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Salieri’s Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle and The Merry Wives of Windsor: Operatic Adaptation and/as Shakespeare Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2014

John R. Severn
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Abstract

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor contains several features that make it unusual within his dramatic output and that thus render problematic the idea of a unified ‘Shakespearean’ canon. Until very recently, literary criticism has either largely ignored or denigrated the play, with a sustained interest in its portrayal of female agency, family life and the natural world only consolidating in the early twenty-first century. However, earlier operatic adaptations, such as Salieri and Defranceschi’s Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle, demonstrate an engagement with those issues which literary criticism has only lately addressed. While approaches to adaptations of The Merry Wives often focus primarily on the character of Falstaff, Salieri and Defranceschi’s opera’s engagement with the play’s issues beyond Falstaff suggests it might give added weight to a growing awareness of a positive alternative reception history of the play beyond literary criticism. At the same time, a consideration of the opera’s engagement with the play’s themes of female agency, family life and the natural world might shed light on Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle beyond the shadow cast by Verdi’s central character.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 83 - 112
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2014 

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39 ‘Il mio parere anche sulla musica di questa mia opera. La Sinfonia é c[e]rto una delle più analoghe che siano state composte al soggetto anzi, si può dire che questa comincia della sinfonia, ecco le ragioni: La prima scena rappresenta una Festa privata in onore, e in casa di ricchi negozianti, marito e moglie dopo i primi compliment[i] di buon augorio, etc, si dice [S]u, rinfreschi, liquori, confetti, poi si torni di nuovo a ballar –. Questo secondo verso facendo credere che la compagnia ha già ballato, ho pensato di far una Sinfonia appresso a poco in forma di tante contradanze, e l’effetto è stato sentito subito dal pubblico, e applaudito’. Antonio Salieri, manuscript notes on Falstaff (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, M.S. Cod. 16.191) in Angermüller, Rudolph, Antonio Salieri: Sein Leben und seine weltlichen Werke unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner ‘großer’ Opern. Teil III: Dokumente (Munich, 1972), 94–97Google Scholar, at 95.

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48 ‘La stessa, la stessissima’: Salieri, Act I, scene 6 (pp. 214–22); ‘Che soave zeffiretto’: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Le nozze di Figaro (London, 1983), Act III, number 20, pp. 499–505.

49 Brown-Montesano, Kristi, Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas (Berkeley, 2007), 155–156CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoting Brophy, Brigid, Mozart the Dramatist: The Value of His Operas to Him, to His Age, and to Us (1964; rpt New York, 1988), 113Google Scholar.

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51 For example: Mistress Page: Quickly! Quickly! Is the buck basket – Mistress Ford: I warrant. (3.3.2–3).

52 On the challenges of the canon to dramatic development and some approaches to solving them, see Dorothea Link, ‘“È la fede degli amanti” and the Viennese Operatic Canon’ in Mozart Studies, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge, 2006), 109–36, at 114–15. Salieri here solves the challenge by embedding the canon within the duettino’s wider structure.

53 Ibid., 112. Link draws on Robert N. Freeman’s work in ‘Johann Georg Albrechtsberger’s “26 Canoni aperti dei varii autori”: Observations on Canonic Theory and Repertory in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Musicologia Humana: Studies in Honor of Warren and Ursula Kirkendale, ed. S. Gmeinwieser, D. Hiley and J. Riedlbauer (Florence, 1994), 485–511.

54 Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Melchiori, Act III, scene 2, lines 13–14.

55 Rice, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera, 581.

56 ‘About to see my sweet beloved wife again, I begin to tremble with joy and pleasure.’

57 Mistress Slender: il geloso vostro sposo [your jealous husband]. Salieri, Act I, scene 1, bars 214–16 (104).

58 ‘But, Lord! who knows whether she bears me an equal affection in her breast! Who knows whether she longs – or fears – to see me return!’; ‘Oh, no, do not come, deadly, vexatious doubt, to disturb the exaltation my heart would like to feel.’

59 Rice, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera, 581

60 ‘He who believes in dreams sees what he does not see and does not see what he has’; Salieri, Act I, finale, bars 616–21 (560–1).

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63 Salieri, Act I, scene 9, bars 89–91 (292–293). Cf. Master Page: If he should intend this voyage towards my wife, I would turn her loose on him, and what he gets more of her than sharp words, let it lie on my head (2.1.164–7).

64 ‘Reca in amor la gelosia’: Salieri, Act II, scene 17 (283–303).

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