If the premise for Damiano Michieletto’s Salzburg production of Falstaff is not exactly promising, one can perhaps understand his reasons for choosing it. We all know that this sprightly and wise comedy was the ageing composer’s last opera, and the Italian director decides to set it, accordingly, in the Casa di Riposo, the home Verdi himself built for retired singers and musicians in Milan. Falstaff becomes one of these old singers; the action of the opera – all of which takes place in the same set, by Paolo Fantin – becomes, I think, his dream.

How, you might ask, can this work? The simple answer is that it doesn’t. The switches between illusion and reality seem primarily to be a case of the director hedging his bets and plumping for neither. There is no differentiation between the scenes and no possibility to define who’s who. All the characters become jumbled up into visitors, nurses or residents, with additional elderly extras pushed into service in cynical and patronising attempts to convey extra cuteness or gravitas. The various heavy-handed Verdian references – a vocal score for Falstaff, a large portrait brought down from the wall at the start of Act 3 – serve only to underline how the production’s thin ideas add nothing and subtract a great deal from this wonderful work. The camera direction nevertheless points them out with didactic insistence, while also, incidentally, making an occasional feature of wobbly, out-of-focus footage shot from the wings.

Ambrogio Maestri is a familiar Falstaff and performs with customary gusto, but Fiorenza Cedolins sounds a little soupy and scoopy as Alice. Javier Camarena and Eleonora Buratto are charming as Nannetta and Fenton, even if they have to put up with an elderly couple (their future selves?) mouthing along to their duet. Elisabeth Kulman’s Mrs Quickly is refreshing for not being the battleaxe we often see in the role. Massimo Cavalletti is a serviceable Ford. There’s no shortage of classy playing from the pit but Zubin Mehta’s conducting, perhaps influenced by the setting, is often rather sedentary.