Of all the musical forms essayed by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), his operas have received the least recognition or respect. Yet he was incontestably a man of the theatre. The first professional staging of Sir John in Love was given by Sadler’s Wells Opera in April 1946. In July 1958, less than a month before he died, the composer attended a performance at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre. After this, it is thought not to have graced the professional stage in Britain again until 2 March 2006 when English National Opera revived the work at the London Coliseum.

In this 1956 BBC studio recording, Roderick Jones makes an ideal Falstaff, commanding and vulnerable in equal measure. His love-song in Act II, ‘O that joy so soon should waste’, is both droll and touching. At the end of play, this butt of ridicule is allowed to become a Master of Ceremonies, conferring his blessing on all, and it is a measure of Jones’s multilayered portrayal that the transformation is effected with ease and dignity. This portrayal is the jewel in the crown of a reading in which a whole community of colourful characters comes to life.

BBC studio recording
Producer Mark Lubbock
Broadcast on 12-13 February 1956

Cast:
- Shallow: Heddle Nash
- Sir Hugh Evans: Parry Jones
- Slender: Gerald Davies
- Peter Simple: Andrew Gold
- Page: Denis Dowling
- Sir John Falstaff: Roderick Jones
- Bardolph: John Kentish
- Nym: Denis Catlin
- Pistol: Forbes Robinson
- Anne Page: April Cantelo
- Mrs Page: Laelia Finneberg
- Mrs Ford: Marion Lowe
- Fenton: James Johnston
- Dr Caius: Francis Loring
- Rugby: Ronald Lewis
- Mrs Quickly: Pamela Bowden
- The Host of the ‘Garter Inn’: Owen Brannigan
- Ford: John Cameron

THE LYRITA RECORDED EDITION TRUST ITTER BROADCAST COLLECTION
In 1952 Richard Itter, the founder of Lyrita, began to make domestic recordings of BBC transmissions using state-of-the-art disc and tape recorders. He documented his collection but rarely listened to it, thus preserving a pristine archive. The Lyrita Recorded Edition Trust began a transfer programme in 2014 with the intention to release the best and rarest of these recordings to the public.