R. Vaughan Williams - Sir John in Love

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