria from Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor, both on recordings and in concert, is Falstaff's "Als Büblein Klein an die Mutter Brust," a rollicking tavern song and a chance at the beginning of Act II for the protagonist to demonstrate the lowest register of his bass voice. (Verdi wrote his hero's music in the baritone register, although a bass-baritone with a good top register can manage it as well.) There is in Nicolai's work, no Dame Quickly, whose "Reverenzas" in Verdi's Falstaff make for a quite unforgettable character. Nicolai's music is solid and often vivid, but not to be compared with the quicksilver fleetness and fecundity that informs Verdi's final stage work.

While Verdi had for a librettist Arrigo Boito, one of Italy's finest writers and a constant encouragement to the aged composer, Nicolai had someone of a considerably lesser order, Hermann Saloman Mosenthal. The result was a libretto (based closely on Shakespeare) of sturdy competence rather than the miraculous text Boito provided Verdi, but it sufficed for Nicolai's needs. The composer himself wrote of his deliberate and enthusiastic approach to composing the music. He began it in December 1845 and completed the work in 1848. The premiere took place at the Königlichen Opernhaus in Berlin on March 9, 1849.

If Nicolai was unable to match the blinding brilliance of Verdi's achievement (still some years to come), he nonetheless created a comic opera that still holds the stage in German-speaking countries and is occasionally mounted elsewhere when a bass of exceptional personality, histrionic ability, and vocal strength is available.

© Erik Eriksson, All Music Guide

Overture

Otto Nicolai (1810 - 1848) became one of the few "one-hit wonders" among classical composers. Although some of his operas had success during his lifetime, it is really only his final opera, The Merry Wives of Windsor, that has become a repertory item, and then for the most part only in German-speaking countries. This tuneful and lighthearted overture is probably the only Nicolai music that most people have heard. Nicolai was born in Königsberg, a German city so far east that it is now part of Russia. He revered Mozart and sought to emulate his elegance, clarity of form, and novelty of orchestration. After studies in Berlin, he went on to Italy, where he learned much about vocal music, the great polyphonic pieces of the Renaissance, and the new bel canto operatic style of Bellini and Donizetti. After achieving initial success in Italy, Nicolai made his career in Vienna, where in 1842 he became the founding conductor of what was then called the Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. His earlier opera Il templario had gained him success in several countries. Seeking a subject for his first opera originally in German, he resisted the idea of attempting a Shakespeare setting, but eventually did begin this opera based on the play of the same name. His aim, he wrote, was to continue the German operatic tradition, "...but Italian lightness must be added." He is far from the only composer to write an opera on the subject of the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, and the comeuppance he gets from a pair of bourgeois wives when he tries to seduce them. The most famous of at least ten operas on the subject is Verdi's Falstaff, with Vaughan Williams' Sir John in Love probably coming in third place after the Nicolai work. Nicolai was crushed when the Court Opera of Vienna rejected it. He took the job of conductor of the Berlin Royal Opera in 1847, along with receiving an invitation to play the opera there. It was a rousing success from its first performance, March 9, 1849. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 11, 1849. The overture is about eight minutes long. Almost a third of it is a slow, melodic introduction, which perhaps suggests the broad landscape the Thames-side town of Windsor. One of the two main melodies of the overture becomes associated later in the opera with Mrs. Page, and a heavy-footed subsidiary theme surely standing for Falstaff. The music is unfailingly bright and bubbling, without doubt the best comic opera overture by a Germanic composer since Mozart.

© All Music Guide