Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Salieri: Falstaff

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

The popular film about Mozart's life Amadeus did not portray the figure of Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) in a particularly flattering light, yet for a supposedly second rate composer he was a greater success than Mozart in his chosen profession. Salieri was a prolific composer, too, and he was in the main a composer of operas. He wrote at least forty of them, compared to Mozart's twenty two.

Salieri's comic opera Falstaff (1799) is Mozartean at every turn--so much so that at times it seems like he's quoting Mozart. Falstaff is also an innovative work in that it was the first time an Italian language adaptation of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor was set to music. Salieri wrote some very popular, memorable tunes for the score of Falstaff. The young Beethoven made one the theme of a set of piano variations. In the history of opera Salieri's Falstaff is an excellent specimen of Italian opera buffa in the period immediately before Rossini came on the scene.

Falstaff got the recorded treatment it deserved from Hungaroton, the former Hungarian state record label, which issued it on three CD's in 1985, presumably a world premiere on disc. I have broadcast these discs twice before, on Sundays August 23, 1994 and August 11, 1996.