Opera Explained: VERDI - Falstaff (Smillie)



Sample Track


An Introduction to... VERDI Falstaff
Timson, David, reader



Introduction 02:07


Opera Explained
An Introduction to… VERDI Falstaff
Written by Thomson Smillie
Narrated by David Timson
1 CD
12-page booklet
8.558158
ISBN: 1-84379-098-X

Verdi’s Falstaff repays careful study with real pleasure. It is opera’s happiest irony that the great Italian master should cap a career – distinguished for its blood-and-thunder tragic masterpieces – with the greatest comic opera in the Italian repertory. The genius of Shakespeare is harnessed (in a miracle of compression) by master-librettist Boito to give the eighty-year-old Verdi a superb libretto, on which he lavished more wonderful tunes than most composers manage in a lifetime. Falstaff is the last great Italian comic opera and a worthy end to the tradition.