Falstaff

Verdi's last opera, a comedy in three acts, first performed at La Scala in Milan on 9 February 1893, when the composer was approaching eighty. Arrigo Boito's libretto is drawn from The Merry Wives of Windsor, with Falstaff's monologues taken from Henry IV. It was Verdi's second comedy. The first, Un giorno di regno, failed at its 1840 premiere at the same theatre, and he wrote no other for half a century. Falstaff does not work like the operas before it: the number structure has largely dissolved, the orchestra is fine-grained and transparent, set-piece arias are few, and the drama moves through conversation. It ends with a fugue whose text says that everything in the world is a joke, and that man is born a clown.