Movie Details

"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.