Otello - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Text William Shakespeare & Arrigo Boito


Cast

Conductor
Giampaolo Bisanti

Directing
Adrian Noble

Furnishing
Dick Bird

Stage effects
Basil Twist

Light
Jean Kalman

Battlemaster
Malcolm Ranson

Assistant director
Joanne Pearce

Otello
Andreas Schager

Jago
Igor Golovatenko

Cassio
Alessandro Liberatore

Desdemona
Nicole Car


Contents

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

The four-act opera, which was originally intended to bear 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 was inserted with the credo of Iago, which portrays him as a villain more clearly comprehensible than in the speaking piece.

Musically, the setting of Shakespeare's Othello marks the culmination of Verdi's lifelong effort to breathe true drama into the standardized schematism of Italian melodrama. The forms and formulas are subordinate to the »whole« that Verdi had been striving for since the 1850s at the latest and are no longer a musical end in themselves, but arise solely from the immanent regularity of the drama that authenticates them.

The current staging – it is the eighth in total at this house – is by Adrian Noble, who, together with his set designer Dick Bird, takes the action to the beginning of the 20th century in order to deal with the tensions caused by the contrast between the local population and surrendered to the foreign Venetian military power against the background of colonialism. Additional sources of inspiration for the production for Noble and Bird were the artistic explorations of Scandinavian playwrights and painters with the theme of jealousy, which Shakespeare once classified as the most dangerous human emotion.



Subject to change.