Critically regarded, the music is unquestionably the best that Verdi has written. Its leading features are its freshness, spontaneity, irresistible humour, and youthfulness; yet, its finished character, the carefully conceived and highly wrought detail, involving much technical skill and learning, bespeak unmistakably the ripened master-mind. What a reply, too, it is to all the early critical opposition which made out that there was nothing in Verdi beyond the power of adapting his countrymen's melodic commonplaces, and stringing them together suitably for a speedy oblivion!
"The age of miracles is supposed to be past, but those who declare it so would do well to consider the miracle of Verdi's persistent artistic vitality.... When count is taken of the quality as well as of the quantity of Verdi's achievements, these must be confessed well-nigh miraculous. The list of his operas is an epitome, one might say, of the development of operatic music. Trace the steady march of his genius from the period of _I Lombardi_ to _Otello_, remember the successive stages typified by _Trovatore_, _Ernani_, _Rigoletto_, _Aïda_,--each a masterpiece after its kind,--and you find yourself in the presence of a man who has never swerved from the search after the highest ideal. Between _I Lombardi_ and _Otello_ there is a gap which it might seem no one man could span. And yet, however different the methods of expression which Verdi has chosen in each stage of his development, the form has always been inevitable, and the man's personality is as apparent and as potent in one as in the other. _Aïda_ seemed likely to be his last work; but with _Otello_ came a new apocalypse. He had not been afraid to modify his method, that it might fit his subject more completely, and there was not wanting those who (wrongly) saw in it a confession of conversion to the Wagnerian gospel. No one believed that the octogenarian composer would find anything fresh to say or any fresh way of saying it. The miracle has been repeated, for in _Falstaff_, produced at Milan on the 9th inst., we have a work which proclaims itself the expression of a phase of Verdi's nature quite unguessed at. The antiquaries of music, who care less to enjoy a work than to classify it, will not find the task in the case of _Falstaff_ easy, for _Falstaff_ does not fall readily into any of the required classes. It belongs to no school, not even to that of Verdi himself, for there was little in any of his other operas to show that he possessed the supreme gift of humour, though indeed we might have remembered that so exquisite a sense of proportion as his never goes unaccompanied with humour, and is dependent on it for perfection."[66]