OTELLO Verdi – Poznań Opera

Victorious in battle, admired by his men, loved by his wife - fate seems to smile on Otello. Happy moments, however, pass imperceptibly when the hero’s mind begins to be gripped by suspicion and jealousy seeps into the heart. And doubts lead to destruction. Otello and Falstaff are thought by many to be at the pinnacle of Italian opera. These Shakespearean masterpieces, the last two operas ever written by Giuseppe Verdi, are the fruit of a remarkable collaboration between the composer and his friend Arrigo Boito, the librettist almost 30 years his junior. Boito was influenced by translations of Shakespeare (by François-Victor Hugo for example) and emphasises Otello’s stormy passion barely allowing him to keep up appearances. Desdomona is a saintly idealisation and Iago a cynical villain on a diabolical scale. The essence of Verdi’s genius throughout his life lay in the wedding of poetry and song in balanced lyrical forms; what is different in these later collaborations with Boito is that these form