You need to accept cookies to get access to the professional section
Commedia lirica in three acts. Music by Guiseppe Verdi, libretto by Arrigo Boito after The Merry wives of Windsor and scene from Henry IV by William Shakespeare.For his last masterpiece, Verdi found the material for the comedy of his life-long dreams in the story of this old, penniless and pot-bellied knight: a huge roar of laughter, which still reverberates in us a century later.
“For forty years I have wanted to write a comic opera”. When Verdi wrote these words in 1890, he had already bid farewell to the stage not once but twice, with Aida and with Otello. Fifty years earlier, he had tried his hand at opera buffa with Un giorno de regno. The piece was a flop and, since his wife died during its composition, the failure left him highly embittered. Was it the desire to ward off the ill fortune that appeared in so many of his operas that made him take up his pen again one last time? Or was it the shadow of Shakespeare? Or perhaps the libretto written by the talented Boito, inspired by Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor, overcame his reluctance?“I am having fun…” Verdi repeated continually when composing Falstaff. The composer views the escapades of the old penniless and pot-bellied knight, who wants to deceive the wives and ends up routed, in a dirty washing basket and tossed into the river Thames, with the clear-sighted, distant and mischievous gaze we recognise from his later photographs. At the age of eighty, his composing was leisurely and liberated from the rules. Arias, duets and ensembles merge together in the same musical movement, continuous and boisterous, making Falstaff an unsurpassed operatic comedy that, a century later, continues to give us the gift of joyous laughter.
Ambrogio Maestri (Sir John Falstaff), Artur Rucinski (Ford), Paolo Fanale (Fenton), Raúl Giménez (Dottore Cajus),Bruno Lazzaretti (Bardolfo),Mario Luperi (Pistola) Svetla Vassileva (Mrs Alice Ford),Elena Tsallagova (Nannetta), Marie-Nicole Lemieux (Mrs Quickly),Gaëlle Arquez (Mrs Meg Page) and The Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus
Conductor : Daniel Oren, Stage director: Dominique Pitoiset, Sets : Alexandre Beliaev, Costumes: Elena Rivkina, Lighting: Philippe Albaric, Chorus Master: Patrick Marie Aubert
Italian
English, French
Production compagny : Cineteve
Running Time : 1 x 133’
Production Year : 2013
Distribution compagny : Telmondis distribution
Video Format : HD CAM, Digibeta 16/9