Austria
Salieri’s brilliant comic turn: Chritoph Pohl as Falstaff and Robert Gleadow as Bardolfo
HERWIG PRAMMER
The closing months of 2016 brought musical portraits of Sir John Falstaff from two composers in two opera houses in the same city: Shakespeare’s Fat Knight took to the stage in two very different Vienna productions. The first was a delightful evening of opera, full of surprises; then in an incarnation that shone musically but fell flat when it came to creativity and dramatic suspense. The first production at Theater an der Wien revived Salieri’s 1799 operatic setting; the second, at the Staatsopera, is the much more familiar work by Verdi. Two very different beasts, but they do bear comparison in terms of their level of creative imagination.