Falstaff, Royal Opera House

Verdi's Falstaff is set to play at the Royal Opera House London in July 2015. When it premiered in 2012, performed by five different companies in five of the world’s greatest opera houses, Robert Carsen’s Falstaff was greeted as the most significant in five decades. The production stars some of the world's most recognisable opera singers, including Ambrogio Maestri, who stars. It is difficult to imagine a part more perfect for the Italian baritone whose stage presence, sturdy vocals and mighty heft combine to epitomize Falstaff. Danish conductor Michael Schønwandt will take up the baton, who succeeded Jaap van Zweden as principal conductor of the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic in 2010.

The Plot

Sir John Falstaff is in love with two married ladies – albeit chiefly because he covets their husbands’ fortunes. When he dispatches a pair of identical love letters to them, he fails to reckon for the two friends’ discovering his duplicity, nor that his own companions might double-cross him for the same pecuniary motivations as his own. With the women seeking revenge on one side of the stage and their men thirsting for vengeance on the other, Falstaff finds himself caught within a trap of his own making. Rollicking and rambunctious, Falstaff abounds with a sense of merriment and good will.

The Opera

Falstaff (1893) is Giuseppi Verdi’s twentieth-eighth and final opera, composed when he was almost eight decades old. With the exception of the unpopular Un giorno di regno from some fifty-thee years earlier, it is his only comic work. Based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, a loose sequel to the Henry IV plays that allowed one of the Bard’s most vibrantly droll characters to ride again, Falstaff stands at the peak of the comic genre.

The Production 

Updated to a grandiose post-war hotel, Carsen’s Falstaff augments Verdi and Shakespeare with a commentary on aristocratic decline and the rise of youth culture.

Carsen is thorough, and his work operates on both a large and a small scale: an acute sensitivity to textual subtleties are matched by elaborate stage sets. Carsen always does justice to the humour of his texts. He is a brilliant director of movement around the stage, making his comedic scenes genuinely side-splitting.