Continuous fun

The time of year is approaching when Nutcrackers take over from opera, and then a further round of Traviatas gets under way. But that does at least mean that it’s also the time when the schools of music put on their end-of-term operas, and this season is unusually promising. Next week Sir Colin Davis is conducting Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict at the Royal Academy of Music, and the week after the Royal College of Music is staging two equally rare Bizet operas, Djamileh and Le Docteur Miracle.

I doubt whether either of them will give me more, or as much, pleasure as the Guildhall School’s production of Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives). This was one of the most polished efforts I have seen at the Guildhall School, with some truly remarkable singers and an orchestra which was on exceptionally fine form, with a few lapses; that speaks strongly for Clive Timms, who has conducted an immense range of operas, always idiomatically.

The question always arises with The Merry Wives: was it worth doing? Though it retains a minor place in the repertoire of German-speaking countries, elsewhere it is inevitably compared with Verdi’s Falstaff, and naturally to Nicolai’s disadvantage. Of course, it isn’t such a great opera as Falstaff, in fact, it isn’t a great opera at all, but neither are plenty of others that we get far more chances to see. There is an odd prejudice, which has lasted now for a long time, in favour of Italian operas of more or less any period over ones from Germany or, for that matter, France. Merry Wives is unarguably much more enjoyable than many of Verdi’s early operas, or than most of Donizetti’s. But it offers less opportunity for singers to show off, and thus for a familiar kind of opera buff to writhe in pleasure at.