Contents Preface page v Sources Textual Notes viii x Characters Scenes Dedication Preface by Ralph Vaughan Williams Sir John in Love Act I 1 Act II 187 Act III 325 Act IV 531 xiv xv xvi xvii Perusal Score Not for Performance
preface The Play The Merry Wives of Windsor, on which Ralph Vaughan Williams based his libretto for his second full-length opera, Sir John in Love, is unusual in the entire Shakespeare canon in that it is the only one of his comedies that takes place in contemporary England, featuring the bourgeoisie and servant class of a country town, and, more especially, the one that of all thirtyseven plays contains by far the smallest number of lines in verse. Popular belief, first recorded in the late seventeenth century, has it that, having attended a performance of Henry IV, Part One, Queen Elizabeth expressed a desire to see a new play showing the great comic character Sir John Falstaff in love, and that, as a result, in 1597–8 (as is now thought), Shakespeare cobbled together some existing material at great speed (hence the amount of prose) to comply with her request. The play exists in two formats: (1) a shorter, unofficial, ‘bad’ Quarto of 1602, which shows signs of being a ‘memorial reconstruction’ of the play by actors (in which the player of the Host of the Garter Inn seems to have taken a major part); and (2) the considerably fuller, more reliable, text of the 1623 First Folio. This historic publication, however, was influenced by the passing in the meantime of James I’s Act to Restrain Abuses of Players of 1606, which forbade the use of such words as ‘God’, ‘Lord’, ‘Ieshu’, and others much used in the Quarto, so that they have usually been expurgated in the Folio with the milder ‘Heaven’ or ‘Heavens’. Modern editors sometimes restore the Quarto text on such occasions, and in this respect the autograph full score and subsequent published vocal score of the opera sometimes differ (see Textual Notes). Libretto Although in the twentieth century the scholarly Arden edition of the play had first appeared in 1904 and the Oxford edition in 1910, according to his wife, Ursula, Vaughan Williams used a nineteenth-century illustrated edition of Shakespeare given to him by his grandmother Caroline Darwin (sister of Charles) as the basis of his libretto; this included incipits of music mentioned in the plays. 1 The programme for the 2006 English National Opera staging of the opera, produced while Ursula was still alive, shows a Victorian-looking page that gives an eight-bar E minor early version of ‘Greensleeves’. Sadly, it is not known what has happened to the volume since Ursula’s death. The British Library houses the composer’s annotated typescript of his libretto that he used during the composition of the opera (see Sources). Choice of subject It is surprising that Vaughan Williams decided to write such a full-scale, four-act, work, in view of the dearth of opportunities for staging native opera in England in the 1920s. He had composed his two-act ‘romantic ballad opera’ Hugh the Drover between 1910 and 1914 but had not orchestrated it until he returned from military service at the end of World War I, and he had had to wait until July 1924 for its first private (student) staging at the Royal College of Music, and until later that year when it was semi-professionally performed by the British National Opera Company, both conducted by the young Dr Malcolm Sargent. Furthermore, he knew only too well that successful operas on the same subject, notably by Nicolai (1849) and, more especially, Verdi (1893), posed a very real threat to the success of his treatment, something that he tried to explain in the published vocal score. 2 True, in August 1912, and later in the spring/summer of 1913, he had spent some weeks in Stratford-upon-Avon where he had written and conducted, among other scores, incidental music for the actor-manager F. R. Benson’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the old Memorial Theatre. 3 It was at this time that he is known to have first used the 1580s’ popular song ‘Greensleeves’ (which Holst had used two years previously), doubtless in response to Mistress Ford’s passing reference to the tune (Act IV, Scene I) and to Falstaff’s lines ‘Let the sky rain potatoes, let it thunder to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’ (Act V, Scene V). In her biography of her late husband, Ursula Vaughan Williams tells us that he had not previously known the play (which was out of favour with avant guard thought at the time), and that he had been so taken with it at Stratford that, on returning to London, he toyed with the idea of basing an opera on it. At the same time, he must have felt that it was about time that a British composer tackled this irresistible native subject, one moreover in which he could make use of his great interest in folk songs, folk dances and the Jacobean masque. Vaughan Williams’s love of the play and his relative inexperience as an opera composer contributed to a miscalculation in the design of his libretto. Whereas Boito, working for Verdi to produce his final commedia lirica, had reduced the singing personnel to a cast of ten (dispensing with Shallow, Slender, Simple, Evans, Page, Nym, the Host, Rugby, and three servants), Vaughan Williams has twenty Perusal Score Not for Performance (reflecting the twenty-two speaking parts in the First Folio), though five may be taken by members of the chorus and the roles of Shallow and Dr Caius doubled by one singer (see vocal score for details). Nevertheless, he shows great imagination in his adaptation of Shakespeare, juxtaposing episodes at will and making judicious cuts, though some would say not enough. Above all, he has outdone Boito/ Verdi in one respect. In order to increase the lyrical content of the opera, he has inserted a number of verses from other v
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