«Φάλσταφ»

Before the overture ends, you already know something is different. The orchestra under Paolo Carignani plays the opening fugue at a tempo that makes the woodwinds sound like they are gossiping — fast, overlapping, conspiratorial. By the time the curtain rises on a 1930s English drawing room, Verdi's last opera has announced itself as what its eighty-year-old composer intended: a comedy written by someone who spent a lifetime mastering tragedy and wanted, finally, to laugh.

Falstaff returns to the Greek National Opera for six performances in the Stavros Niarchos Hall at the SNFCC. The production is Stephen Langridge's — the artistic director of Britain's Glyndebourne Festival — staging the story in interwar England where class hierarchies still ruled and social pretension was at its most visible. Langridge's vision is revived here by Katerina Petsatodi, with Giorgos Souglides' set and costume design transforming the stage into a world of tweed, gin, and poorly concealed ambition. In the title role, baritone Tassis Christogiannopoulos performs Falstaff for the first time at the National Opera, bringing both the vocal weight and the comic timing the role demands. Carignani, known to the Athens opera audience from his work conducting Nabucco and Tosca, leads the National Opera Orchestra.

The Stavros Niarchos Hall holds 1,400 seats in a horseshoe designed by Renzo Piano, and for Falstaff the room fills with a cross-section of the Athens opera world: season subscribers who have been tracking this revival since the program announcement, music students who secured the 15-euro seats early, and visitors who chose Athens partly because the National Opera was on the calendar. The intermission conversations spill onto the SNFCC terrace overlooking the park.

| Aspect | Details | |--------|---------| | **Setting** | Stavros Niarchos Hall, SNFCC — 1,400-seat horseshoe auditorium, Renzo Piano design | | **Vibe** | Celebratory, polished, communal — opera as shared event | | **Sound** | Full orchestra, operatic voices, Carignani conducting — built for this acoustic | | **Door** | Ticketed, assigned seating — several dates already sold out |

Verdi wrote Falstaff at eighty, with a libretto by Arrigo Boito adapted from Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV. The opera follows the aging knight Sir John Falstaff as he tries to seduce two married women simultaneously, only to discover they are three steps ahead of him. The comedy is not slapstick — it is the humor of a man who refuses to see himself clearly. The final fugue, where the entire cast sings that the whole world is a joke, is Verdi's farewell to the stage.

If you want intimate chamber opera or experimental staging, Langridge's production is traditional in scale — this is grand opera played for comedy in a hall built for the purpose. But if you want to hear Verdi's final masterwork performed by a full company in one of Europe's newest opera houses, with a conductor who knows how to make an orchestra laugh, this run has only six dates.

The SNFCC is at Syggrou Avenue 364 in Kallithea. A shuttle bus runs from Syggrou-Fix metro station directly to the opera entrance. Tickets range from 15 euros for students to 90 euros for premium seats, available through ticketservices.gr. Several performances are already sold out — March 5 is the final date. The SNFCC terrace cafe operates through the evening.

Verdi composed twenty-eight operas over fifty-seven years and chose to end with a comedy. March 5 is the last of six performances — after that, the orchestra puts down Falstaff's score and it does not return to the stand this season.