This four-act comic opera celebrating Shakespeares Sir John Falstaff was given its first professional performance in 1946. The libretto, written by the composer, is based on The Merry Wives of Windsor, and interpolates texts by contemporaries of Shakespeare such as Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Campion. The work contains English folksong material and fine examples of the composer's orchestral lyricism and dramatic flair. Music from the opera was later adapted to form the cantata In Windsor Forest and the Fantasia on Greensleeves. For this comprehensive new edition, the editor (and conductor) David Lloyd-Jones has drawn on all available sources, providing an authoritative Study Score with critical commentary. The performance materials are newly-engraved. The orchestral score, vocal score, choral scores, and the optional Episode & Interlude are also available on hire.
Please note that this score comes as two separate volumes.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, born in Gloucestershire on 12 October 1872, read History at Cambridge and went to the Royal College of Music where his teachers were Parry, Wood, and Stanford. Vaughan Williams believed in the value of music education and wrote practical competition pieces, serviceable church music, and with the 49th Parallel (1940-41) he found a new outlet in writing for film. His profoundly disturbing Symphony No.6 (1948) received international acclaim with more than a hundred performances in a little over two years. His great sensitivity to the 20th-century human condition, his flexibility in writing for all levels of music making, and his unquestionably great imagination combine to make him one of the key figures in 20th century music. Ralph Vaughan Williams had a long association with Oxford University Press; over 200 publications are available in the Oxford catalogue.
David Lloyd-Jones was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford and made his professional conducting debut in 1961 with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. He worked briefly as a répétiteur at the Royal Opera House before joining the New Opera Company, where he worked from 1961 to 1964. In 1972 he was appointed Assistant Music Director at Sadlers Wells Opera (now English National Opera), where he conducted a wide repertory which included the first British staging of War and Peace by Sergei Prokofiev. Lloyd-Jones became the first Music Director of Opera North in 1977, where he conducted over fifty productions. He was General Editor for the William Walton Edition, and has published extensively with OUP.
