Falstaff was composed to a libretto fashioned by Arrigo Boito largely from Shakespeare's play The Merry Wives of Windsor. Superficially the work is an opera buffa in it's depiction of the travails of the penniless knight, Sir John Falstaff, but goes beyond the operatic tradition of the time. The vocal line is integrated into the orchestral texture, and with self-quotations and parodic elements, the opera is saturated with as much irony as comedy, forming the fitting culmination of Verdi's entire operatic life. Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts this acclaimed staging of Verdi's final masterpiece.