Sunday, August 23, 2015

NICOLAI : MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR

Radio New Zealand Concert network
Sunday 23rd of August 2015 at 6 - 8.40 pm

NICOLAI: The Merry Wives of Windsor, opera in three acts
Alice Ford........................ Anneke Luyten
Meg Page.......................... Sabina Willeit
Sir John Falstaff............... Franz Hawlata
Fenton.............................. Davide Giusti
Ford.................................. Werner van Machelen
Anne Page........................ Sophie Junker
Page.................................. Laurent Kubla
Slender............................. Stefan Cifolelli
Dr Cajus........................... Patrick Delcour
First citizen....................... Patrick Mignon
Le thérapeute.................... Sébastien Dutrieux
Liège Royal Phil Chorus & Orch/Christian Zacharias
(recorded at the Opéra, Liège, by Belgium Radio)

INTRODUCTION
LIBRETTO (Deutsch) 
LIBRETTO (English)
SCORE  
PREVIEW

The Merry Wives of Windsor (in German: Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor) is an opera in three acts by Otto Nicolai to a German libretto by Salomon Hermann Mosenthal based on the play The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare.

Here is an opera that I have actually been in (singing in the chorus, when the Perkel Opera came to Palmerston North and Wanganui). Perkel Opera was launched in Auckland in 1974, and produced some 20 operas, touring widely in the North Island. In 1989 it merged with two smaller companies to form Auckland Metropolitan Opera.
   This is really a Singspiel (a play with singing as well as speech, or vice versa if you prefer) like Mozart's Seraglio and Magic Flute, spoken dialogue not recitative.
   Falstaff is on the loose again, and the lusty (lustig, anyway) wives are ready to entrap him, thrice. They are here known as Frau Fluth (Ford) and Frau Reich (Page). He is thrown out of a laundry basket into a river; next he is dressed up in woman's clothing to disguise him as an old lady (like a pantomime dame); and finally he is ill-treated in Windsor Forest. But this is a comic opera, so there is reconciliation in the end.


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