Welcome to Opera Abbreviated, your very own series of podcasts designed to give you a pithy sense of the operas being presented by the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD series. A new production of Giuseppe Verdi's Otello is presented live from the Met on October 17.
Arrigo Boito's libretto for Verdi's opera has been called better drama than Shakespeare's play. I'm not going to go there, but the Italian text is generally agreed to be the finest opera libretto.
It was a fitting gift for the ageing Giuseppe Verdi, who by the 1870s seemed content as a (wealthy) gentleman farmer at his estate at Sant'Agata, near Milan. There, he lived with his wife, the retired soprano GiuseppinaStrepponi and received musicians from around the world eager for Il maestro Verdi's imprimatur. He also traveled throughout Europe supervising revivals of his operas.
Boito, as an, "angry young man," years earlier had declared Verdi old hat.Later, he assisted with the revisions of Macbeth and Simon Boccanegra. Their collaboration continued to the last two opera's Verdi wrote, Otello and Falstaff.
The 2015 production from the Met has already engendered some controversy before opening night. It was announced that Aleksandr Antonenko in the title role would not wear dark make-up. Nobody asked me but it smacked of a PR stunt to generate some pre-opening buzz. It did. Makeup -gate is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
I don't care if he's painted purple and green. Experience Otello and hear Italian opera at its greatest.
