Falstaff

• Opera

Sir John Falstaff is an anarchist who only bows to the rule of his own pleasure, an egoist who only indulges in his absolutist power and physical abundance and who wants to tear down the narrow-minded morals of his fellow human beings like the city walls of a fortress by seducing two women at the same time. Of course this goes wrong, but those who want to expose him also lose a lot of ground in the game of confusion that they stage around him - and which the audience just barely sees through. "Tutto nel mondo è burla", but these antics are only funny because falling into the abyss represents a very serious risk. The "Otello" librettist Arrigo Boito has cleverly distilled a linguistically ingenious libretto from Shakespeare's original, which takes Verdi to highly complex compositional heights.

Directed by Calixto Bieito
Set design: Susanne Gschwender
Costumes: Anja Rabes
Dramaturgy: Bettina Auer
Light: Michael Bauer

premiere on January 19, 2020