Rent Verdi: Falstaff: Royal Opera (1983)

When Carlo Maria Giulini returned to conducting public performances of opera after an absence of fourteen years, he chose for the occasion one of the enduring comic masterpieces - Verdi's Falstaff. The composer was almost eighty when he broke the six-year silence following the premiere of Otello, and startled the musical world by revealing his complete mastery of comic invention. It is true that much of the success for this consummate work of genius is due to a libretto of extraordinary brilliance by Arrigo Boito, who took the substance of the piece from The Marry Wives of Windsor And Henry IV, but nothing can detract from Verdi's capacity for matching it with music of real wit and humour.