Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor

Depicting the comedic adventures of an unhappy rascal on a quest for affection and money, Shakespeare’s original pearl of a play caricatures the bourgeois mores of his age. All the essential ingredients for a top-notch comic opera can be found in this hilarious romp of a comedy of errors, qualities Verdi put on full display in Falstaff, his own 1893 adaptation of the tale. But before Verdi’s work came Otto Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, a three-act Singspiel mixing spoken dialogue and musical numbers. By the time he composed the work, Nicolai had already achieved considerable success with Italian operas, but it was this new work in his native German that would become his masterpiece.