I was totally overwhelmed by it. I had had a good musical education as a boy, as the Vienna of my youth was an extremely musical city. Although I had heard a great many operas, I had never heard anything like this. I have never forgotten the impression that evening made on me.
When I made a study, I found, to my great surprise, that this opera (Falstaff), with its gaiety, its zest for life, and its incredible vitality, was written by a man aged eighty! To me, then just eighteen, eighty was an incredible age. I doubt that I even knew anyone that old. It was not a common age when life expectancies, even among healthy people, were around fifty or so. Then I read what Verdi himself had written when he was asked why, at his age, a famous man and considered one of the nineteenth-century’s foremost opera composers, he had taken on the hard work of writing one more opera, and an exceedingly demanding one. "All my life as a musician," he wrote, "I have striven for perfection. It has always eluded me. I surely had an obligation to make one more try."
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