Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff will launch the 8th BOV Opera Festival on Wednesday of next week, with a repeat performance on Friday 16 March.

The production will be a first for the Manoel Theatre since it will be the first official collaboration with Italian theatre company Teatro Borgatti from Cento in Italy. Artistic direction will be in the capable hands of Gioanni Dispenza, while Matteo Taverna is technical director and Philippe Partridge is stage assistant. Mro Michael Laus will be directing the National Orchestra.

A number of seasoned performers from Teatro Borgatti make up the line-up for the cast in Falstaff. The title role will be performed by Paolo Drigo alongside Valentina Coladonato in the role of Alice Ford. Meg will be performed by Luisa Mauro Partridge, Nannetta by Francesca Bruni, Ford by Carlo Riccioli, Fenton by Francesco Marsiglia, Quickly by Simona Forni, Dr Cajus by Luigi Maria Barilone, Bardolfo by Dario Prola and Pistola by Gian Luca Breda. Mr Breda will sing in Malta after singing Colline in La Boheme, the Astra Theatre’s production of 2005.

The three-act operatic comedy, an adaptation by Arrigo Boito of Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor, was Verdi’s last opera, written in the composer’s eighth decade, and only the second of his 26 operas to be a comedy. It was also the third of Verdi’s operas to be based on a Shakespearean play and, like his first adaptation of the English playwright, Macbeth, it concludes with a fugue, the famous “Tutto nel mondo è burla” (All the world’s a joke).

The opera was premiered on 9 February 1893 at La Scala in Milan, Italy to great success. While not as immensely popular as the works that immediately preceded it, Aida and Otello, Falstaff has long been a critical favourite for its refinement and melodic invention.