BBC Symphony Orchestra
(Leader, Paul Beard )
Conductor, Sir Adrian Boult
Elgar was careful to point out that this symphonic study was a musical picture of the Falstaff of the historical plays, not the simple figure of fun in The Merry Wives of Windsor. In the words of an eighteenth-century writer, he is 'a man at once young and old, enterprising and fat, a dupe and a wit, harmless and wicked ... a knave without malice, a liar without deceit; and a knight, a gentleman and a soldier, without either dignity, decency or honour.'
The work, which is full of inventiveness and vitality, falls into four sections, which are linked together. At the opening Falstaff is portrayed ' in a green old age, mellow, gay, corpulent, and unprincipled '; and the scene is an apartment of the Prince, who escapes from the coldness and convention of his father's Court to the teeming life of'the London streets and the Boar's Head Tavern, where Falstaff is monarch. There follow midnight exploits at Gad's Hill, Falstaff's march with his ' scarecrow army and the return through Gloucestershire, the crowning and progress of the new King, the repudiation of Falstaff, and his death, when he ' babbled of green fields.'
In the course of the study there are two
Interludes for small orchestra. In the first, Sir John, asleep behind the arras in the tavern at Eastcheap, dreams of his boyhood when he was page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. The second takes place in Justice Shallow's orchard in Gloucestershire. Harold Rutland