Otello - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Otello

conductor
Bertrand de Billy
Director
Adrian Noble
Furnishing
Dick Bird
Stage effects
Basil twist
light
Jean Kalman
Combat master
Malcolm Ranson
Assistant director
Joanne Pearce
Otello
Gregory customer
Iago
Ludovic Tézier
Cassio
Freddie De Tommaso
Desdemona
Rachel Willis-Sorensen

As great as Verdi's enthusiasm for Shakespeare's work was, in the end only three of his operas were based on models by the English playwright - besides Macbeth, these were his two last works for music theater, i.e. Otello and Falstaff, both of which he based on the libretti of his former artistic counterpart Arrigo Boito composed. Working together on Otello lasted around seven years before the opera was successfully premiered on February 5, 1887 at La Scala in Milan. Otello was re-enacted worldwide in a very short time, including in Vienna, where the opera was premiered in Austria on March 15, 1888 at the Court Opera, today's State Opera.

The four-act opera, which was originally supposed to have the title Iago, has some obvious external differences compared to Shakespeare: For example, the first act of the play was omitted, but a self-reflection added with the Credo of Iago, which makes him the villain make it appear clearer than in speaking.

Musically, the setting of Shakespeare's Othello marks the end of Verdi's lifelong efforts to breathe true drama into the standardized schematism of Italian melodramma. The forms and formulas are subordinate to the "whole" that Verdi has striven for since the 1850s at the latest and are no longer a musical end in itself, but arise solely from the immanent regularity of the drama that certifies them.

The current production - it is the eighth in total at this house - comes from Adrian Noble, who, together with his designer Dick Bird, relocated the plot to the beginning of the 20th century in order to address the tensions created by the contrast between the local population and surrendered to the foreign Venetian military power against the backdrop of colonialism. Additional sources of inspiration for the production for Noble and Bird were the artistic confrontations of Scandinavian playwrights and painters with the subject of jealousy, which Shakespeare once classified as the most dangerous human emotion.

Subject to changes.

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