DORA LABBETTE (Soprano)
PARRY JONES (Tenor)
THE WIRELESS MILITARY BAND
Conducted by B. WALTON O'DONNELL

There are many operas on subjects from our Shakespeare by German composers. That industrious fellow, the German, studies our Shakespeare rather more thoroughly than we do ourselves. Nicolai, the composer of The Merry Wives of Windsor, was one of the adventurous young people who ran away from home. He had the good luck to fall into kindly hands and to be given a first-rate education in music under the same master as the great Mendelssohn, and his career throughout was a happy and successful one. He held several posts as conductor and director, of which he might have made use to produce his own works, but made himself responsible rather for tho best possible performances of the great classics.
This Overture is made up principally of music from the third act of the opera, in which the scene is laid in Windsor Forest, where Falstaff and the rest join in a crazy fancy-dress frolic. The quiet tune of the opening, which the violoncellos begin, suggests the moon rising over the forest, and all the other lighthearted tunes concern themselves with the merrymaking with which the opera ends.

A great deal of German's best known work is music originally written for the theatre, particularly for many of the Shakespeare plays; so popular have these become, that it is not too much to say that they are probably known to a wider public at the present day than the plays themselves.
These three dances are part of the incidental music composed for a production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, at the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1892. The first is a Morris Dance, in the sturdy robust rhythm traditionally associated with that old-time measure of the country. There is an introductory section of sixteen bars before the tune itself enters.
The second, called 'Shepherd's Dance,' is a light-footed movement, graceful and dainty, in which the same spirit of brightness prevails as in the first more boisterous dance. Tn this movement, too, there is an introductory section before the tune enters.
The third dance has the name of 'Torch Dance,' and is much the most energetic and vigorous of the set. In the same time-measure as the first dance, it is built up on a rushing, strenuous tune which hurries along without a pause to its close, played on the full strength of the orchestra.