Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi
This 2009 Festival production has now finished but it will be revived for Glyndebourne on Tour this Autumn. Find our more about Falstaff on Tour.
Supported by Hamish and Sophie Forsyth
Sung in Italian with English supertitles
Vladimir Jurowski on conducting Verdi's Falstaff
Listen to the podcast featuring interviews with conductor Vladimir Jurowski and Baritone Christopher Purves who takes on the mantle of the larger-than-life Falstaff in this production.
"Having sounded all the shrieks and groans of the human heart, to finish with a mighty burst of laughter – that will astonish the world!”
So wrote Verdi to his librettist, Arrigo Boito, just before embarking upon what he knew would be his final opera. And the result has gone on astonishing the world ever since – not least that such a mercurial, nimble-footed and profusely tuneful portrait of Shakespeare’s Fat Knight should have flowed from the pen of a man then nearing 80. (There are even those who think that Boito’s libretto – three parts The Merry Wives of Windsor to two parts Henry IV, with a sprinkling of fairy dust from A Midsummer Night’s Dream – improves on the Bard’s originals.)
Glyndebourne first presented Falstaff in its 1955 Edinburgh Festival season, in a production with typically witty designs by Osbert Lancaster that slyly included caricatures of several members of the Glyndebourne staff among the ancestral portraits hanging on Ford’s walls. This year’s new production reunites the director/conductor team of Richard Jones and Vladimir Jurowski, who scored such a striking success with their 2007 collaboration on Verdi’s first Shakespearian opera, Macbeth.
An international cast is led by the exciting British baritone Christopher Purves in the larger-than-life role of the corpulent Falstaff, whose profligate presence both outrages and inspires the leaner, meaner citizens of Windsor.
Performance schedule
Key
* = Pre-performance talk available in the in the Ebert Room.
Creative team
Conductor Vladimir Jurowski
Director Richard Jones
Designer Ultz
Lighting Designer Mimi Jordan Sherin
Movement Director Linda Dobell
Chorus Master Thomas Blunt
London Philharmonic Orchestra
The Glyndebourne Chorus
Cast includes:
Falstaff Christopher Purves
Alice Ford Dina Kuznetsova
Ford Tassis Christoyannis
Meg Page Jennifer Holloway
Mistress Quickly Marie-Nicole Lemieux
Nannetta Adriana Kucerová
Fenton Bülent Bezdüz
Dr Caius Peter Hoare
Bardolph Alasdair Elliott
Pistol Paolo Battaglia
Study event
Sunday 17 May, Ebert Room
Pre-performance talk
Sunday 24 May