Falstaff

Verdi amazed the musical world when he crowned a lifetime of operatic tragedies with this richly comic portrait of Sir John Falstaff, featuring a flood of melodies, inexhaustible rhythms, and a quicksilver orchestral palette. Verdi's librettist, Arrigo Boito, put it best when he said, "We got all the juice from that Shakespearean orange, without any of the seeds."