Introduction
Adaptation and literary criticism share common ground. As Linda Hutcheon notes, in choosing to engage in adaptation, adaptors ‘not only interpret a work, but … also take a position on it’.Footnote 1 Adaptation is thus, by its nature, a form of criticism. Adaptation and literary criticism also share similar methodologies, particularly in their selective approaches to the ‘source’ text. Comparisons between adaptations and their sources quickly make clear the selective nature of many adaptations. However, as Barbara Hodgdon argues, the Shakespearean literary critic, basing his or her work on the printed play text, also constructs from it a ‘selective’ text:
By no means does this critic or reader deal with the whole play; rather, he or she ignores – and sometimes effectively erases – large sections of text. This is not called cutting, however: it is called making an argument. But it is cutting, and it is done in a surreptitious rather than forthright way.Footnote 2
Although adaptation and literary criticism thus have significant points in common, productive interplay between studies of adaptations of Shakespeare and literary-critical studies of the plays has nonetheless generally been slight. This is particularly so (with a few exceptions) when the adaptation reconfigures Shakespeare’s theatrical writing in another medium, such as opera, whose conventions and meaning-making tools may be unfamiliar to literary critics.Footnote 3 This article offers one attempt to address that lacuna, through examination of an adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The Merry Wives of Windsor contains a number of features that make it unusual in the canon of Shakespeare’s work, in particular the central role it gives to female characters, its depiction of family and married life, and its treatment of the natural world. Strangely, given the play’s title and the central role of the merry wives, the play’s women have been remarkably absent from Shakespearean literary criticism. Indeed, feminist Shakespeare scholar Phyllis Rackin notes that what little study of the play’s treatment of women and domesticity exists dates largely from after 2000.Footnote 4 In terms of the play’s unusually detailed English setting, Jeanne Addison Roberts’s Shakespeare’s English Comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor in Context (1979) marked a turning point in critical approaches to the play by drawing attention to its treatment of nature in its references to flora and fauna, providing a foundation for the eco-criticism that began to emerge in the early twenty-first century.Footnote 5 In this article, I suggest ways in which Antonio Salieri and Carlo Prospero Defranceschi’s Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle (Falstaff, or the Three Tricks) (Vienna, 1799), an operatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, draws out and develops those aspects of The Merry Wives of Windsor which until very recently have been either marginalised or ignored by mainstream critical discourses: the central position given to women’s agency and friendship, the depiction of family and married life, and the interaction between humans and nature.
The Merry Wives of Windsor has experienced strikingly different receptions in the study and on the stage. While, for much of its existence, literary criticism has treated it as at best an aberration about which the least said the better, it proves a consistently popular stage success, with an almost unbroken post-Restoration performance history. It was one of the earliest plays performed once the English theatres re-opened after the Restoration; its multiple early editions and its status as one of perhaps only five Shakespeare plays still in the repertory before the closure of the theatres suggest its pre-Civil War popularity.Footnote 6 Giorgio Melchiori notes a gap in its presence in the English repertoire only between 1706 and 1720 (apparently due to difficulties in finding a suitable Falstaff), a remarkable feat given the stage histories of many plays more central to the canon.Footnote 7
Furthermore, unlike many of Shakespeare’s plays, The Merry Wives has held the stage in unadapted form for almost all its existence. The play has thus not experienced the process of textual intervention and ‘improvement’ followed by rehabilitation and return to Shakespeare’s text which most of his plays have undergone, and through which Shakespeare’s position as national poet and high-cultural icon has (paradoxically as it may seem) been consolidated.Footnote 8 Although adaptation for the spoken stage has not been critical to the play’s stage survival and popular success, the play has proved a fertile source for adaptations, particularly for the musical stage.Footnote 9 Much of these adaptations’ engagement with Shakespeare’s play, beyond depictions of Falstaff, remains largely unacknowledged. Nonetheless, I contend that by bringing attention to aspects of the play that are often overlooked in the critical literature, these adaptations provide a critical commentary that prefigures approaches the play has received only at a comparatively late date. This article proposes that viewing operatic adaptations as a form of criticism-through-practice might contribute to a more nuanced reception history of The Merry Wives than Shakespeare scholarship currently grants the play. At the same time, while the critical commentary provided by Salieri and Defranceschi’s adaptation might be illuminating for continuing scholarship on The Merry Wives, an awareness of the opera’s engagements with the source play’s unusual aspects might also promote a greater understanding of the specific points of interest of an opera that is often overshadowed by Verdi’s Falstaff.
Before moving on to discuss Salieri and Defranceschi’s opera in more detail, I will discuss some of the literary critical approaches which have been applied to the play. Although the play is often a popular stage success, it is not one of the most studied or widely known of Shakespeare’s plays. Indeed, it is likely that, for many, Verdi’s Falstaff (1893) rather than The Merry Wives itself serves as the point of entry to Shakespeare’s Windsor. However, Verdi’s Falstaff reworks the play to a considerable extent, in particular by giving its title character a significantly more central role, but also by cutting Shakespeare’s large cast of characters and reworking aspects of the personalities of those characters who are retained. A synopsis of Shakespeare’s play is therefore useful at this stage; for brevity, I shall focus on those central plotlines that have a direct bearing on Salieri and Defranceschi’s Falstaff.
The Merry Wives of Windsor is set in and around the town of Windsor, apparently in late Elizabethan times in all but name. The play is structurally complex, consisting of a number of interweaving plotlines centring on two wealthy middle-class Windsor families: Frank and Alice Ford, and George and Meg Page and their children Anne and William. The families are friendly, and Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are particularly close friends. Master Page is a trusting, loving husband, while Master Ford has an irrationally jealous nature. In one of the main plotlines, Sir John Falstaff, newly arrived in Windsor and in need of money, sends Mistress Page and Mistress Ford identical love letters, with the aim of seducing them in order to gain access to their household purses. The women lure Falstaff into thinking that they are receptive to his advances, with the aim of both taking revenge on Falstaff for his impudence by encouraging him to remain in residence at the Garter Inn until he bankrupts himself and teaching the jealous Master Ford a lesson through first arousing his jealousy and then proving it groundless. In the meantime, Master Ford and Master Page learn of Falstaff’s plans. While Master Page is unconcerned, the jealous Master Ford persuades the Host of the Garter to introduce him to Falstaff as ‘Master Brook’ in order to ascertain Falstaff’s intentions.
Employing their friend Mistress Quickly to act as go-between, the women pretend to yield to Falstaff’s seductions, and play two tricks on Falstaff and Master Ford. The first trick results in Falstaff being bundled into a laundry basket and dumped into the Thames. The second involves the wives in disguising Falstaff as the Old Woman of Brainford, whom Master Ford has forbidden from visiting her niece, the Fords’ maid. The disguised Falstaff is roundly beaten by Master Ford. After this episode, the wives let their husbands in on their tricks, and Master Ford accepts that his jealousy has been unfounded. In the final trick, Falstaff is lured to Windsor Forest disguised as Herne the Hunter and is tricked into believing he is being attacked by fairies – in reality, the citizens of Windsor, led by Mistress Quickly as Queen of the Fairies.
In a second major plotline, the Pages’ daughter Anne is wooed by a French doctor, Dr Caius, with the support of Mistress Page, and by Master Slender, a young nobleman, with the support of Master Page. Anne, however, is in love with Fenton. With the help of the Host of the Garter, Anne and Fenton contrive to marry each other, outwitting Anne’s parents and tricking Fenton’s rival suitors while the rest of the company is engaged in the third trick. The two plotlines converge in Windsor Forest at night. This move from the urban to the natural world is marked by a transition to poetry from the prose of the bulk of the play, and accompanies a recognition and forgiveness of the multiple tricks. Master and Mistress Page quickly forgive Anne’s actions and accept Fenton as a son-in-law, and Mistress Page invites all her friends, including Falstaff, back home for dinner.
As suggested above, several features evident from this synopsis combine to make The Merry Wives unusual in Shakespeare’s output. It is unusual in being set, effectively, in an apparently contemporary England; it is also unusual in the central position it accords women, its positive depiction of adult female friendships, its portrayal of domesticity and family structures, including parent–children relationships, and its examination of life within ongoing marriages.Footnote 10 Nonetheless – perhaps surprisingly, given the play’s title – these features have only relatively recently received literary-critical attention. Indeed, beyond textual criticism, the play has largely been marginalised in Shakespearean critical literature, a situation reinforcing its perceived status as ‘the runt of Shakespeare’s comic litter’.Footnote 11
For much of the twentieth century, what little literary, rather than textual, criticism there was on the play dealt (generally to its disadvantage) with arguments over its treatment of the character of Falstaff compared to his depiction in Shakespeare’s earlier history plays, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2. Falstaff has an unusual place in Shakespeare’s output in his position as a major character who inhabits three plays in different dramatic genres. In fact, Shakespeare’s differing portrayals of Falstaff in the history plays, on the one hand, and in The Merry Wives, on the other, constitute a perceived problem that has troubled critics of The Merry Wives perhaps more than those of the history plays. The problem has at least two aspects. The first is temporal: Falstaff appears as Prince Hal’s companion in Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, set in the early fifteenth century, and his death is discussed in Henry V. However, he also appears, apparently in the late sixteenth century, in The Merry Wives. The second problem, apparently a question of characterisation, might better be seen as a question of his centrality and relationship to other characters within the plays. Henry IV’s Falstaff, a coward, glutton, drunkard, liar and thief at the centre of the play, has been loved and lauded for his vitality and transcendent humanity by generations of influential critics – indeed Harold Bloom (somewhat notoriously) credits Falstaff along with Hamlet with ‘the invention of the human’.Footnote 12The Merry Wives’ Falstaff – likewise a coward, glutton, drunkard, liar and thief – is largely the butt of tricks played by other characters in response to his own tricks. One solution to the perceived problem of this difference in perspectives has been to denigrate The Merry Wives as a whole. Another is simply more or less to ignore the play in discussions of Falstaff. John Dover Wilson does both, writing:
It is commonly agreed... that in studying the character of Falstaff, The Merry Wives of Windsor may be left out of account, that play being indubitably ‘an unpremeditated sequel’, the hero [sic] of which is made to bear the name of Falstaff primarily for reasons of theatrical expediency, not of dramatic art.Footnote 13
Critical commentary on operatic adaptations of The Merry Wives, particularly following Winton Dean’s influential ‘Shakespeare and Opera’ (1964), has also tended to focus on the figure of Falstaff, Verdi and Boito’s Falstaff regularly being held as the benchmark against which no other operatic adaptation of the play, or indeed the play itself, can compete.Footnote 14 Verdi and Boito’s Falstaff is indeed a masterpiece of opera, and for those whose familiarity with the character of Falstaff stems largely from the larger-than-life central character of that opera, Shakespeare’s depiction of Falstaff in The Merry Wives as primarily the object of other characters’ actions might seem surprising. In fact, Verdi and Boito’s Falstaff is an amalgam of aspects of Shakespeare’s character drawn from all three of the plays in which he appears. In particular, by setting the opera squarely in Henry IV’s reign, by placing Falstaff firmly at the centre of the opera and by adding dialogue from the Henry IV plays, Boito succeeds in creating a Falstaff who integrates aspects of the character from the history plays with that of the comedy, creating a coherent character from Shakespeare’s seemingly disparate visions.
Further, in Verdi’s opera a sex-war replaces the nuanced gender issues of Shakespeare’s play. Master Page, the trusting husband, is excised. Anne Page changes families to become Nannetta Ford, with only one unwanted suitor, proposed by her father. Ford thus becomes both an irrationally jealous husband and a wildly overbearing father. Instead of opposing Nannetta’s marriage to Fenton, Mistress Ford helps bring them together. The notion of a sex-war is epitomised in the Act I finale’s double chorus, in which the women sing in 6/8 time to a six-syllable metre while the men sing in 4/4 time to an eight-syllable metre.Footnote 15
As R.S. White suggests:
Verdi’s is a wholly new creation which, in its way, is a commentary on The Merry Wives of Windsor rather than an adaptation. In design and scope a more apt comparison [to Verdi’s opera] would be Orson Welles’s film Chimes at Midnight [a film that centres on Welles as Falstaff, whose character is an amalgam of the Falstaff of the history plays and The Merry Wives].Footnote 16
It is curious, then, that in a reversal of the trend towards conservative, fidelity-based critiques often applied to performances and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, the various forms of ‘Shakespearean’ authority which W.B. Worthen suggests constrain modern approaches to the performance of Shakespeare’s plays are often displaced in the case of The Merry Wives by the authority of Verdi’s opera.Footnote 17 Even Jeanne Addison Roberts – whose Shakespeare’s English Comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor in Context broke new ground by its move away from a focus on Falstaff – declared: ‘My own view of the play is epitomized in Giuseppe Verdi’s adaptation of it in his opera Falstaff.’Footnote 18
This valorisation of Verdi’s opera is doubly curious in light of Thomas Leitch’s observation, in the context of novel-to-film adaptations, that a focus on fidelity can always be used to evaluate adaptations as inferior to the adapted work: ‘no matter how clever or audacious an adaptation is, the book will always be better than any adaptation because it is always better at being itself’.Footnote 19 The assertion that Verdi’s Falstaff is ‘paradoxically, more truly Shakespearean than its Shakespearean source’ is no less extraordinary by virtue of its widespread currency.Footnote 20 What is even more extraordinary is that operatic adaptations – such as Salieri and Defranceschi’s Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle and Otto Nicolai and Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (Berlin, 1849) – which follow Shakespeare’s play more closely (accepting, for example, its free-standing portrait of Falstaff without reference to the character from the history plays), are found to be not ‘genuinely Shakespearean’.Footnote 21 A circular argument thus develops: Verdi’s opera, having ‘improved’ The Merry Wives by largely removing or minimising many of the aspects that make it unusual in Shakespeare’s output (and therefore defectively ‘Shakespearean’), is intrinsically more ‘Shakespearean’ than operas which engage with those aspects; as these operas are thus not ‘genuinely Shakespearean’, there can be little value in looking to them for insights into Shakespeare’s play. That literary critics who address operatic adaptations of Shakespeare tend to avoid critical engagement with the Merry Wives operas as primary musico-dramatic texts, relying instead on secondary sources for their musical insights, has resulted in Winton Dean’s views dominating the discourse.Footnote 22 Nonetheless, White, in a remarkably even-handed judgement within a generally polemical critical environment, counters the repeated arguments that Verdi improved The Merry Wives and presented the ‘real’ Falstaff:
Neither assertion is true. He has not pretended to give us Shakespeare’s Merry Wives but a new work based loosely on The Merry Wives and drawing on several others, and he has not given us Shakespeare’s Falstaff but his own, an extrapolation from and amplification of the original.Footnote 23
Although the character of Falstaff has been the point on which both The Merry Wives of Windsor and its operatic adaptations have often been judged, the play’s title places women firmly at the play’s centre. However, a range of critical and editorial practices have contrived either to displace the wives from their central role in favour of Falstaff, or to excise them altogether from the company of Shakespeare’s women. Melchiori, for example, frequently avoids reference to the wives, referring instead to the play as ‘the Falstaff play’ or ‘the comedy of Sir John Falstaff’.Footnote 24 Basing his Arden edition on the more reliable Folio text (in which the play has the clear title The Merry Wiues of Windsor), rather than the abbreviated Quarto text, which he treats as a memorial reconstruction (and which has an extended description of the play on the title-page rather than a title), he nonetheless insists on titling the play ‘Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor’, claiming that ‘the original conception of the play is much more truly expressed by the form in which it appears on the title-page of the 1602 Quarto edition’.Footnote 25
Indeed, despite the large late twentieth-century critical output on the women of Shakespeare’s plays, writers and critics, many writing from apparently feminist stances, have either marginalised or ignored the play’s women to what seems an almost wilful degree. Thus Angela Pitt, in what she claims to be the first ‘comprehensive study of the women in Shakespeare’s plays’, manages only two references to the play, dismissing it as ‘a comedy of remarkable tedium and inconsequence, in which none of the characters emerges with any great mark of individuality’, which ‘focuses on a dreary intrigue among a group of married women’.Footnote 26 Neither Penny Gay’s performance history of women in the comedies nor Irene Dash’s Women’s Worlds in Shakespeare’s Plays makes any mention of the play.Footnote 27 Feminist critic L.T. Fitz appears to excise it from the canon, claiming that Cleopatra and Juliet ‘share the distinction of being two of the three women [the other presumably Cressida] to have made it into the titles of Shakespeare’s plays’.Footnote 28 While their names are not specified, women have not only ‘made it into the title’ of The Merry Wives, but are perhaps unique in not sharing it with a man.Footnote 29 Despite Shakespeare’s prominent plotline of both Master and Mistress Page’s separate attempts to arrange their daughter Anne’s marriage, Lagretta Tallent Lenker’s study of Shakespearean fathers and daughters ignores the Page family, only addressing the play to note that Falstaff is neither a father nor a father-figure.Footnote 30 Playwright Charlotte Keatley claims that part of her motivation for writing My Mother Said I Never Should was to counter the lack of mother–daughter relationships in theatre, particularly – given his popular reputation for universality – in Shakespeare:
Shakespeare wrote over thirty-five plays, which, we are taught at school, cover all human experience. In fact, there is no Shakespeare play about a mother and a daughter relationship, except Romeo and Juliet, but Juliet is brought up by her nurse, and A Winter’s Tale, where the mother is frozen during the twenty-five years of the play.Footnote 31
This lack of acknowledgement even of the play’s existence has resulted, as Phyllis Rackin notes, in The Taming of the Shrew taking on ‘not only in the popular imagination but also in feminist scholarship, the status of the paradigmatic Shakespearian representation of women’s place in marriage’, a situation Rackin aimed to rectify in her 2005 study of The Merry Wives.Footnote 32
Rackin’s argument is not simply that The Merry Wives has been unjustly neglected and that overdue critical attention might give rise to new insights into the play. She moves beyond this to argue persuasively for a recuperation of The Merry Wives (and the merry wives) to the mainstream of literary-critical attention, a recuperation that will prompt a reassessment, particularly from a feminist viewpoint, of the whole Shakespearean canon. Noting that, unlike Shakespeare’s much-theorised cross-dressing heroines, the female characters in The Merry Wives ‘exercise considerable power in their own persons as women’, Rackin calls for the recognition of the wives as a ‘striking contrast to what we have come to think of as the paradigmatic Shakespearian heroine, who inhabits a homosocial world where women are isolated and confined within households controlled by fathers and husbands’.Footnote 33 To strengthen her argument, Rackin draws on glimpses of an alternative reception history beyond the marginalising forces of mainstream academic literary criticism, finding positive judgements of the play and its characters in, for example, the letters of the seventeenth-century polymath Margaret Cavendish, Friedrich Engels’s correspondence with Karl Marx, and the writings of Rosa Grindon, a feminist, lecturer in natural history and president of the Manchester Ladies’ Literary and Scientific Club, at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 34 Roger Savage has also noted the appeal of the play to early twentieth-century campaigners for women’s suffrage, while the play appealed sufficiently to Catherine the Great for her to adapt it for the Russian stage in 1786, trimming down Falstaff’s role in the process.Footnote 35 This article will suggest that the work of operatic adapters who engaged with the play’s central female characters might usefully be incorporated in this alternative reception history.
In the following, I do not attempt to give critical evaluations of Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle as an opera, or even to give a full account of it as an adaptation – indeed, my focus on aspects of the opera other than the character of Falstaff means that this account is inevitably incomplete. Mindful of Barbara Hodgdon’s description above of criticism as creating a ‘selective’ text by a process of ‘cutting’, I certainly do not wish to suggest that the role of Falstaff should be discounted within the opera. Instead, I attempt to demonstrate that operatic adaptations of the play can be read productively as criticism-through-practice in which an engagement with the play’s unusual aspects – beyond the character of Falstaff – is a prominent feature. Most noticeably, the opera responds to the source play by replicating an active, central position in the drama for its female characters and their performers. Indeed, opera, with its emphasis on the female performer, is well placed to provide space for the creation of adaptations that bring to the fore the central role The Merry Wives of Windsor accords its women. In addition, the musical and scenic adaptations of Shakespeare’s final scene allow for musico-dramatic extensions of Shakespeare’s engagement with the natural world as it appears in Windsor Forest.
As discussed above, part of the aim of the following discussion of Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle is to give added weight to the alternative reception history that Rackin draws on, a reception history that recognises, acknowledges and values the unusual features of The Merry Wives of Windsor, that resists the tendency to marginalise the merry wives that has often been present in literary criticism, and that might in turn influence future literary-critical approaches. At the same time, an exploration of the specific ways in which the opera engages with Shakespeare’s play also allows it to differentiate itself from Verdi’s Falstaff, the operatic adaptation of The Merry Wives that has dominated both discourse and repertoire. Indeed, as Salieri and Defranceschi’s Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle has recently witnessed a tentative return to the repertoire, an appreciation of that opera’s engagement with aspects of The Merry Wives beyond the character of Falstaff might assist it in consolidating its place in the repertoire beyond the shadow cast by Verdi’s towering character.
Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle
Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle, a dramma giocoso, was the first of Salieri’s three collaborations with Defranceschi, representing the final phase of Salieri’s Viennese career in Italian opera. The opera opened in Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater on 3 January 1799; within the year its success led to productions in Dresden’s Kleines Churfürstliches Theater, opening in November 1799, and in Berlin’s Königliche Schauspiele, opening in December 1799. Cesare in Farmacusa, a dramma eroicomico, followed in June 1800, with their final work together, Angiolina, ossia Il matrimonio per sussurro, opening in October 1800, both also at the Kärntnertortheater. Angiolina, another adaptation of an early modern English play, Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, shares with Falstaff the theme of a failed attempt by an unreasonable husband to control his wife.
Prior to Falstaff, Salieri’s previous dramma giocoso was the remarkable Il mondo alla rovescia, performed in 1795 after several years’ gestation, with a libretto by Caterino Mazzolà. The opera’s setting, an island whose population is governed by women, allowed for an exploration of gender roles and gender equality that would be continued to a lesser degree in Falstaff, and for this reason it deserves brief consideration here. At some time in the distant past, the opera postulates, European women settled the island and established dominion over its men. Women at the time of the opera’s setting lead an active, physical life (Act II opens with a chorus of female metalworkers in a munitions factory), while men carry out traditionally ‘feminine’ tasks such as embroidery. Gendered behaviour is discussed as performance and is presented as learned rather than innate: when two Europeans, a count and a marquise, are brought to the island, they each successfully learn the behaviours appropriate to their sex in their new environment. This reversal of European gendered norms is no carnivalesque interlude, and the opera’s climax is a dramatisation of its argument for gender equality. A battle between the island’s female army and male European soldiers sent to rescue the count and the marquise threatens to carry on indefinitely as neither side is stronger or more capable than the other; the battle only ends when a truce is called. The marquise, fortified by her newly learned assertive behaviour, chooses to return to Europe with her new islander husband and the European soldiers, while the count chooses to remain on the island, which continues under female government. This anti-essentialist treatment of gender roles in Il mondo alla rovescia might shed some light on Salieri’s approaches to gender roles in Falstaff and Angiolina, his later comedies centring on assertive women. As we shall see, Falstaff is characterised by some surprising departures from gendered opera buffa norms. While these moments might be seen as simply ‘feminising’ or ‘masculinising’ the opera’s male or female characters, an awareness of Il mondo alla rovescia at least allows for an alternative reading of these moments as a continuation of the interest in exploring late eighteenth-century gender essentialism displayed by Salieri in his earlier opera.
In adapting The Merry Wives, Salieri and Defranceschi approached the play as a free-standing work without reference to the history plays. The action appears to take place in contemporary eighteenth-century Windsor, and their Falstaff is clearly an adaptation of the Falstaff of The Merry Wives alone. Although the complete plays of Shakespeare had been available for the reading public since 1782 in Johann Joachim Eschenburg’s German translation, comparisons between the Falstaffs of Shakespeare’s comedy and his history plays in an embodied, staged form were unlikely to have featured highly in the opera’s Viennese reception. While some of Falstaff’s Viennese audience would already have had the chance to see stage adaptations of The Merry Wives, wherein the action was transplanted to Vienna (Joseph Bernhard Pelzel’s Die lustigen Abentheuer an der Wienn, first performed 1771, and the anonymous Die lustigen Weiber in Wien, first performed in 1794), the Henry IV history plays were slower to reach the Viennese stage, first appearing in the form of a reading by Karl von Holtei in 1844, and receiving a full staging there only in 1873–4.Footnote 36
Defranceschi’s libretto makes significant cuts to the play’s multiple plotlines: in adapting Shakespeare’s play to the typical Goldonian opera buffa cast of three female and four male soloists, Defranceschi retained only the plotlines of the taming of Master Ford’s jealousy, Falstaff’s attempted seductions and (followed relatively closely) the three tricks played on him (in which, respectively, he is packed into a laundry basket and thrown into the Thames, disguised as the Old Woman of Brainford and beaten by Master Ford, and punished in Windsor Forest by the citizens of Windsor dressed as fairies). From Shakespeare’s characters, Defranceschi retained Master (now Mister) and Mistress Ford (tenor and soprano respectively), Sir John Falstaff (bass) and his servant Bardolfo (baritone); Master and Mistress Page (baritone and mezzo-soprano respectively) were renamed Slender, presumably for ease of Italian pronunciation (borrowing their surname from one of Anne Page’s suitors in Shakespeare’s play), and a new character, Mistress Ford’s maid Betty (soprano), was added. A mixed chorus plays a substantial role, and an off-stage baritone Echo and mute servants complete the cast.
The distribution of roles in the source play and in the opera reflects the composition of their respective original performing companies: an all-male early modern theatre company whose female characters were played by boy apprentices, and whose actors frequently doubled parts, and an opera buffa company whose adult female singers’ voices were amongst its main attractions. Falstaff’s three female and four male principal characters thus contrast with Shakespeare’s four female and sixteen male speaking roles. While the casting cuts provide the balance in vocal range that is arguably more important for an opera company than for a theatre company, they also create a sense of a stage world in which women are not outnumbered by men. Indeed, as Bardolfo is absent from the finale, the opera ends, unusually and perhaps symbolically, with an equal gender balance amongst the soloists.Footnote 37
The reduction in the number of principal roles and the paring back of Shakespeare’s multiple plotlines have the effect of focusing the dramatic action particularly clearly on the married couples, the Fords and the Slenders, and on the friendship between Mistress Ford and Mistress Slender. Drawing on the assertiveness and self-reliance of the women in Shakespeare’s play, all three of Falstaff’s women display agency independent of men, demonstrating their mutual co-operation and their ability to control and organise not only their own lives but also those of others. However, Mistress Ford stands out as the dramatic centre of the opera: in a series of scenes which add musico-dramatic nuance to Shakespeare’s depiction of Alice Ford, the forceful character of the opera’s Mistress Ford allows her to convert her friend Mistress Slender’s anger to laughter, to show her jealous husband the error of his ways and to teach Falstaff a lesson for his impudent attempts at seduction. In particular, Mistress Ford exceeds her Shakespearean counterpart in demonstrating her organisational skills by planning the final trick, which includes briefing and arranging disguises for her neighbours and friends who will play fairies and spirits, even before she has begun carrying out the second trick.Footnote 38 Her engagement in teaching Falstaff the error of his ways also goes beyond that of Shakespeare’s Alice Ford, as, in the absence of the play’s Mistress Quickly, the operatic Mistress Ford deals directly with Falstaff, visiting him twice disguised as a maid and leading the final trick disguised as the Queen of the Fairies.
The overture consists of a series of lively contredanses. The opera opens at a party at the Slenders’ which Falstaff has gatecrashed and which Mistress Ford is attending without her husband, who is absent from Windsor on business. Shortly after the curtain rises, Mister Slender’s lyrics imply that the overture was in fact diegetic dance music. In his manuscript notes on Falstaff, Salieri noted of the overture:
My opinion also on the music of my opera:
The overture is certainly one of the most closely linked overtures to its subject matter that have ever been composed; indeed, it could be said that the opera begins with the overture. Here are the reasons for this: the first scene represents a private party held in the house of – and in honour of – rich merchants, husband and wife. After the first toast to their good fortune, etc, ‘Now, refreshments, drinks and snacks, and then we’ll start dancing again’ is announced. Since this second verse suggests that the guests have already danced, I thought of composing an overture roughly in the form of many contredanses and the effect was immediately felt and applauded by the audience.Footnote 39
Salieri’s note suggests a sophisticated engagement with theatrical conventions on the part of both audience and composer: the audience’s recognition of the novel effect and their applause demonstrate a lively engagement with theatrical convention, while Salieri’s calculated creation of the overture as a set of contredanses suggests his willingness to exploit that awareness and engagement. The noticeably novel effect of the overture – an effect only graspable after the overture has ended and the opera proper has begun – might thus send a signal early on in the opera that audiences should be alert to further ways in which operatic conventions are subverted in this work, and which in turn add meaning to the way in which Shakespeare’s play is adapted.
We soon learn that Falstaff has been flirting unsuccessfully with both Mistress Ford and Mistress Slender all night – perhaps, we might imagine, during those contredanses before the curtain opened, lively dances that would have provided an opportunity for physical contact and a cover for amorous small-talk. He continues to pester them, his attempts at seduction characterised by flirtatious dotted quaver motifs that contrast with his rapid semiquaver asides – motifs that Mister Slender, as we shall see, will later mock to comic effect (Ex. 1). Having suggested to Mistress Slender that they make fun of him, Mistress Ford replies ambiguously to Falstaff’s next flirtatious comment, and, as the band strikes up a minuet, accepts Falstaff’s invitation to dance. Mistress Ford’s agreement to dance a minuet rather than the foregoing contredanses suggests that her vivaciousness is tempered by prudence: while the physically energetic contredanse filled the room with dancers, the minuet – in which physical contact was restricted to a formal presentation of hands – was danced by a single couple as the assembled guests looked on, the public scrutiny discouraging unwanted amorous advances. As the two dance, the mixed chorus admires Mistress Ford’s graceful gestures and dainty flourishes, while the men also admire her beauty. Triplet figures in the violins in bar 7 of Example 2, however, capture Falstaff’s ungainly deportment and difficulty in keeping his balance while executing the bows and reverences required by the minuet, much to the suppressed amusement of the onlookers (Ex. 2). The sprightly nimblemindedness that Mistress Ford will later display and Falstaff’s contrasting clumsiness of approach (which leads him, for example, to send identical love letters to women he knows are close friends) are here prefigured in physical form. At the same time, given the minuet’s association with aristocratic behaviour and its connotations of natural grace, noble simplicity and self-control, the couple’s contrasting abilities in dancing the minuet provide an ironic class commentary: on the dance floor, at least, the middle-class Mistress Ford appears more noble than Sir John Falstaff.Footnote 40
Salieri, Act I, scene 1, bars 126–31 (84–5).
Salieri, Act I, scene 1, bars 160–84 (92–8).
Dance links this first encounter between Mistress Ford and Falstaff and their subsequent meeting, when Mistress Ford adopts the disguise of a German maid with limited Italian in order to arrange a rendezvous between Falstaff and her ‘mistress’ (in fact herself) in response to Falstaff’s love letter. Mistress Ford’s German-language aria ‘O, die Männer kenn’ ich schon’ (‘Oh, I know what men are like’) in response to Falstaff’s attempts to seduce her (in her maid persona) takes the form of a gavotte, the dance’s pastoral connotations and folk-dance origins enhancing Mistress Ford’s disguise as a rustic maid. Although the scene has no direct analogue in The Merry Wives (in which Mistress Quickly arranges the rendezvous between Falstaff and Mistress Ford), it replicates some of the multilingual comedy of The Merry Wives that would otherwise be lost through Falstaff’s casting cuts, such as the comedy provided by Dr Caius’s French-inflected English, or the scene of young William Page’s Latin lesson in which Mistress Quickly misconstrues the Welsh-accented Latin declensions taught by Sir Hugh, the Welsh parson, to hilarious and often obscene effect. John Rice notes that this scena tedesca also ‘partakes of a tradition of multilingualism and comic attempts to speak in foreign languages that go back to Goldoni’ and suggests that this aria may have reminded older Viennese of the bilingual trio in Salieri’s first comic success, La fiera di Venezia, ‘So wie bei den deutschen Tänzen’.Footnote 41 Mistress Ford indeed shares the daring inventiveness of Falsirena, the leading soprano of La fiera di Venezia, who disguises herself first as an Italian opera singer, then as a French merchant’s wife and finally as a German baroness, singing in the appropriate language for each disguise. However, while the disguised Falsirena is able to pass herself off faultlessly in each language, in her interview with Falstaff, Mistress Ford deliberately adopts a broken Italian interspersed with German. Here, her assumed linguistic clumsiness, mirroring Falstaff’s physical clumsiness in their first encounter, in turn draws out and emphasises Falstaff’s verbal awkwardness as he intersperses his Italian with broken German amplified by the occasional French phrase (Ex. 3).
Salieri, Act I, scene 11, bars 18–27 (310–11).
Mistress Ford’s decision to disguise herself as a foreigner and her behaviour in that disguise suggest a nuanced engagement with opera buffa conventions for female servants. Mary Hunter notes the tendency in opera buffa arias for female servants to present themselves as ‘other’:
Whereas men spend most of their misogynist diatribes listing female faults, women spend most of their anti-male statements defending themselves rather than attacking men. Serving-class femininity, then, is presented as an ‘other’ to masculinity; it is an ‘otherness’ of which its possessors are fully conscious, and which they are delighted to manipulate in their own interests, which almost without exception have to do with men, as sources of comfort, providers of goods, or thorns in the side.Footnote 42
Mistress Ford is of course only disguised as a servant, and, appropriately, does not conform to her assumed character’s naiveté. Her aria is more worldly wise: she simply tells Falstaff that she is already experienced enough to see through men’s lies in their attempts to seduce women, making no reference to women’s behaviour. Nonetheless, Mistress Ford still manipulates a sense of ‘otherness’: by setting herself up as a German maid with limited Italian in an Italian-speaking stage environment, she also sets herself up as an exotic ‘other’ for Falstaff. However, for the German-speaking audiences in Vienna, Dresden and Berlin, her German aria is likely to have had the opposite effect, the change from Italian to German providing a relaxing sense of linguistic clarity and familiarity – reinforcing a sense that Mistress Ford is one of them. For these audiences, however, Falstaff’s replies in broken German are likely to have been particularly grotesque, with the effect that he is also set up as an incompetent ‘other’.
Mistress Ford engages the sympathies of the audience by direct address, encouraging them to share in her amusement at her manipulation of Falstaff, at the same time as she demonstrates her awareness of the conventions of her genre. As she allows Falstaff to think that she is capitulating flirtatiously to his advances, she emphasises her apparent lack of resistance through a conventionally yielding modulation from the tonic G major to the subdominant, C major; however, she immediately turns to the audience to mock Falstaff in her own persona in a lively sarcastic aside, the music suddenly increasing in pace and veering assertively in the direction of the dominant (Ex. 4).
Salieri, Act I, scene 11, bars 154–73 (333–7).
In the original Viennese production, this scena tedesca would have functioned on the level of the performers as well as of the characters. In particular, ‘Oh, die Männer kenn’ ich schon’ would have reinforced the idea of Vienna as a cosmopolitan city for the opera’s first audience members, who had followed the progress of Irene Tomeoni, the first Mistress Ford, in learning German: having arrived in Vienna with no German, her adoption of a German persona and performance of a full German aria in Falstaff would implicitly have flattered the audience’s sense of Viennese self-importance.Footnote 43 Learning German appears to have been unusual for Italian singers in Vienna, and indeed it seems to have been no easy achievement for her.Footnote 44 The comedy and wit of the scene thus worked on the level of both characters and performers. Both Tomeoni and Carlo Angressani, the first Falstaff, were native speakers of Italian: for Tomeoni to mangle her Italian but to sing in fluent German adds wit and wonder to the scene, while also enhancing the effect of Mistress Ford’s disguise.
Like her friend Mistress Ford, Mistress Slender is also an assertive and independent woman who does not rely on her husband for protection. At first portrayed as less playful than her friend (in the opening scene, when Mistress Ford responds to Falstaff’s flirtations, Mistress Slender remarks that in her shoes she would have kept quiet), Mistress Slender appears as a force to be reckoned with in her first aria. Like her Shakespearean counterpart, she swears revenge on Falstaff after reading his letter. However, Mistress Slender’s strength of feeling exceeds that of Shakespeare’s Mistress Page: the latter’s two lines on revenge, ‘How shall I be revenged on him? For revenged I will be, as sure as his guts are made of puddings’, are tempered by humour; in the opera, they are turned into a full-scale rage aria, ‘Vendetta, sì, vendetta!’ introduced by martial trumpets and timpani.Footnote 45 Mistress Slender’s formidable character is demonstrated through an extraordinary downward leap of two octaves on the word ‘vendetta’, accompanied again by trumpets and timpani, at the climax of a modulation to the dominant. The energy this releases triggers an outpouring of rage expressed in rapid triplets (Ex. 5). Her sustained, genuine rage stands out from buffa conventions: as Hunter notes, buffa women’s rage, unless only simulated, is generally ‘domesticated’ over the course of the aria, ‘either by softening its musical expression … or by failing to sustain it’.Footnote 46 The musical expression of Mistress Slender’s rage is in no way softened over the course of her aria, which ends in a flourish of martial resolve. She maintains her outrage to the end of the aria, her final line building in intensity via a crescendo from piano to forte over a string accompaniment. As her vocal line comes to a close on a perfect cadence, trumpets, oboes and timpani return to provide her with suitably determined exit music.
Salieri, Act I, scene 6, bars 60–70 (200–3).
Mistress Slender’s aria follows immediately after a scene for Mister Ford in which he reveals his irrational jealousy. Although Mistress Slender’s rage might well be justified, in remaining fixed in her anger to the end of her aria Mistress Slender might nonetheless be seen as at least as irrational as Mister Ford, the juxtaposition of their respective scenes encouraging such a comparison. James Webster notes in his analysis of the ‘aria as drama’ in Mozart’s operas that the chief structural feature of the arias, at least in Mozart’s later operas, is ‘that of developing towards a culmination or a changed state of being’.Footnote 47 This is a feature of all Falstaff’s arias other than Mistress Slender’s rage aria. The significance of Mistress Slender’s temporary inability to move the drama forward by converting her rage into action or into another emotional state becomes clear in the demonstration of friendship between Mistress Slender and Mistress Ford that follows the aria. Despite the driving force of her accompanying trumpets and timpani, Mistress Slender’s exit is interrupted by the arrival of her friend Mistress Ford. In a short recitative and the subsequent duettino ‘La stessa, la stessissima’, Mistress Ford converts Mistress Slender’s rage to an appreciation of the comic in Falstaff’s outrageous behaviour, their laughter expressed first in a brief semiquaver outburst in the accompaniment (bar 3 of Ex. 6), then pouring forth in semiquaver passages until the duettino ends (Ex. 6). Subsequently, their laughter turns into a plan for their first trick on Falstaff, the two friends’ respective proposals suggesting their differing natures: Mistress Slender suggests taking revenge by means of a court case; the lively Mistress Ford, in contrast, proposes taking their revenge into their own hands by means of a trick.
Salieri, Act I, scene 6, bars 128–39 (220–3).
Mistress Ford and Mistress Slender’s friendship lies at the centre of the opera, an adult female friendship untouched by jealousy over a man, something rarely depicted either in opera or so explicitly in Shakespeare beyond The Merry Wives. However, the female bonding in Salieri’s opera does find parallel in contemporary opera: in the charming ‘La stessa, la stessissima’, as the friends compare Falstaff’s letters, Salieri appears to refer approvingly to the duet ‘Che soave zeffiretto’ between Figaro’s Countess and Susanna.Footnote 48 Both numbers concern letters; in both, one woman repeats the other’s words (the Countess dictates to Susanna, who reads back what she has written, while Mistress Ford and Mistress Slender compare Falstaff’s almost identical letters, their own almost identical reactions overlapping each other); both are in B-flat major; both contain passages in canon; Mozart’s duet is scored for strings, bassoon and oboe, while Salieri’s is scored for strings with obbligato oboe (Ex. 7). Kristi Brown-Montessano notes that, ‘in a genre that thrives on cat-fights and romantic rivalries between women, the Countess and Susanna display a remarkable solidarity’, and, quoting Brigid Brophy, she claims that ‘the affection of these two women not only “gives the opera its rarity and touchingness”, but also makes it “a revolutionary document” arguing for the individuality of servants and women’.Footnote 49 One might argue that, still more than Mozart’s, Salieri’s duet creates a striking image of an affectionate female relationship on equal terms, independent of men and beyond ties of blood, marriage and (unlike the Countess and Susanna) contractual employment.
Salieri, Act I, scene 6, bars 120–8 (218–20).
Two features of the duet, the obbligato oboe and the central section in canon, add nuance to the depiction of the women’s friendship. The oboe might indicate the friendship’s strength: Frits Noske suggests that the oboe’s extra-musical connotations represented ‘the idea of companionship and, more particularly, fidelity in love, friendship or servitude’.Footnote 50 The women’s overlapping lines in the canonic section that serves as a symbol of their close friendship have their correlate in Shakespeare’s Mistress Page and Mistress Ford’s overlapping sentences, as one answers the other before the other has finished her question.Footnote 51 The canon was a feature particularly of Viennese opera, despite its closed musical format posing a challenge for dramatic development.Footnote 52 Dorothea Link, in her work on Viennese operatic canons, proposes their use ‘as a symbol of Enlightenment ideals, whereby unity is represented by strict imitation and brotherhood by homophonic texture’.Footnote 53 Taking ‘Vendetta, sì, vendetta!’ and ‘La stessa, la stessissima’ as a musico-dramatic unit, the scene’s dramatic meaning lies not in Mistress Slender’s remaining fixed in her rage, but in Mistress Ford’s ability to move her out of it into better humour and into action.
‘La stessa, la stessissima’ is not Falstaff’s only example of a canon. In the opera’s final scene, having convinced her husband of the error of his ways, and apparently having cured him of his jealousy, Mistress Ford leads her husband in a striking extended duet in canon ‘Te sol amo’ (Ex. 8). The extremely sparse texture of the accompaniment to this duet – a solo violin doubling Mistress Ford and a solo cello doubling Mister Ford, with no continuo – ensures that the Fords’ reconciliation stands out from the rest of the busy dramatic action of the last scene. In Mistress Ford and Mistress Slender’s letter scene, Mistress Ford was able to convert her friend’s anger to humour relatively quickly, resulting in the short canonic central section of ‘La stessa, la stessissima’, in which the women’s friendship was emblematised. This example of Mistress Ford’s positive influence on her friend resulting in a canonic motif as she calms Mistress Slender’s anger might be seen as linked to the dramatically more significant transformation of Mister Ford’s jealous nature, their subsequent reconciliation emblematised in a more extended canonic duet. The appearance of the canon form in relation to both Mistress Ford’s friendship and her marriage perhaps suggests that her friendship with Mistress Slender is significant enough to bear comparison to her marriage (or indeed that her marriage is, by the end of the opera, sufficiently strong to bear comparison to her friendship). If so, this link between the women’s friendship and marriage is not an invention of Salieri and Defranceschi, but has its roots in Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Master Ford tells Mistress Page: ‘I think if your husbands were dead you two would marry.’Footnote 54
Salieri, Act II, finale, bars 46–69 (325–32).
Mister Ford’s journey towards this reconciliation duet is charted across three arias, as his irrational jealousy and reliance on received ideas are converted to self-awareness and confidence in his wife. We first encounter Mister Ford in scene 4, relatively late in the first act, as he returns alone to Windsor after some days’ absence. As John Rice notes, Mister Ford’s delayed entrance reverses the opera buffa custom of delaying the entrance of an important female character, who typically appears alone to sing a cavatina.Footnote 55 Mister Ford’s first aria, ‘Vicino a rivedere’, is indeed a cavatina: in this aria, Mister Ford appears at the mercy both of his emotions and of his musical accompaniment, which appears to drive as much as to reflect his emotional state. Semiquaver passages built on two notes in the bass alternating with rushing semiquaver runs in the upper strings and woodwinds hurry him onto the stage in the orchestral introduction to his aria. This alternation of semiquaver passages continues as Mister Ford begins to sing: semiquaver passages in the cellos continue to underscore his vocal line, suggesting Mister Ford’s fluttering stomach as he imagines seeing his wife again; trembling semiquavers in his coloratura vocal line then confirm his words as he begins to quiver with joy and pleasure (‘Vicino a rivedere / La dolce amata sposa / Di gioja e di piacere / Comincio a palpitar’).Footnote 56 Nonetheless, his reputation as a jealous husband precedes him: Mistress Slender’s reference to him as ‘il geloso vostro sposo’ (your jealous husband) in the first scene of the opera encourages us to see Mister Ford’s joy at seeing his wife again at a critical distance.Footnote 57 It is therefore not entirely a surprise (for the audience at least) when a forte tonic chord suddenly stops Mister Ford in his tracks; short staccato string phrases replace the flowing accompaniment as he becomes distressed at the thought that his wife might not wish to see him (‘Ma oh Dio! Chi sa se in petto, / Mi serba eguale affetto! / Chi sa se brama, o teme, / Vedermi ritornar!’), leading to a disturbing diminished fifth chord on tremolo strings as he attempts to fight off his doubts in his wife (‘Oh, no, dubbio funesto / Ah non venir molesto / A disturbar il giubilo / Che il cor vorria provar’).Footnote 58 His attempts at banishing these intrusive doubts are (temporarily) successful, and he returns to his joyful coloratura. This vulnerability to changing emotions, more often a feature of opera buffa women, might well suggest a ‘feminised’ Mister Ford, especially when taken together with Rice’s suggestion of the reversal of gendered buffa norms in Ford’s late entrance with a cavatina. However, Salieri’s previous examination of gender essentialism in Il mondo alla rovescia might also encourage an understanding of Mister Ford’s journey from his first aria’s emotionalism to his reconciliation with his wife as problematising late eighteenth-century gender roles, suggesting that a tendency to yield to feelings cannot be correlated to a fixed, gendered characteristic, but is, in this instance at least, instead linked to a faulty, and corrigible, epistemology.
A postlude closes the cavatina, before Mister Ford moves to recitative, admitting: ‘I have no reason to doubt her’. However, he continues: ‘but she’s a woman and that’s enough. Whoever called woman the symbol of inconstancy said well!’ (Ex. 9). For all Mister Ford’s emotional battling with his intrusive doubts in his cavatina, he gives in remarkably easily to a misogynist maxim. Here Salieri’s recitative writing provides a level of detail that is barely perceptible in performance but that adds ironic nuance to the role: Mister Ford admits he has no reason to doubt his wife over a chord in C major, the notional ‘natural’ key. A dominant seventh chord on C underscores his next phrase, ‘but she’s a woman’, resolving to the subdominant, F major, as he concludes ‘and that’s enough’. Mister Ford thus, in miniature, musically equates inconstancy and yielding with women through the sense of ‘yielding’ provided by the move to the subdominant. However, this resolution also functions ironically: Mister Ford himself is equated with a yielding nature, falling from the ‘natural’ C major tonality of his recognition of the lack of empirical evidence for his fears to the subdominant when he chooses instead to rely on received ideas rather than thinking for himself. Suggestive of the importance of this theme within the opera is the extent to which Falstaff’s Mister Ford differs from Shakespeare’s Master Ford: whereas Falstaff’s Mistress Ford and the Slenders tend to be intensified distillations of their Shakespearean counterparts, Falstaff’s Mister Ford is a result of textual intervention. While Shakespeare’s Ford is introduced as Pistol warns him of Falstaff’s plans to seduce his wife, Falstaff’s Ford already suspects his wife before learning of Falstaff’s plans, merely on the basis of misogynist cliché.
Salieri, Act I, scene 4, bars 72–6 (187).
Falstaff’s Mister Ford’s willingness to dispense with evidence in making judgements, and instead to rely on received ideas, seems to be linked in his subsequent aria, ‘Or degli affanni i palpiti’, to a lack of self-knowledge. Whereas the overblown, joyful coloratura passages of his first aria, contrasting with his hesitating, tormented doubts, might suggest a parody of opera seria arias (as Rice notes, Giuseppe Simoni, the first Mister Ford, had a background in opera seria), those in his second aria move from parody to irony.Footnote 59 Here he refers to his love as ‘il più costante ardor’ (the most constant ardour). However, each time he utters the word ‘costante’ he breaks into coloratura. In Example 10, for instance, the continuo drops out of the accompaniment, leaving a solo clarinet to accompanies these coloratura passages a third below the vocal line as Mister Ford modulates to the dominant: neither melody, harmony nor instrumentation are ‘constant’, setting up an ironic gap between what Mister Ford says about himself and what his music expresses (Ex. 10). By contrast, having seen the error of his ways and as a demonstration that he has learned his lesson, when Mister Ford sings of his ‘constant faith’ in his spouse in his last aria, ‘La sua fede sì gradita’, the second syllable of ‘costante’ is held on one long note for more than a bar and a half over a tonic chord (Ex. 11). Here the word-painting joins music and meaning appropriately: Mister Ford is now ready for his reconciliation duet in canon with his wife.
Salieri, Act I, scene 11, bars 78–88 (408–10).
Salieri, Act II, scene 16, bars 39–43 (266–7).
Mister Ford’s painfully tormenting jealousy is also displayed in ensembles. In the finale to Act I, for example, Mistress Ford, Mistress Slender, Betty and Mister Slender remonstrate with Mister Ford. Mister Ford has blamed his jealous suspicions on a frightful dream he claims to have had: these four then warn him that ‘Chi a’sogni crede / Vede quello che non vede / e non vede quel che v’ha.’Footnote 60 The distribution of voices in this quartet – two sopranos, a mezzo-soprano and a baritone – provide an unusual texture. Mary Hunter, surveying Viennese opere buffe from around 1770 to 1790, notes:
In large ensembles … (quartets and up), men almost without exception outnumber women – over two-thirds of quartets involve three male and a single female character, who is normally the much-desired centre of the plot. (None reverse this balance, with three women and one man.) Such ensembles thus crystallise and magnify the underlying gendered narrative of many opere buffe. Footnote 61
While Falstaff lies just outside Hunter’s survey, given widespread late eighteenth-century views that equated women with emotion rather than reason, it is striking that the majority of those recommending the rational life are women. However, the presence of Mister Slender in the quartet prevents the argument being one grounded in gender difference: Salieri’s Falstaff, unlike Verdi’s, contains no elements of a ‘sex war’.
Mister Slender’s role in the opera seems designed to highlight the absurdity of Mister Ford’s jealousy. Unlike the tormented Mister Ford, Mister Slender positively revels in his wife’s independence: having been warned by Bardolfo of Falstaff’s plans alongside Mister Ford, he spends his first aria, ‘Venga pure il cavaliere’, amusing himself by imagining his wife’s reactions to an attempted seduction by Falstaff. While the dramatic interest for Shakespeare’s Master Page lies largely in his attempts to marry his daughter to the suitor of his choosing, Mister Slender appears to have no children. Salieri and Defranceschi were thus left with a character with little obvious dramatic conflict or dramatic trajectory and whose principal function is to represent a trusting and contented husband in contrast to Mister Ford. (As noted above, Verdi and Boito chose to cut Master Page’s character altogether, transferring his daughter to the Fords). Nonetheless, the lack of a dramatic trajectory did not mean a lack of opportunity for Ignaz Saal, the original Mister Slender, to display his acting skills. In order to create a central character who is a loving and trusting husband without being either boring or sentimental, the composer and lyricist provided Saal with a comic turn in his first aria; indeed, Salieri noted that the aria’s success was almost entirely due to Saal’s delivery.Footnote 62 Mister Slender imagines Falstaff attempting to seduce his wife, and mimics both: first she robustly refuses his advances; subsequently she abandons politeness, initially abusing him verbally, then, exceeding Shakespeare’s Page’s imaginings, threatening physical violence, warning, if Falstaff does not leave, ‘Ti graffio, ti straccio, ti rompo il mostaccio’ (I’ll scratch you, I’ll claw you, I’ll bash your ugly mug in).Footnote 63 As he imagines Falstaff and Mistress Slender’s encounter, Mister Slender draws on musical motifs from previous scenes to assist in his mimicry. Falstaff’s flirtatious dotted semiquaver motif (compare Ex. 1 above) is made even more insinuating and whining in Mister Slender’s impersonation by the addition of chromatic variations and an extension of the second crotchet of the original motif to a minim (Ex. 12). Mister Slender first represents his wife’s polite but firm refusal by repeated crotchets. Subsequently, he imitates his wife in a tirade of insults delivered in triplet measures interspersed with downward octave leaps, drawing on motifs from Mistress Slender’s rage aria (although Mister Slender only manages leaps of a single octave). Mister Slender ends his aria confident that if Falstaff persists, his wife will carry out her imagined threats.
Mister Slender imitating Falstaff and Mistress Slender in turn: Salieri, Act I, scene 9, bars 53–73 (282–7).
Mister Slender later explains his confidence in his wife in his last aria, ‘Reca in amor la gelosia’, as he waits in Windsor Forest for the others to join him: making oneself prey to jealousy is a disease that ruins marriages.Footnote 64 Here Salieri and Defranceschi are strikingly original in their engagement with Shakespeare’s use of Windsor Forest as the setting for the final scene, giving the forest a significant role in enriching the aria’s meaning. The accompaniment to Mister Slender’s aria, largely restricted to basso continuo with occasional woodwind ornamentation, contrasts strongly with the rich orchestration of Mister Ford’s earlier emotional arias. Already an old-fashioned texture, this perhaps suggests the wisdom of age. At the same time, the simplified accompaniment reinforces both the naturalness of the forest context in which it appears and the natural wisdom of the aria’s content. Mister Slender is not only surrounded by nature, but nature confirms the sentiments in his aria: an echo affirms the last phrase of each stanza, as Slender draws to the audience’s attention in the lines ‘The echo itself confirms it, and on such a point anyone with any sense can echo me.’Footnote 65Falstaff’s forest stands out as unusual amongst buffa outdoor settings: as Hunter notes, these are usually restricted to landscapes, gardens, or gothic settings, all of which usually display signs of human habitation.Footnote 66 Indeed, this unusual forest setting – in buffo terms at least – for the Windsor Forest scene might suggest an opera buffa into which Romanticism has made some inroads. In Shakespeare’s forest, verse replaces the prose of the bulk of the play. Salieri’s forest likewise transforms the opera’s musical texture, not only in this number, but also in the even more stripped-back accompaniment in the Fords’ subsequent duet of reconciliation. Whereas Shakespeare’s forest setting suggests the natural rightness of the existing order in Mistress Quickly’s poetic praise of ‘our radiant queen’, Windsor Castle and the Order of the Garter, in Mister Slender’s aria Salieri and Defranceschi develop Shakespeare’s Windsor Forest to the status of a quasi-character who affirms and celebrates the apparently natural order of trust between spouses.Footnote 67 Shakespeare’s forest celebrates what is; Salieri’s forest suggests what should be, what could be, but what is not yet.
By significantly reducing Shakespeare’s large cast of characters, Salieri and Defranceschi are thus able to focus on the married couples who are central to the play. This allows them to bring out particularly clearly the agency and ingenuity that Mistress Slender and Mistress Ford share with Shakespeare’s merry wives, while making an argument, in Mister Ford’s dramatic trajectory, for the rejection of a reliance on misogyny. However, the women’s wit, the centrality of their friendship and the opera’s interest in the relationships of married couples are of course not guaranteed to survive intact in performance, particularly in modern performances in the wake of the foregrounding of Falstaff in Verdi and Boito’s opera. For example, stage business was introduced in the 1995 Schwetzinger Festspiele production to give Mister Ford some grounds for jealousy: Mister Ford sees Bardolfo leaving the Fords’ house before he returns home.Footnote 68 The irrational nature of Mister Ford’s jealousy was thus undercut in this production. Later, the production cut completely the Fords’ reconciliation duet in canon. The focus on the Fords’ reconciliation, its placement in the ‘natural’ scene of Windsor Forest, and the link between their duet and the earlier duet for Mistress Ford and Mistress Slender, were thus lost. More minor changes to the libretto can also subtly shift the focus from the wives to Falstaff. Thus (among other examples), the Act I minuet loses its ironic meaning in the recording by the Madrigalists of Milan, which changes the original chorus observation ‘com’è bella’ to ‘com’è bello’, with the result that one half of the chorus mock Falstaff’s clumsiness, while the other half appear to admire his grace and handsome appearance: Mistress Ford appears to be ignored altogether.Footnote 69 Nonetheless, the opera in its original conception foregrounds those aspects of Shakespeare’s play that have been marginalised in literary-critical discourse, by means of a combination of music, libretto and – it would appear from Salieri’s notes – a sophisticated engagement with opera buffa conventions on the part of both the creators and the audience. An awareness of the opera’s engagement with the play’s unusual aspects might therefore allow it to distinguish itself from Verdi’s better-known adaptation; at the same time, such an awareness should provide added weight to the alternative reception history for the play that Phyllis Rackin draws on, one in which the merry wives, their friendship, their married lives, and the natural world that surrounds them, are valued and recognised as important aspects of the Shakespearean canon.
