Salieri – Falstaff
John Del Carlo; Teresa Ringholz; Richard Croft; Stuttgart RSO; Arnold Östman
ArtHaus Musik 102306
This recording is not exactly new. It gives us a live performance from the Schwetzingen Festival, which dates from 1995. The DVD was first released in 2000 (it is still available in that format). So we are dealing with what is essentially a repackaging.
Although in the early 17th century Monteverdi’s opera had both serious and comic elements, in the 18th century these tended to be divided between opera seria and opera buffa. That division was not absolute and several of Handel’s operas (most notably Partenope and Serse) were in part comic. It was not until Mozart, however, that the serious potential of comic opera was brought out. Antonio Salieri’s Falstaff was first performed in January 1799, a little more than seven years after Mozart’s death. Yet it is a comic opera that shows little of the complexities which we find in Don Giovanni or Così fan tutte. Nor is Falstaff’s story as interestingly treated as it is by Verdi, Nicolai or Vaughan Williams.
I found much of Salieri’s opera decidedly unfunny and much of the music rather routine. There are a few exceptions such as Mr. Ford’s jealousy arias (beautifully sung by the tenor Richard Croft) and the final scene in which Falstaff is confronted with a ritual scene of torment (with the soprano Teresa Ringholz very fine as the Queen of the Fairies). It is not a coincidence that it is exactly those scenes which carry a threat which move beyond what is merely comic.
