L'onore! Ladri! (Falstaff)

Boito sent Verdi a draft in 1889 combining The Merry Wives of Windsor with the Falstaff of Henry IV; Verdi, then seventy-six, worked at it slowly and without a contract, telling friends he was writing it to pass the time and might never let it be staged. Falstaff opened at La Scala on 9 February 1893 — his last opera and his second comedy, fifty-three years after the failure of Un giorno di regno. The set pieces of his earlier manner are almost entirely gone: the writing is conversational, the orchestra carries the wit, and the work closes with a fugue.