Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff

Edited by Gabriele Dotto (2025)

NR 142870

This edition provides the necessary material for the performance of:

• Rome version – The basic text of the critical edition, and the only version for which precise and complete documentation survives (performance of the earlier Milan version, written for La Scala, is no longer viable, after a portion of the orchestration was lost). The differences between the Rome version and the traditional score stand out in Act III, beginning with “The Fairies’ Scene”. The critical edition also restores Verdi’s original stage directions, which in modern editions had been heavily altered and even misinterpreted.
• Paris version – Presents the modifications made for the opera’s Paris revival. The critical edition highlights how the traditional scores in circulation have made patchworks of the Rome and Paris versions without any clear rationale. It has also corrected a previously unimagined number of errors, oversights, misinterpretations and readings stemming from various “restorations” carried out after World War II, which incorporated notes and instructions derived from performance materials returned from theaters and annotated by anonymous performers. Moreover, recent studies have revealed that several readings from the autograph manuscript were superseded by equally important contemporary collateral sources. All of this contributes to a critical edition that, with regard to a host of details and more broadly speaking, at times differs significantly from previously known versions.