And now for something completely different. Apart from his debut as Mandryka, the saturnine but romantic stranger from afar in Richard Strauss’s Arabella, and a spin opposite Anna Netrebko as Baron Scarpia, Rome’s sadistic chief of police, the German baritone Michael Volle’s assignments at the Metropolitan Opera have been one Wagner heavyweight after another. Now he’s back in the title role of Verdi’s farewell opera, cutting up as Shakespeare’s incorrigible old rapscallion, whose “means are very slender,” as the Lord Chief-Justice remarks in Henry IV, Part II, and whose “waste is great.” “I would my means were greater, and my waist were slenderer,” Falstaff parries in the play. That’s a pun you won’t find in Verdi, but on the other hand, Verdi signs off with that final fugue—all starlight and thunder—about how all the world’s a jest, and where’s Shakespeare’s precedent for that? —Matthew Gurewitsch