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Thanks to Peter Schaffer's Amadeus, Antonio Salieri has beenimmortalized as the mediocre musician who probably poisoned Mozart in a fit ofjealousy over the latter's immense talent. While history has been less than kindto Salieri, occasional stagings of his operas and recordings of his works showthat this ignorance is not entirely justified. His opera Falstaff is oneof several based on Shakespeare's immortal comic creation, and while not asmemorable as Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor or Verdi'simmortal Falstaff, Salieri's version passes its two hours onstage with apleasing comic touch.

This 1995 performance from the Schwetzinger Festspiele in Germany is proofpositive that Salieri's operas can hold their own onstage. Director MichaelHampe stages the farce at a brisk but never breakneck pace, and he and hisdesigners conjure up a plausibly comic world. John de Carlo looks exactly rightas the overbearing knight whose eye for the ladies leads to his comeuppance, andhe sings with brio. Conductor Arnold Östmann and the Radio Symphony OrchestraStuttgart play the bright-sounding score with panache. Visually, thisFalstaff looks great, and aurally, the stereo mix is quite good. Sincethis is an opera that's rarely recorded, let alone heard, this disc is a mustfor fans of 18th-century music. --Kevin Filipski ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Salieri is not Mozart
This DVD is nicely presented visually, but I found the sound on my admittedly ancient TV to be quite distorted. It seemed as if the sound was recorded at a level above what the recording equipment could take. Most of the singers including Falstaff seemed reasonably accurate, but the apparent distortion made the quality seem mediocre. The dialogue was quite good and the comic acting was excellent. On the other hand, the quality of the music was just not very good. Maybe everyone should hear Salieri's music (origin of 2 star rating) but I don't believe one needs to invest $30 for this privilege. My copy is going to the library because in spite of good orchestral playing and decent singing and acting, I will never waste my time watching and listening to this again.

A very pleasant surprise
"Not very good" was how a friend of mine many years ago described the music to a certain opera he had just heard on a CD. Perhaps if he viewed the new Arthaus Musik DVD release of Salieri's (100 023), distributed by the excellent Naxos of America people, his opinion might change.

Now granted that it comes nowhere close to the standard set by the Verdi opera and it lacks the great beauty of the Vaughan Williams "Sir John in Love," it is almost as good as Nicolai's "Merry Wives of Windsor" and quite respectable on its own terms. As in Boito's libretto for the Verdi work, Salieri's librettist, Carlo Prospers Defranceschi, cut the Shakespeare play down to its essential plots and even more so. The subplot of Fenton and Ann Page is gone. Indeed so are Mr. and Mrs. Page, the second merry wife here becoming Mrs. Slender. The incident of Falstaff in drag is included, however, and Mr. Ford gets two jealousy arias, where Boito gives him one.

There is a very funny scene in which Mrs. Ford comes in disguise (since there is no Mistress Quickly in this version), pretending to speak German and a little English, while Falstaff professes to speak only English and a little German--all the while the two are singing in Italian, laced with German phrases and a little French thrown in!

There is a little more secco recite than modern audiences would care to have, and not many of the tunes of the arias and ensembles will linger in the memory after only one hearing; but the score is in general bubbly and well composed by the man who almost certainly did not murder Mozart.

The cast is strong throughout. Boasting many American singers, it includes John Del Carlo (Falstaff), Teresa Ringholz (Mrs. Ford), Richard Croft (Mr. Ford), Delores Ziegler (Mrs. Slender), Jake Gardner (Mr. Slender), Carlos Feller (Bardolfo), and Darla Brooks (Betty). Del Carlo gives us a tall, not really unattractive Falstaff (except for the paunch), while Ringholz shows good comic flair in her two disguise scenes. Extra humor is offered by the zesty subtitles, written in rhyme, that paraphrase rather than translate the Italian text.

Arnold Oestmann conducts the Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart at the Schwetzinger Festspiele. The video is excellent, the subtitles are clear. And the disc runs at about 20 minutes longer than the 120 minutes shown on the back cover. A delightful addition to any musical collection. ... Read more

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This classic production of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria ("The Return of Ulysses") from the 1985 Salzburg Festival updates the Renaissance orchestration to a distinctly modern sound but conveys the musical and dramatic power of Monteverdi's masterpiece with impressive impact. The new orchestration by one of the 20th century's most accomplished opera composers, Hans Werner Henze, was commissioned because existing manuscripts lack orchestral details. The effect is hybrid, but it works.

Michael Hampe's staging focuses on the interactions of the characters without trying to create a realistic sense of period and environment. This is effective in a work of art that has roles for gods (Neptune, Minerva) as well as abstractions (Time, Human Frailty). Jeffrey Tate conducts with a fine sense of the proper style, and the singers fit impressively into their roles. Notably fine performances by Thomas Allen as the returning warrior, Ulysses, and Kathleen Kuhlmann as his long-suffering wife, Penelope, are set off by a superb supporting cast. --Joe McLellan ... Read more

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This is an opera about true and false feelings, emotional manipulation, and the striking of poses and attitudes by people who are "emotionally correct" the way many individuals and institutions today are politically correct. As the opera progresses, the attitudes of the two romantic heroes and their fiancées are gradually undermined, but they begin by saying and doing exactly what is expected of them, with results that are musically beguiling and, at the same time, very funny. In Act II, theemotion becomes real: the characters who were like puppets begin to shed true tears, and the comedy deepens into a serious statement about human fragility and the need to tolerate one another's weaknesses. These points are well made in a performance that is musically and theatrically polished, with particularly fine ensemble singing. There are six solo singers in Cosi; all the roles have approximately the same importance but in this production, as in many others, the spotlight is often stolen by the maid Despina. Adelina Scarabelli is so good in the role that you wish her performances weren't so rare. --Joe McLellan ... Read more