Otello

Boito’s first decision is subtractive. Shakespeare’s Venetian act is cut whole, and the opera opens in the storm off Cyprus with no prelude, so the action begins as the hero lands. Every later scene has a job. The drinking song exists to make Cassio drunk; the drunkenness costs him his rank; the lost rank gives Desdemona her suit, and the suit gives Iago his evidence. The handkerchief changes hands inside the Act II quartet. The subtractive test finds give in three places: the homage chorus halts the action for a picture of Desdemona among islanders, though Iago’s asides keep it working; the bonfire chorus is a chorus round a fire; and the Act III concertato is static for its length.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: jealousy is learnt, and it is learnt as a language. Otello enters on “Esultate!”
“Rejoice!”, a heroic call over the storm. By Act III his “Dio! mi potevi scagliar tutti i mali”
“God, you could have hurled every ill at me” begins on repeated notes, low, almost spoken, and the chromatic slides that were Iago’s sound in his part. The most suggestible voice in the work is the heroic one, and trust is attacked through its own goods: a wife’s kindness, a handkerchief offered to cool a husband’s brow. Held down because the condition is largely Shakespeare’s, because an Iago given a creed discloses less than one left opaque, and because, with Venice cut, the outsider’s condition is mostly gone.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The opening is the sublime of terror: no prelude, a fortissimo tutti, an organ cluster held under the whole storm, lightning in the woodwinds, a chorus praying, and the hero’s call rising out of it. The love duet, opened by divided cellos, closes on the kiss theme, “Un bacio… un bacio ancora”
“A kiss… another kiss”. The Credo is the sublime of dread, and the oath duet a vow at full force. The Act III finale piles the whole company over a collapsing hero. Act IV rises by quiet: the cor anglais, the Willow Song, the Ave Maria, the double basses alone, the kiss theme over the dying man. Held off the top by the homage and bonfire choruses, which are charm, not height.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Boito builds the archetype; he does not cite it. The opera stands between two creeds. Iago’s Credo makes him the adversary in a theology: “Credo in un Dio crudel”
“I believe in a cruel God”, who made him in his own image, and “La Morte è il Nulla”
“Death is Nothingness”. Desdemona’s Ave Maria, sung before she lies down for the last time, answers from the other side, and the drama ends with the innocent sacrificed and the hero damned by his own hand. A hero comes out of the sea and is undone on land by a voice. Held down because the schema flattens the particular: an Iago who is the devil is less Iago, and a Desdemona at prayer is nearer an icon than a wife.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance is Italian opera of the 1880s, built of numbers with cadences for applause, and Verdi’s own practice through Aida. The departures: no prelude to Act I; a continuous texture in which recitative, arioso and set piece pass into one another; scenes that end without applause; a libretto by a poet of the Scapigliatura. The stake was real: Verdi was seventy-three, fifteen years from his last new opera, and the charge of Wagnerism was waiting. Held near the gate on two counts. The turn continues his own road through Don Carlos, Aida and the Simon Boccanegra of 1881, and the set pieces still stand inside the flow. Wagner had broken the number opera twenty years before; this swerve is taken within the Italian tradition.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that one voice can colonise another, which only music can stage as a fact rather than a report. Iago’s idiom is set in the drinking song: trills, staccato, chromatic slides, sardonic grace notes, the swagger of “Inaffia l’ugola!”
“Wet your throat!” Through Acts II and III those gestures enter Otello’s music, and his heroic line breaks into fragments. “Era la notte, Cassio dormia”
“It was night, Cassio was sleeping” is a lie sung sotto voce, so the poison arrives as intimacy. The kiss motive, given at the end of Act I, returns only at the end of Act IV: the form’s two poles are one melody. The cost lies in the Act III concertato, where the form serves the ensemble more than the drama, and in the homage chorus.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Evidence over promise. The literature has standing: Joseph Kerman in Opera as Drama (1956), the third volume of Julian Budden’s The Operas of Verdi (1981), James Hepokoski’s Cambridge Opera Handbook (1987), the correspondence of Verdi and Boito, and the production book Ricordi issued for the first staging. The questions stay open: whether the Credo deepens or diminishes Shakespeare’s Iago; whether Otello’s collapse is prepared or abrupt; which form of the Act III concertato to play; whether the tragedy is Otello’s or Iago’s. Performance is unsettled on the title role, between the trumpet of Tamagno’s tradition and lyric readings, and on how the Moor is staged. Held below the top by volume: the contest is real, and narrower than two centuries of argument.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work made continuous music drama Italian, with the voice still sovereign, and showed that Shakespeare could be set at tragic pace without the reduction of Rossini’s Otello of 1816, which the Italian stage had known for seventy years. It redirected Italian opera more than the art as a whole: the German and French lines of the next generation ran from Wagner. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it opened the road to Falstaff (1893); its continuous acts, conversational declamation and commenting orchestra passed to Puccini and the verismo composers; it made the Italian libretto a literary form, on Boito’s model; and its title role became the summit test of the heroic tenor.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Survival is demonstrated across 139 years: continuous performance since 1887 in every major house, the work abroad within two years, and a recorded tradition from Toscanini, who had played in the orchestra of the first night, to the present. The work survives whole. The 1887 score is the performing version; the ballet added for Paris in 1894 came after the work was complete and has not displaced it. The surface fixed to its moment is small. The Credo’s theology is a late-Romantic Mephistophelean pose and dates more than the music. The staging of Otello’s blackness has become a question each production must answer, though the libretto’s own racial language is slight. And the work depends on a role few can sing, so its presence is continuous but rationed.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Command of the medium at the height of Verdi’s output. The orchestra: the storm’s organ cluster and woodwind lightning; divided cellos for the love duet; the cor anglais of Act IV; the double basses alone for Otello’s entry; mandolins, guitars and bagpipes for the homage chorus. The ensembles: the Act II quartet keeps four characters distinct, Desdemona’s long lines above, Iago and Emilia struggling for the handkerchief in quick parlando below; the Act III terzetto sets Iago’s banter against Otello’s hidden asides. Boito’s verse is metrically virtuosic, from the drinking song’s tongue-twisters to the hendecasyllables of “E tu m’amavi per le mie sventure / ed io t’amavo per la tua pietà”
“And you loved me for my misfortunes, and I loved you for your pity”. Held off the top by the Act III concertato, whose dramatic purpose blurs under its weight.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the drinking song’s tavern swagger and the Ave Maria. One law governs them. The opera is a contest of voices for possession of a soul, and every number is a move in it, Iago’s song in the first act and Desdemona’s prayer in the last. The outer tempest Otello outlives in Act I becomes the inner one he cannot. Themes rhyme across the span: the kiss motive, and the jealousy theme of Iago’s warning, which opens Act III. The strain is the Credo. It sets out a metaphysics the drama, built of psychology, never returns to: once Iago has declared death nothing and heaven an old fable, he goes back to being an ensign with a plan, and the action never tests the theology.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The orders held: consciousness, in Otello’s collapse and Iago’s mind; love and marriage, from the duet to the bed; war, in the enemy fleet sunk in the storm; the state, in the embassy that recalls Otello before the court; the crowd, in choruses that pray, celebrate and acclaim; the natural order, in the storm; the sacred, in two opposed creeds. They are integrated: the embassy arrives at the hour of Otello’s collapse, so the state witnesses his fall. What holds the axis lowest is the cut of Venice, which takes the family with Brabantio, the senate’s deliberation and most of the outsider’s place in a society. Labour and history are absent. The orders are fewer than the play holds.

Score: 8.1 / 10