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Composer: Giuseppe Verdi
Librettist: Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV
Premiere: 9 February 1893, Milan (La Scala)
Language: Italian
Synopsis: https://www.opera-arias.com/verdi/falstaff/synopsis/
Translation: English subtitles
Cast & Characters:
Ambrogio Maestri as Sir John Falstaff
Roberto Frontali as Ford
Juan Diego Flòrez as Fenton
Inva Mula as Nannetta
Ernesto Gavazzi as Dr. Cajus
Paolo Barbacini as Bardolfo
Luigi Roni as Pistola
Barbara Frittoli as Mrs. Alice Ford
Bernadette Manca Di Nissa as Mrs. Quickly
Anna Caterina Antonacci as Mrs. Meg Page
Orchestra e Coro del Teatro alla Scala
Conductor Riccardo Muti
Directed for Stage by Ruggero Cappuccio - After a historical staging (1913) by the Teatro Verdi, Busseto.
Recorded live at the Teatro Verdi. Busseto, 10 April 2001.
Directed for TV by Pierre Cavasillas
Falstaff is an operatic commedia lirica in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi, adapted by Arrigo Boito from Shakespeare's plays The Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV. The plot revolves around the thwarted, sometimes farcical, efforts of the fat knight Sir John Falstaff to seduce two married women to gain access to their husbands' wealth.
It was Verdi's last opera, written in the composer's ninth decade, and only the second of his 26 operas to be a comedy. It was also the third of Verdi's operas to be based on a Shakespearean play, following his earlier Macbeth and Otello. (Verdi had toyed, too, with writing an opera based on King Lear and Arrigo Boito later tried to interest him in Antony and Cleopatra, but neither project was ever brought to fruition.) While it has not proved to be as immensely popular as the Verdi works that immediately preceded it, namely Aida and Otello, Falstaff has long been an admired favorite with critics and musicians because of its brilliant orchestration, scintillating libretto and refined melodic invention.
Verdi was concerned about working on a new opera at his advanced age, but he yearned to write a comic work and was pleased with Boito's draft libretto. It took the collaborators three years from mid-1889 to complete. Although the prospect of a new opera from Verdi aroused immense interest in Italy and around the world, Falstaff did not prove to be as popular as earlier works in the composer's canon. After the initial performances in Italy, other European countries and the US, the work was neglected until the conductor Arturo Toscanini insisted on its revival at La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York from the late 1890s into the next century. Some felt that the piece suffered from a lack of the full-blooded melodies of the best of Verdi's previous operas, a view that Toscanini strongly opposed. Conductors of the generation after Toscanini to champion the work included Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti and Leonard Bernstein. The work is now part of the standard operatic repertory of many opera companies.
