Verdi: Otello (Gran Teatro Liceu, Barcelona; Opus Arte, 2006)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, July 19) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing DVD of Verdi’s next-to-last opera, Otello, with a text by Arrigo Boïto (whose opera Mefistofele is my all-time favorite Italian opera composed by anyone other than Verdi or Puccini) based on Shakespeare’s play Othello. By now just about everyone knows the story: Othello/Otello is a Moorish (i.e., Black – in the original Italian story, Geraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, “Otello Moro” was just the character’s name, but the translator of the English version from which Shakespeare worked read “Moro” as “Moor” and therefore made Othello Black) general who has been appointed by the rulers of Venice to subjugate and rule their colony on Cyprus. He’s met and married Desdemona, daughter of a Venetian senator, and moved with her to Cyprus (where the opera begins, Verdi and Boïto having lopped off the entire first act of the play), only Iago, the treacherous ensign, is determined to destroy Otello’s career. He does this by successfully convincing him that Desdemona is having extra-relational activities with Cassio, whom Otello demotes from captain to ensign after Cassio gets into a drunken brawl. Ultimately Otello gets so worked up at the mere thought that his wife is unfaithful to him that he murders her, then almost immediately regrets it, especially after Iago’s wife Emilia turns up (she’s also Desdemona’s maidservant) and says to Otello, “And you believed him?” The play and the opera both end with Ot[h]ello committing suicide while Iago lives and is taken into custody – in Orson Welles’ magisterial 1952 film we see Iago being carried in a giant cage and the film then flashes back to tell the story – the only Shakespearean tragedy I can think of in which the villain is still alive at the end.

This production came from the Teatro Liceu in Barcelona and starred José Cura as Otello – almost a decade after his breakthrough in the role at the Teatro Regio in Turin under Claudio Abbado’s direction. It was staged in a very stark manner, with just movable walls and a steeply raked stage that made me wonder just how the singers were able to concentrate while standing on a set that could have toppled them over. When in Act II the libretto mentioned trees, one tree of a palpable phoniness materialized. Act III took place with a backdrop of a giant mirror that had the uncomfortable effect of allowing us to see a reflection of the orchestra pit and the musicians providing the music. There was also a giant white cross on stage, which Cassio knocked to the ground during his drunken brawl with Montano; Otello later broke during the “Si, pel Ciel” duet that ends Act II, and the broken-off top served as Desdemona’s prayer bench for her big scena, the “Willow Song” and “Ave Maria,” in Act IV. Musically, this Otello was quite capable if hardly the energy rush Arturo Toscanini’s 1947 recording was (he’d played cello in the orchestra in the opera’s 1887 premiere and his record was great despite a weak cast – Ramon Vinay as Otello was still working through his conversion from baritone to tenor and Herva Nelli as Desdemona and Giuseppe Valdengo as Iago were simply overparted). José Cura was an acceptable Otello rather than a truly great one (his competition in the role over the years has included Melchior, Vickers and Domingo!) who looked properly hunky even if he didn’t appear Black. (I’m still waiting and hoping for an Otello who will do the complete racial transformation Laurence Olivier pulled off in his 1964 film of the play.)

The other two principals, Krassimira Stoyanova as Desdemona and Lado Ataneli (a baritone from the former Soviet republic of Georgia whom I’d already encountered on a Naxos recital CD) as Iago, were much more interesting. Stoyanova’s voice sounded a bit too thick and heavy for Desdemona (she’s more Callas than Tebaldi), but she acted beautifully and her rendition of the big fourth-act scena as she’s getting ready to be killed by Otello was marvelous. Ataneli was also first-rate, reminiscent of Donald Trump (let’s face it, right now any story about a psychopathic villain is going to remind me of Donald Trump!) and in complete command of his role. Anyone watching this is not going to have any trouble understanding why Otello is such a sitting duck for Iago’s manipulations – and the Teatro Liceu made the plot more credible by casting a drop-dead-gorgeous tenor, Vittorio Grigolo, as Cassio, the man with whom Desdemona is supposedly having her affair. Grigolo later became a star in his own right, though that came to an end when, according to his Wikipedia page, he became a victim of #MeToo blacklisting. “In September 2019 Grigolo was dismissed firstly by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden on the grounds of inappropriate behavior during the Royal Opera's tour in Japan,” the page said. “His contracts with the Metropolitan Opera were subsequently also canceled.” The conductor was Antoni Ros Marbà, a Catalonian Spaniard who studied with, among other people, Sergiu Celibidache and Jean Martinon. He’s still alive, though he was 69 when he gave this performance and he’s 87 now. Like Cura, he did a competent, professional job but not one to efface memories of Toscanini, Furtwängler, Karajan and the other major names of the past that conducted this opera.