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Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff

Chor der Hamburgischen Staatsoper
Ambrogio Maestri
Falstaff | Markus Brück Ford | Oleksiy Palchykov Fenton | Jürgen Sacher Dr. Cajus | Daniel Kluge Bardolfo | Tigran Martirossian Pistola | Maija Kovalevska | Alice Ford | Elbenita Kajtazi Nannetta | Nadezhda Karyazina Mrs. Quickly | Ida Aldrian Meg Page
Calixto Bieito, stage director
Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg
Axel Kober

Sir John Falstaff is an anarchist who obeys only the reign of his own enjoyment, an egoist who feeds only his power-hunger and his own flesh, and who would prefer to raze the small-minded morals of his contemporaries like the walls of a fortress – by seducing two women at the same time. Needless to say, his plan is thwarted, but those trying to expose him also fail to emerge unruffled from the confusion they unleash around him – which only the audience can keep track of, barely. “Tutto nel mondo è burla,” but these jokes are only funny because falling into the abyss actually does pose quite a serious risk. Arrigo Boito, the librettist of “Otello”, distilled a sophisticated, ingenious libretto from Shakespeare’s original, driving Verdi to highly complex compositional heights.

Repertoire

Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff, Opera in three acts, Libretto by Arrigio Boito after William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor

Facts

Prog. No.
6815
Music genre
Opera
Length
130 mins
Director
Henning Kasten
Producers
EuroArts Music in coproduction with ZDF/arte
Production year
2020
Format
HD