Falstaff

Verdi's last opera, first heard at La Scala in 1893, has never been staged in Iceland before. It is also the first full production of the Icelandic Opera, the national company established by law in 2025 as part of the National Theatre. Arrigo Boito's libretto takes Sir John Falstaff from Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, with lines worked in from Henry IV. Ageing and broke, the knight sends the same love letter to two married women, with an eye on their husbands' money. The women compare letters and turn the joke on him. He is tipped into the Thames in a basket of laundry, set upon at midnight by townsfolk dressed as fairies, and in the end the whole company sings a fugue on the words that everything in the world is a jest. It is sung in Icelandic, in a new translation by Sólveig Sigurðardóttir and Þórhallur Auður Helgason. Ólafur Kjartan Sigurðarson, who has sung Wagner's Ring at Bayreuth, takes the title role, one of ten soloists, with a chorus and a full orchestra under Alexander Joel, and Brynhildur Guðjónsdóttir directs. It opens the company's partnership with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.