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Falstaff
Comic Opera in three acts. Libretto by Arrigo Boito after Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV

In Falstaff Verdi finally wrote the comedy he had wanted to write all his life but had not been able to because of the lack of an appropriate libretto.

This crowning opus of Verdi's glorious Indian Summer is the true distillation of his amazing achievement over a career of some sixty years in the opera house. In this culminating triumph of his old age, Verdi is hardly recognisable as the composer of what he called his 'galley years' when his style conformed to the structure and style of the period. By the time he reached Falstaff, his final operatic masterpiece, he had virtually rejected all the formal constraints and methods of his youth, writing in a through-composed manner where recitative and aria merge naturally and unobtrusively into each other.

In this he was enormously helped by having Boito, himself a composer of some stature, as his librettist. Adapting passages from Shakespeare's Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor in masterly fashion, Boito presented Verdi, after due consultation with the venerable composer, with just the text to rekindle the fires of the old master.

Boito had been responsible for the task of converting Othello into Otello, a taut drama hammered out from the playwright's somewhat sprawling text. He did exactly the same with Falstaff, at the same time providing a libretto that stands on its own as a work of literary merit. From it Verdi fashioned a comedy that moves effortlessly through three succinct acts.