Falstaff

"Tutto nel mondo è burla", everything in the world is a bad joke. The punchline is at the expense of the people. The main thing is to have laughed at the end!

Giuseppe Verdi is known as the grand master of tragic emotions. Yet throughout his life, the composer wanted to write a funny opera. At the end of his life, he finally found the right hero in Shakespeare's sardonically gluttonous drunkard and bon vivant Falstaff. He sends the same love letter twice. It never occurs to the worn-out knight that the befriended ladies could talk to each other. So he sets in motion a furious machinery of revenge, which the offended women bring against him. A jealous husband, a playful servant and a pair of young lovers also intervene. In the end, everyone is the victim, some more than others and old men in particular.

In his last opera, the 90-year-old Verdi looks with a melancholy smile at the ever-young life, the youth that repeats itself like the moon in ever new faces, ever different human lives, while time passes to release us all as mortals.

The young director Tobias Ribitzki makes his directorial debut at the Tiroler Landestheater with this great masterpiece of Italian opera and leads the in-house ensemble through a turbulent evening full of cheerful entanglements and deep poetry.