Falstaff

“If Falstaff got thinner, what would he be?” Sir John Falstaff loves food, wine and women – and urgently needs cash to pay off his debts. Despite his advanced age, he considers himself an irresistible heartthrob and writes two identical love letters to Mrs Alice Ford and Mrs Meg Page in order to get his hands on their husbands’ money. But the two women see through his plan and begin to play him at his own game ...

With his final opera, which premiered in Milan in 1893, the almost 80-year-old Giuseppe Verdi turned for only the second time to comedy and virtually reinvented himself as a composer. In keeping with Arrigo Boito’s text, which plays skilfully with words, references and poetic devices, Verdi created a dynamic score full of lightness and depth, interspersed with melancholy and lyrical moments, leading up to the famous closing fugue: “Everything in the world is a jest!”

Following the great success of his production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola in 2021, Damiano Michieletto is now directing Verdi’s commedia lirica as a fast-paced, opulently staged comedy about an ageing musician who nostalgically reminisces about his former success and conquests, while at the same time upsetting the apple cart in a hidebound, strait-laced society. For Daniele Gatti, here overseeing his first opera at the Semperoper as Principal Conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden, Falstaff is “a true marvel’ and “a study of the human condition”.