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 masterlibrettist Boito to give the eighty-year-old Verdi a wonderful libretto, on which he lavished more superb tunes than most composers manage in a lifetime. Falstaff is the last great Italian comic opera and a worthy end to the tradition.