"Falstaff" by Giuseppe Verdi at the Gran Teatre del Liceu

Year 1893: Verdi, at 80 years old, attends the premiere of Falstaff at La Scala. As a major event, among the audience are Princess Letizia Bonaparte and the Italian opera composers Pietro Mascagni and Giacomo Puccini. The composer himself came out to greet the audience on stage, receiving an ovation at the end of each act.

Verdi, with an extensive and exceptional career spanning almost two-thirds of the nineteenth century, wanted to bid farewell with a great comic work: because his only incursion, Un giorno di regno (1840), was a major failure, since during that period his wife and two of his children died-a complex circumstance for writing a comedy. Verdi was a devotee of William Shakespeare's theatre. As a result of this admiration, he wrote two masterpieces: Macbeth (1847) and Otello (1887), and chose Falstaff as the text for his next opera.

Only a genius of Giuseppe Verdi's stature could bid farewell to lyricism by exclaiming with sarcasm and mockery, "Tutto nel mondo è burla": the final moral of this bittersweet comedy in which the composer showed extraordinary vitality and surprising modernity in its musical structure.

The Boito-Verdi tandem revives an elderly hedonist and somewhat cowardly figure, Sir John Falstaff, the former comrade-in-arms of the future Henry V of England, now abandoned to drink, gluttony, lust, and bragging; withered, short of money, grotesque and conceited, but endowed with a cynical talent and intelligence that give him an irresistible charm. A caricature of Falstaff himself acts like a thief, ready to trick the weak and take advantage of the poor. He falls in love with Alice Ford and Meg Page, two young married women who amuse themselves by stoking the desire of the old knight in order to ridicule his attempts at seduction.

Laurent Pelly's staging, set in the twentieth century, ends with a mirror in which the audience itself is reflected as the final recipient of the great fugue and invites us to laugh at ourselves. With uncommon theatrical agility and unpredictable dramatic gestures, he intelligently presents fun and, at the same time, melancholy scenes.

The celebrated baritones Luca Salsi and Ambrogio Maestri will perform the role of Falstaff, the autumnal knight, cheerfully tormented by a trio of clever women with a brilliant cast completed by Roberta Mantega (Alice), Daniela Barcellona (Mrs. Quickly), Serena Sáenz (Nanetta), Santiago Ballerini (Fenton), and Mattia Olivieri (Ford). An unforgettable score in the hands of Josep Pons, who bids farewell to the Liceu audience as its principal conductor, after 12 wonderful years in the role.

Falstaff, the last laugh of old Verdi. A clumsy character of profound humanity who possesses the wisdom of the greats, who already understand that many things we see as important, deep down, are not. We are all Falstaff! "We do not want Falstaff to die. And of course, he will not. He is life itself." - Harold Bloom