As among modern German music-dramas Tristan and Isolde is the greatest, so is Otello among the lyric dramas of Italy—one might as well include France. Falstaff is their comic pendant as Die Meistersinger is to Tristan. Verdi composed Otello when he was past threescore and ten. The fact seems incredible; in its score seethes the passion of middle manhood, the fervors of a flowering maturity. No one ever dreamed of setting Shakespeare in this royally tragic fashion. Rossini fluted with the theme; in Verdi jealousy, love, envy, hatred, are handled by a master. It is a wonderful opera, and a Shakespearean Verdi began at a time when most men are preparing for death. Reversing natural processes, this phenomenal being wrote younger music the older he grew. After Aïda—Otello! After grim tragedy, joyous comedy—Falstaff! If he had survived ninety years, he might have written a comic opera that would have outpointed in wit and humor Johann Strauss!
Otello is a true music-drama; its composer seldom halts to symphonize his events as does Wagner. Boïto, the greatest of librettists, has skeletonized the story; Verdi’s music gives it vitality, grace, contour, brilliancy. And yet the Italian poet has not gravely disturbed the old original. It is but a compliment to his gift of absorbing the Shakespearean spirit to say that Iago’s Credo, that terrific explosion of nihilism and hatred, does not seem out of perspective in the picture. It is Boïto’s intercalation, as are the Cypriote choruses in Act II. All the rest is pure Shakespeare, barring a few happy transpositions from the Senate speech to the duo at the close of Act I.
Verdi’s character-drawing is masterly. Do not let us balk at comparisons, or for that matter at superlatives. No composer ever lived—Mozart and Wagner are alone excepted—who could have so drawn the hot-blooded Moor and the cynical cannikin clinker, set them facing each other in the score, and allowed them to work out their own musical fates, as has Verdi. The key to Otello is its characterization—in a musical sense, of course. But the medium in which Verdi bids them move, their fluidity, their humanity—these are the things that almost defy critical analysis. Whether he is listening to his crafty Ancient, or caressing Desdemona, or raging like the hardy Numean lion, it is always Otello, the Moor of Venice, a living, suffering, loving man—Shakespeare’s Otello.
The character does not suggest the flashy operatic, the ranter of the footlights. Nor does Iago, whether as the bluff hero of battles and battles, or the loathsome serpent stinging the other’s soul, ever lag dramatically, ever sink into the conventional attitudes of a transpontine melodrama. It is Iago, “the spirit that denies,” underlined perhaps, as music must emphasize ever the current emotions of a character. Desdemona is drawn in relief to her furious lover and warrior, and in relief to her cold-blooded maligner.
Verdi has assigned her gentle music, the Ave Maria, the Willow Song. She is a pure white cloud against which as a background are etched the powerful masculine motives of the play. Delicacy and vivacity reveal, bit by bit, the interior of a sweet, troubled soul. The other figures, Cassio, Emilia, are sketches that add to the density of the background without detracting from the chief motives. It is a remarkable libretto.
From the opening storm to the strangling scene the music flows swiftly, as swiftly as the drama. Rich, varied, and eloquent, the orchestra seldom tarries in its vivid and acute commentary. There is scant employment of typical motives—the “kiss” theme in Act I is sounded with psychologic fidelity when Otello dies. In the Handkerchief Trio is there pause for instrumental elaboration; but, in the main, old set forms are avoided, and while there is melodic flow, it does not often crystallize. The duo at the end of Act I, the Credo of unfaith, and Otello’s exhortation to the high heavens in Act II; the tremendous outburst in the next act with Iago’s sardonically triumphant exclamation, “Behold the lion!” as he plants his scornful heel on the recumbent man—then the final catastrophe! Throughout there are picturesque strokes, effects of massed splendor; and about the tempest-stirred souls is an atmosphere of gloom, of doom, of guilt and melancholy foreboding.
Verdi has felt the moods of his poet and made them his own. The moods, the character-painting, are progressive; Otello, Iago, grow from act to act. The simple-hearted, trusting general with his agonized cry, “Miseria mia,” develops into a savage thirsting for blood; “Sangue, sangue!” he howls; he sees blood; the multitudinous music is incarnadine with it. And it is all vocal, it is written for the human voice; the voice, not the orchestra, is the centre of gravity in this astounding drama. Another such Iago, subtle, sinister, evil incarnate, withal a dangerously graceful fellow,—such an impersonation as Maurel’s may never be duplicated. And this singing actor had the advantage of Verdi and Boïto’s “coaching” in 1887, when the music-drama was produced at Milan. This to show that the music play demands as excellent an Iago as an Otello—indeed, Verdi’s first idea of a title was the former—and while there have been several Otellos, only one great Iago has appeared thus far on the contemporary operatic stage.
BOÏTO’S MEFISTOFELE
Mefistofele by Arrigo Boïto to was revived at the Metropolitan Opera House, January 14, 1901, where it was originally heard in December, 1883, and later, January 15, 1896. There is a record that Marie Roze was the first Marguerite of Boïto at the Academy of Music. This was as early as November 24, 1880. Mefistofele was first heard in Milan, Italy, in 1868: its première was a scene of rioting, and a duel in which Boïto participated occurred later. Public feeling ran very high, for they take their art seriously in Italy. The performance lasted six hours, and was a hopeless failure. Not until the work, pruned, revised, and greatly curtailed, was repeated in Bologna, did Boïto receive a fair hearing. He had composed little previous to this music-drama, preferring journalism and literary work. But Mefistofele was such a challenge to older operatic forms that the work was soon sung in London and elsewhere. Boïto, who is chiefly known as the librettist of the later Verdi, is a man of the highest artistic ideals. His mother was Polish, which may account for his versatility, his poetic gifts. He worked over, re-orchestrated, and polished Mefistofele, and changed Faust from a tenor to a barytone part. And it all smells of the lamp, despite some beautiful pages.
Mefistofele was once music of the future; now it reminds one of some strange, amorphous survival from a remote period. It is such a tremendous attempt to embrace all of Goethe’s profound world philosophy, poetry, dramatic symbolism, that it is a failure—a remarkable failure. There is little melodic invention, the prison scene being the top notch of its dramatic passion; while the tenor solo, From the Meadows, From the Valleys, is strangely reminiscent of the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata. It is mostly music of the head, not of the heart. Boïto has admirably characterized Mefistofele. His sinister solo, I am the Spirit that Denies, is very striking; the orchestra with its shrill, diabolical whistling suggests Berlioz. And it also suggests in feeling the Honor solo in Verdi’s Falstaff and Iago’s Credo in Otello. Boïto and Verdi have collaborated so much that they must have absorbed each other’s ideas. In the garden scene—a quartet and nothing more—Rigoletto is recalled in the echoing laughter. It seems trifling though trickily difficult. Goethe’s Marguerite is not realized. She is hardly ingénue, this flirting girl who so calmly gives a sleeping potion to her mother. And the loving side of her nature is barely outlined.