Salieri: Falstaff

Opera 12

Salieri: Falstaff

Soloists

The madrigalists of Milan

Alberto Veronesi

For the next few operas I am going to look at works inspired by Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor.  I won’t be including Verdi’s Falstaff because that is an opera that I know so well (and besides I have already included Verdi in this project) but there are quite a few others to go at.

I wasn’t aware, until I acquired this CD in a second-hand sale, that Salieri had written an opera based on the play so I was intrigued to hear what it might be like.  It is of course almost impossible not to think of Salieri without remembering the play/film Amadeus and I am afraid that that is exactly what occurred to me at the start of this piece. The overture started off with some very trivial, cliched, material which irresistibly reminded me of the scene in the film where Mozart played a march by Salieri in a mocking style and transmuted it into something from Figaro. I found most of the first Act very weak and it was hard to get engaged with it. Things did improve after that - there were some spirited ensembles and some more attractive numbers but overall I do think that this opera is a lost cause. Cecilia Bartoli recorded a CD of extracts from Salieri operas some years ago and there are some interesting things there, but I suspect she had to wade though a lot of ordinarily material before finding enough worth recording.

Amadeus is fiction and the portrayal of Mozart there is highly contrived and unlikely. But it does have a deep dramatic truth. The gulf between talent and genius is at once wafer thin and absolutely enormous.