Otello

• 1. Introduction

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  Otello, Giuseppe Verdi's opera in four acts, was sixteen years in the making before it finally reached the stage at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on the 5th of February 1887. Its premiere was one of the most anticipated events in the history of Italian opera. The retired composer who swore he would never write again. The cunning publisher who spent a decade plotting to change his mind. The Shakespeare play that had haunted Verdi for years. How did one of opera's greatest works get coaxed into existence against the will of its own creator? And what did it take to stage a debut so consequential that theatres across Europe and America scrambled to mount it within the year?

• 2. A Reluctant Composer

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  After Aida premiered in December 1871, Verdi declared his career over. He was at that point the most popular composer in Italy, and possibly the wealthiest. Yet he chose to step back, much as Rossini had done after William Tell. His publisher Giulio Ricordi watched this withdrawal with mounting alarm. Musicologist Julian Budden describes Verdi's sixties as years of gloom and depression, with letters full of complaints about Italian theatre, Italian politics, and Italian music, all seen as sinking beneath what the composer called a tide of Germanism.

  Ricordi tried everything. He wrote to Verdi in February 1870 suggesting the composer set Boito's unfinished Nerone libretto to music. Verdi ignored him. In January 1871 Ricordi sent along the libretto for Franco Faccio's Amleto, which Boito had co-written and which had been revived that February. Nothing came of it. When Ricordi declared that "the whole salvation of the theatre and the art is in your hands", Verdi wrote back in April 1875 calling it a joke. Clara Maffei tried to interest the composer in March 1878, and Verdi replied simply: "For what reason should I write? What would I succeed in doing?"

  Knowing of Verdi's admiration for the soprano Adelina Patti, Ricordi even tried to tempt the composer into writing an opera specially for her. When that failed, he approached Verdi's wife Giuseppina directly, hoping she might present the idea at a favorable moment. She too admitted defeat.

• 3. The Plot at the Dinner Table

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  On the 30th of June 1879, Verdi visited Milan to conduct his Requiem Mass at La Scala in a benefit performance. The audience's enthusiasm was unmistakable: the orchestra of La Scala played outside his hotel afterward. Walker, the musicologist, suspects that Ricordi and the conductor Franco Faccio had stage-managed those effects to give Verdi a sense of being genuinely welcome in the city.

  That summer, Ricordi and Faccio arranged a dinner at Verdi's Milan residence. Ricordi steered the conversation toward Shakespeare and toward the librettist Arrigo Boito. Ricordi later told the story to Giuseppe Adami, a librettist who would go on to work with Puccini: "At the mention of Othello I saw Verdi fix his eyes on me, with suspicion, but with interest. He had certainly understood; he had certainly reacted."

  Verdi had long admired Shakespeare. His one previous attempt at a Shakespearean opera, Macbeth in 1847, had been initially successful but poorly received when revised for Paris in 1865. The relatively straightforward story of Othello was judged a more promising target. Verdi's response to the dinner's suggestions was characteristically non-committal: "I wish absolutely to avoid committing myself... The best thing is for him to send me the finished poem."

  Boito began drafting the libretto despite an illness, and by late October or early November had sent a copy of the work in progress. Giuseppina Verdi wrote to Ricordi on the 7th of November noting, between themselves, that what Boito had written of the African seemed to please her husband and was very well done. For years the project circulated under the code name "chocolate", likely because Ricordi sent Verdi a Christmas cake three years running with a figure of the Moor molded in chocolate on top.

• 4. Crisis and Composition

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  Composition finally began in March 1884, five years after the first drafts of the libretto. As the musicologist Frank Walker charts it, the work was completed in three separate bursts: a brief start in Genoa in March 1884, a principal stretch from December 1884 through April 1885 also in Genoa, and a final session at Sant'Agata from mid-September to early October 1885.

  Before those sessions could proceed, a near-fatal crisis erupted. While attending a banquet in Naples following the successful run of his own opera Mefistofele, Boito gave an interview and appears to have been misquoted by a journalist who overheard part of the conversation. The impression left was that Boito, himself a composer, wanted to set the Otello libretto himself. When Verdi read this in a Milan newspaper, he was shaken. He wrote to conductor Faccio rather than confronting Boito directly, saying he would return the manuscript "intact, without a shadow of resentment, without rancor of any kind".

  Boito was horrified. He wrote immediately to Verdi: "The theme and my libretto are yours by right of conquest. You alone can set Othello to music." He begged the composer not to abandon the opera: "It is predestined for you. Create it." Verdi's answer was blunt, complaining of his age and his years of service, but Boito pressed on anyway. He drafted what he called "a sort of evil Credo" for Iago, writing it, he said, for his own comfort and personal satisfaction. Verdi's response on the 3rd of May praised it: "Most beautiful this Credo; most powerful and wholly Shakespearian."

  On the 1st of November 1886, Verdi sent Boito a laconic telegram: "DEAR BOITO, It is finished! All honour to us! (and to Him!!)." Boito wrote back that "The Moor will come back no more to knock on the door of the Palazzo Doria, but you will go to meet the Moor at La Scala. Otello exists. The great dream has become reality."

• 5. The Premiere and Its Aftermath

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  Italy's foremost dramatic tenor, Francesco Tamagno, was cast as Otello. The esteemed French singing-actor Victor Maurel took the villainous baritone role of Iago. Romilda Pantaleoni, a well-known singing-actress, sang Desdemona. The conductor was Franco Faccio, who had been part of the years-long effort to bring the opera into being.

  Preparations were conducted in absolute secrecy, and Verdi reserved the right to cancel the premiere up to the last minute. He expressed reservations about Tamagno's softer singing, though not about the power of his voice in dramatic passages. At the debut, the audience's enthusiasm swept away those doubts: Verdi took 20 curtain calls at the end of the opera.

  The opera reached the United States on the 16th of April 1888, at the Academy of Music in New York. London saw it on the 5th of July 1889. At its Vienna premiere on the 14th of March 1888, the title role was sung by Hermann Winkelmann, who had created the title role in Wagner's Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882. Buenos Aires heard the opera twice in quick succession in 1888, from two different companies; one of those productions featured Tamagno himself alongside Romilda Pantaleoni, both of them reprising their roles from the world premiere.

  The Paris premiere came at the Palais Garnier on the 12th of October 1894. Verdi composed a short ballet for the finale of act three for this production, a ceremony of welcome for the Venetian ambassadors. The work was performed in a French translation by Boito and Camille Du Locle. Albert Saléza sang the title role, Rose Caron was Desdemona, and Paul Taffanel conducted.

• 6. The Singers Who Shaped It

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  The three leading roles rank among the most demanding Verdi ever wrote, both vocally and dramatically. The chain of tenors who have sung Otello stretches from the trumpet-voiced Tamagno through generations of singers who each confronted warnings that their voice was not the right kind for the part. Placido Domingo wrote in My First Forty Years that when he decided to sing Otello, people told him he was crazy, pointing to Mario Del Monaco as the proper model. Del Monaco had been warned not to sing it because his voice was nothing like Ramon Vinay's. Vinay had been told that only a tenor with Giovanni Martinelli's piercing sound was right. Martinelli had heard Antonin Trantoul, who had sung Otello at La Scala in the twenties, held up as the example. And at La Scala, those who remembered Tamagno found Trantoul completely unsatisfactory. Domingo notes that a letter from Verdi to his own publisher makes plain that even Tamagno left a great deal to be desired.

  The role of Iago has drawn a comparable lineage of baritones. Victor Maurel was its first exponent; those who followed include Mattia Battistini, Titta Ruffo, Tito Gobbi, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Leonard Warren. The Russian heroic tenor Ivan Yershov was a renowned Otello in his native country before the First World War. His compatriot Arnold Azrikan earned his greatest recognition in the role and was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1946 for the performance.

  Desdemona has been sung by a wide range of lyric sopranos since 1887. Among them: Renata Tebaldi in 1954, Mirella Freni and Kiri Te Kanawa both in 1974, Renee Fleming in 1996, and Sonya Yoncheva in 2015. Enrico Caruso was studying the role of Otello when he died unexpectedly in 1921, ending the Metropolitan Opera's plans to stage the work as a new vehicle for its star tenor. The Metropolitan also made news in 2015 when it stopped the longstanding practice of white singers wearing dark makeup for the title role.