Program
OnE HunDRED TwEnTIETH SEASOn
Chicago Symphony orchestra
riccardo muti Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Thursday, April 7, 2011, at 7:00
Saturday, April 9, 2011, at 7:00
Tuesday, April 12, 2011, at 7:00
Otello
Music by Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto by Arrigo Boito, after Shakespeare’s Othello
riccardo muti Conductor
Otello, a Moor, general of the
Venetian forces ........................ aleksandrs antonenko Tenor
Iago, his ensign ......................................Nicola alaimo Baritone
Cassio, a captain ............................Juan Francisco gatell Tenor
Roderigo, a Venetian gentleman ............. michael Spyres Tenor
Lodovico, ambassador of the
Venetian Republic ........................... Eric owens Bass-baritone
Montano, Otello’s predecessor
as governor of Cyprus .............................Paolo Battaglia Bass
A Herald .................................................. David govertsen Bass
Desdemona, wife of Otello ....... Krassimira Stoyanova Soprano
Emilia, wife of Iago................Barbara Di Castri Mezzo-soprano
Soldiers and sailors of the Venetian Republic; Venetian ladies and gentlemen; Cypriot men, women, and children; men of the Greek, Dalmatian, and
Albanian armies; an innkeeper and his four servers; seamen
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Duain Wolfe Director
Chicago Children’s Choir
Josephine Lee Artistic Director
(continued)
Otello
Act 1
Act 2
INtErmISSIoN
Act 3
Act 4
Place: A seaport in Cyprus
Time: The end of the fifteenth century
Musical preparation: Speranza Scappucci
Supertitles by Sonya Friedman
These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances of
Verdi’s Otello.
Production of Otello is made possible with leadership support from Randy L. and Melvin R.
Berlin and the following generous contributors: Julie and Roger Baskes ∙ Rhoda Lea and
Henry S. Frank ∙ Gilchrist Foundation ∙ Mr. & Mrs. Thomas C. Heagy ∙ Mr. & Mrs. Sanfred
Koltun ∙ Margot and Josef Lakonishok ∙ Mr. Richard J. Tribble ∙ and an Anonymous Donor.
Maestro Muti’s 2011 Spring Residency is supported in part by a generous grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts.
CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.
Steinway is the official piano of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
2
CommENtS By PHILLIP HuSCHER
giuseppe Verdi
Born October 9, 1813, Roncole, near Busseto, Italy.
Died January 27, 1901, Milan, Italy.
Otello, opera in Four acts
V
erdi found his few idols—
Michelangelo, Dante, Schiller,
and most of all, Shakespeare—outside music. Today, visitors to Sant’
Agata, the ochre-colored villa
where Verdi lived nearly his entire
adult life, can still see, atop Verdi’s
bedside bookcase, two complete
Italian translations of the works
of Shakespeare, worn by time
and constant handling, next to
the complete works of Dante and
the plays of Schiller. This was the
company he chose, these the men
from whom he continued to learn
of life—for Verdi, the only true
textbook on music.
We do not know when Giuseppe
Verdi—born into poverty and
raised simply—came to value the
words of Shakespeare, but in 1865,
when the revision of his opera
ComPoSED
March 1884–november 1886
FIrSt PErFormaNCE
February 5, 1887, Teatro all
Scala, Milan
Macbeth provoked criticism, Verdi
lashed out at the suggestion he did
not know his Shakespeare: “. . . I
have had him in my hands from my
earliest youth, and I read and reread
him continually.”
Macbeth was Verdi’s first setting
of Shakespeare, but it was not the
first Shakespeare play to tempt
him. As early as 1844—Nabucco
had recently given Verdi his
first taste of success—King Lear,
Hamlet, and The Tempest headed
the list of favored subjects. Lear
would continue to taunt Verdi
throughout his life; it was his one
great, unfulfilled hope. He worked
closely with Antonio Somma on a
libretto, admitting to him that he
preferred Shakespeare to all other
dramatists, including the Greeks;
whatever music he wrote for King
INStrumENtatIoN
three flutes and piccolo, two
oboes and english horn, two
clarinets and bass clarinet,
four bassoons, four horns,
two trumpets and two
cornets, four trombones,
timpani, cymbals, tam-tam,
bass drums, harp, mandolins, guitar, organ, strings,
offstage banda of trumpets
and trombones
aPProxImatE
PErFormaNCE tImE
Acts 1 and 2: 69 minutes
Acts 3 and 4: 67 minutes
CSo rECorDINg
1991. Sir Georg Solti
conducting; with Kiri Te
Kanawa, Luciano Pavarotti,
and Leo nucci, principal
soloists. London.
3
Lear either found its way into
other projects or was destroyed,
according to the composer’s wishes,
after his death.
In 1850, Verdi said that he
planned to compose settings of “all
the major works of the great trage-
Boito and Verdi at Sant’ Agata
dian.” But, aside from Macbeth and
intermittent stirrings of the Lear
project, nothing came of any plans
until 1879, when Verdi’s reputation
and success were so great that, at
the age of sixty-five, he could easily
have retired for good, knowing that
Aida, the Requiem, and another
half-dozen works at the very least,
would keep his name alive.
It was Giulio Ricordi—his
family name still heads the scores
from which many young singers
learn Verdi—who first mentioned
Othello. Ricordi and his wife
4
were dining with Verdi, his wife
Giuseppina, and Franco Faccio,
Italy’s leading conductor. “Quite
by chance,” Ricordi later remembered, “I steered the conversation
on to Shakespeare and Boito. At
the mention of Othello, I saw Verdi
look at me with suspicion, but with
interest. He had certainly understood and had certainly reacted. I
believe the time was ripe.”
Those are the names Ricordi
carefully dropped into the table
conversation that night—Othello,
a play Verdi had never seriously
considered setting, and Arrigo
Boito, known for his own opera,
Mefistofele, and for several librettos written for others, including a
Hamlet for Faccio, and La Gioconda
for Ponchielli. If the time was
ripe, Verdi remained cool. Faccio
brought Boito to see Verdi the next
day; three days later, when Boito
returned alone, with an Otello—
Othello loses an “h” in translation to
Italian—libretto already sketched,
Verdi said simply, “Now write the
poetry. It will always do for me, or
for you, or for someone else.”
Boito worked on the libretto
continually, despite facial neuralgia
and a severe recurring toothache;
finally, he sent part of it on to Verdi
in November. Giuseppina knew
better than to press for a verdict.
“Let the river find its own way to
the sea,” she advised. “It is in the
wide open spaces that some men
are destined to meet and understand one another.”
The relationship between Verdi
and Arrigo Boito was complicated.
They had known each other since
1862, when the twenty-year-old
Boito wrote the text for Verdi’s
“Hymn of the Nations”—an
uncomfortable, yet undeniably
rousing mixture of three national
anthems—but true understanding
of the kind that allows for inspired
collaboration was still far off. At
the time, Verdi thanked Boito, gave
him a gold watch, and moved on
to bigger projects, never guessing
that they would later find important
work to do together. Their paths
seldom crossed; for a while, due to
a misunderstanding, they did not
speak. Boito was known to harbor
Wagnerian yearnings. (“No harm
in that,” Verdi said, “as long
admiration doesn’t degenerate into
imitation.”) When Verdi and Boito
ran into each other in the railroad
station waiting room following a
performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin
in Bologna in 1871, they talked
mostly of the difficulties of sleeping
on the train. Boito’s opera Mefistofele
was successfully revived in 1875, but
Verdi was still unmoved: “It is difficult at the moment to say whether
Boito will be able to provide Italy
with masterpieces. He has much
talent, he aspires to originality, but
the result is rather peculiar. . . .”
By the time Verdi sat down to
dinner with Giulio Ricordi in
the summer of 1879, Verdi knew
Boito as a man of genuine talent,
and possibly of great promise, but
hardly a likely partner. Perhaps he
welcomed Boito into his home the
next day—their first meeting since
the brief encounter in the train
station eight years before—because
he knew Boito shared his deep love
for Shakespeare. Enthusiasm for
Shakespeare in nineteenth-century
Italy was not widespread. The play
Macbeth, for example, had never
been staged in Italy when Verdi
wrote his opera; even in 1879, as
Verdi began to consider making an
opera of Othello, Shakespeare was
known and admired only by an
educated few.
Arrigo Boito was one of those
few, as much a man of letters, in
fact, as a musician. And so late in
1879, the river found its way to
the sea: Giuseppina confided that
Verdi liked what he found in Boito’s
draft. But she also noticed that he
slipped it into his briefcase, beside
Somma’s King Lear libretto, “which
has been sleeping soundly and
undisturbed for thirty years. What
will become of this Otello?” she
wrote to a friend the week before
Christmas in 1879, “no one knows.”
It was to be more than four
years before Verdi began to write
the music for Otello, but, in the
intervening time, it was never far
from his mind. At first, Giulio
Ricordi played go-between,
intercepting messages and forwarding suggestions, as Boito refined
the text. Soon, Boito and Verdi
began to exchange letters directly.
There were large problems to
be solved. It was Boito’s idea to
omit Shakespeare’s first act, set in
Venice. Verdi demanded a stirring
crowd scene, without parallel in
Shakespeare, to bring the curtain
down on act 3. Boito sharpened
it by wiping the crowd from the
stage just at the end, leaving Iago
triumphant over Otello’s limp
body. The guiding words in tidying
Shakespeare’s sprawling tragedy
were those Verdi proposed to
5
Antonio Somma when tackling
King Lear: “Brevity, clarity, truth.”
Before the real work began, Verdi
and Boito collaborated on the revision of an earlier Verdi opera, Simon
Boccanegra—a testing of the waters.
It went well, though not without
disagreement. In July 1881, four
months after the new Boccanegra
was first given, Boito made his
first visit to see Verdi face-to-face
to discuss their Otello—or Iago, as
it often was called then. And then
another distraction: in 1882, Verdi
turned to a large-scale revision of
his Don Carlos, a crafty sharpening
of his skills before writing the first
note of Otello. It was mid-March
1884 when Verdi finally began.
He had not written a new opera
in fifteen years—he used to turn
them out one a season—though the
Requiem of 1874, the trial run with
Boito on Boccanegra, and the tough
solo challenge of refashioning Don
Carlos had helped greatly in preparing the leap from Aida to Otello.
The music for Otello was written in three spurts of activity, the
first cut short in less than a month
by a crippling rumor that Boito
wished he were writing the score
himself. Fences were mended, but
damage was done, and another
eight months passed during which
the fate of Otello hung precariously
before Verdi again began to write.
This time, Verdi worked at full
force, breaking off only for a normal summer holiday of “unimaginable laziness.” On October 5,
1885, Verdi wrote: “I finished the
fourth act and I breathe again.”
There were still further adjustments
to text and music. Verdi began
6
to orchestrate, which would take
the bulk of another year. Only in
January 1886 was the title Otello
chosen for certain over Iago. Not
until May 1886 did Verdi hit upon
Otello’s striking entrance, the
celebrated “Esultate.” The following November, Verdi finished the
scoring; the work was sent off to
the printer the next month. On
December 21, 1886, Boito wrote:
“The dream has become a reality.”
The premiere at La Scala on
February 5, 1887, was a triumph.
Press gathered from throughout
Europe and sent home reports that
Verdi had surpassed himself. But
even then, some critics worried that
Verdi had raised Italian opera to
such extraordinary heights that the
force, simplicity of utterance, and
melodic generosity of his earlier
work were lost forever. George
Bernard Shaw even suggested
that the well had begun to dry
up. Indeed, to this day, there are
those who prefer the organ-grinder
accompaniment and the great
pop tunes of early Verdi to Otello’s
subtle interplay of word and music
as well as its infinite command
of orchestral color that is responsive to all the nuances of human
emotion. Otello was the first of
Verdi’s works to force the Wagner
camp to listen. (Verdi admired
Wagner, with reservations; when
he heard Tannhäuser in Vienna in
1875, he said, “I dozed, but so did
the Germans.”) Otello is at once a
summing up—Falstaff, yet to come,
charted different territory—crystallizing all Verdi had learned
in nearly fifty years spent in the
opera house, as well as a work of
unexpected vitality and vision—in
its own way, a work of the future.
T
he first act of Otello sweeps, in
one unbroken span, from the
terrifying storm that rips open the
first page of the score to the calm
of night as the stars begin to show.
Verdi and Boito have compressed a
wealth of action, incident, innuendo, and detail under this single
span; it is a dangerously rich canvas,
yet the eye and ear fall readily
on the central elements. Otello’s
entrance, one of the most famous
in all opera, casts a sudden beam of
light through the storm; he sings
but two lines, then goes home for
the night, yet his presence lingers.
Two big ensembles that would
have been set pieces—showstoppers, in fact, in earlier opera—are
now seamlessly woven into the
action: the bonfire chorus, “Fuoco
di gioia,” all
flickering
light; and
the drinking
song, which
nearly fizzles
under its own
intoxication—Cassio,
after only two
verses, stammers, loses
his place, and
nearly brings
Shakespeare
the music to a
halt. But, once
again, it is
the entrance of Otello, roused from
his sleep by so much discord, that
defuses the scene, letting it rock
thE aCt 3 FINaLE: VErDI’S FINaL thoughtS
At these performances of
Otello, Riccardo Muti uses
the rarely performed revision
of the act 3 finale that Verdi
made for Paris in 1894—
seven years after the opera’s
La Scala premiere. when
Verdi learned that the Paris
Opera wanted to stage Otello,
he jumped at the chance to
rethink the large ensemble
near the end of act 3—the
passage that had given him
and Boito trouble from the
start and that continued to
bother the composer even
after the Milan premiere
because of the way it held up
the action. Briefly reunited
with Boito once again—their
final opera, Falstaff, had
premiered in 1893—they set
to work redoing the most
elaborate finale Verdi had
ever written. This time,
opting for dramatic clarity
over musical splendor, Verdi
shortened, refocused, tightened, and recomposed the
grand concertato finale so
that Iago’s asides—including
his instructions to Roderigo
to kill Cassio—which
previously were buried in the
densely woven ensemble,
now emerge vividly. This is
the last operatic music Verdi
ever wrote (it is succeeded
only by the last of his Four
Sacred Pieces—the Te Deum
and Stabat Mater)—and it
shows the eighty-year-old
composer moving towards
a new kind of writing
characterized by daringly
modern harmonies and
crystalline textures.
Although the Paris version
represents Verdi’s final
thoughts on this powerful
scene, it has rarely been
performed since 1894.
Riccardo Muti chose to
include it in stagings of
Otello early in his career and
has continued to perform
it ever since. These are
the first performances
of the revised act 3 finale
in Chicago.
—P. H.
7
gently toward the love duet that
closes the act. This music, exquisitely scored for low strings, with
wonderful touches from the winds
and harp, rises slowly towards the
stars over rich, questing harmonies.
Finally, as Desdemona and Otello
kiss, it is the orchestra alone that
sings, to incalculable effect.
The following acts turn inward—
not only literally, from the open air
of the Cyprus night to the rooms
of Otello’s castle, but to the interior
drama that begins to play against
the public spectacle of the first act.
We come upon Iago and Cassio
mid-conversation as act 2 opens,
and our sensation of eavesdropping
only grows as Iago, left alone, utters
his “Credo”—as close as Iago gets
to a conventional aria. We know
that Boito’s text for this soliloquy,
sent unsolicited to Verdi after
their one serious disagreement,
persuaded the composer to pick up
his pen again; but it is not the text,
despite Verdi’s verdict as “wholly
Shakespearean,” but his tough and
explosive setting that gives this
passage a Shakespearean power.
Desdemona, in contrast, is perfectly characterized not in an aria of
her own, but by the angelic chorus
of the women and children who
accompany her. Two ensembles, old
forms freshly treated, are woven
into a continuous fabric of conversation, asides, and half-uttered
thoughts. The quartet for the two
couples brilliantly integrates action
and contemplation under the
two-octave span of Desdemona’s
virtually seamless melody. In the
vengeance duet that closes the act,
Verdi chooses his most dramatic,
8
oversized style—concluding with
a throwback of sorts to the old
cabaletta, sung to the footlights—
though it never worked better or
seemed more apt dramatically.
Act 3 mercilessly lays bare the
relationship between Otello and
Desdemona, both in private and
against the broad backdrop of
a large public finale. Verdi has
become a formidable “searcher of
the human heart,” as he once said
of Shakespeare; the duet that opens
the act charts emotional territory with a razor’s precision that
music rarely touches. In Otello’s
soliloquy, intoned in the most
terrifying quiet—the vocal line is
marked pppp and soffocata (suffocated)—Verdi finally exposes the
soul of a broken man. After that,
nothing could fall more cruelly
on the ears than Iago’s coup de
théâtre with the handkerchief—a
sadistic scherzo before the finale.
Even the traditional finale that
Verdi demanded—carried by seven
independent voices over chorus and
orchestra while the action freezes—
rises to new heights when Otello,
standing mute in the middle of the
crowd, suddenly explodes in anger
and scatters the music in bold,
unexpected directions. (At these
performances, Riccardo Muti uses
the revised finale that Verdi wrote
for Paris in 1894; see the sidebar
on page 28D.)
The last act begins with
Desdemona’s Willow Song,
quietly sung in a mood of utmost
calm, ruffled once by the wind,
and later by Desdemona’s sudden
desperation—a moment of searing
emotional truth. The subtle shift
to muted strings for Desdemona’s
prayer seems to drain the room of
air. Otello enters to a single thread
of sound from the double basses—
the voice of terror itself. As soon
as he bends to kiss the sleeping
Desdemona, and the full force of
Verdi’s love music, not heard since
the end of the first act, floods over
him, the tragedy unfolds swiftly.
The legacy of Otello is a building
near the heart of Milan: the Casa
di Riposo per Musicisti, a rest
home for musicians, where, as Verdi
knew but too well, the battles of
old age are best waged with music
and companionship, hand in hand.
The Casa di Riposo was built on
T
he difficult task of working
together on Otello deepened
and strengthened the relationship
between Verdi and Boito. When
they began Falstaff two years later,
the tensions, the petty aggravations, and the bigger arguments
were gone. Later, Boito even
suggested they tackle Lear together,
but Giuseppina waved him off:
“Verdi is too old, too tired.” Yet it
was Giuseppina who died first, late
in November 1897. Verdi was now
alone. He wrote to a friend: “Great
sorrow does not demand great
expression; it asks for silence, isolation, I would even say the torture
of reflection.”
In the end, despite their differences—and through their struggles—Verdi and Boito had become
as close as father and son. Boito, in
fact, sat silently at Verdi’s bedside
during the composer’s last days; he
was there when Verdi died. “He
died magnificently, like a fighter,
formidable and mute,” he later
wrote, when he could bring himself
to discuss the death of the man who
had given him his only real taste of
greatness. Boito knew that “To be
the faithful servant of Verdi, and
of that other, born on the Avon”
was enough.
Verdi wrote to Boito after he completed the
score of Otello: “It is finished! Salute to us . . .
(and also to Him!!) Farewell”
land Verdi purchased with the
proceeds from Otello and designed
by Camillo Boito, Arrigo’s brother.
In his last years, Verdi would call
the Casa di Riposo the favorite of
all his works.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
9
the Characters
by arrigo Boito
G
Boito
iulio Ricordi prepared an
elaborately detailed production
book for Otello
that includes
fascinating
thumbnail
sketches of
the characters
written by
Arrigo Boito.
Selections
from Boito’s
comments,
as translated
by Julian
Budden, follow.
otello
A Moor, general of the Venetian
republic. He has passed his fortieth
year. He presents the brave, loyal
figure of a man of arms. Simple
in his bearing and in his gestures,
imperious in his commands, cool
in his judgment. . . . His first words
proclaim victory in a voice of thunder amid the tempest; his last words
exhale a sigh of love upon a kiss.
First we should see the hero, then
the lover; and we must perceive the
hero in all his greatness if we are
to understand how worthy he is of
love and how great his capacity for
passionate devotion. Then from that
prodigious love a fearful jealousy
will be born through the cunning
agency of Iago. . . .
Iago has first stabbed the Moor
to the heart and then put his finger
on the wound. Otello’s torture has
begun. The whole man changes:
10
he was wise, sensible, and now
he raves; he was strong and now
he waxes feeble; he was just and
upright and now he will commit a crime; he was strong and
hale and now he groans and falls
about and swoons like one who
has taken poison or been smitten by epilepsy. Indeed, Iago’s
words are poison injected into the
Moor’s blood. . . . Otello is the
supreme victim of the tragedy and
of Iago. . . .
Iago
Iago is envy. Iago is a villain. Iago is
a critic. In the cast list, Shakespeare
describes him thus: Iago, a villain,
and adds not a word more. In the
square in Cyprus, Iago says of
himself, “I am nothing but a critic.”
He is a mean and spiteful critic;
he sees the evil in mankind and in
himself. “I am a villain because I
am human.” He sees evil in Nature,
in God. He commits evil for evil’s
sake. He is an artist in deceit. The
cause of his hatred for Otello is not
very serious compared to the vengeance he exacts from it. . . . Iago is
the real author of the drama; he it is
who fabricates the threads, gathers them up, combines them, and
weaves them together. . . .
One of his talents is the faculty
he possesses of changing his personality according to the person to
whom he happens to be speaking,
so as to deceive them or to bend
them to his will. Easy and genial
with Cassio; ironic with Roderigo;
apparently good-humored, respectful, and humbly devoted towards
Otello; brutal and threatening with
Emilia; obsequious to Desdemona
and Lodovico. Such are the basic
qualities, the appearance, and the
various facets of this man.
Desdemona
A feeling of love, purity, nobility, docility, ingenuousness, and
resignation should pervade the
most chaste and harmonious figure
of Desdemona in the highest
degree. The more simple and gentle
her movements and gestures, the
greater the emotion they will arouse
in the spectator.
Emilia
Iago’s wife; devoted to Desdemona.
She hates her villainous husband
and fears him, and, while she
submits to his violence and bullying, she knows the wickedness of
his soul. But at the end, she reveals
his infamy with all the strength and
courage of a downtrodden creature
that rebels.
Cassio
Captain of the Venetian
Republic. . . . He is somewhat
obsessed with his passing affairs
These are the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra’s first
subscription concert performances of Verdi’s Otello.
and a little vain; but he is a brave
soldier who knows how to defend
himself with spirit, sword in
hand . . . a jealous guardian of his
own honor.
roderigo
A young Venetian, rich and elegant,
hopelessly and platonically in love
with Desdemona, quite without
her knowledge. He is a visionary,
a simple creature, a dreamer who
allows himself to be cheated and
dominated by Iago. Iago makes
use of him as a passive and docile
instrument for the accomplishment
of his designs.
Lodovico
Senator of the Venetian Republic,
ambassador to Cyprus. Of grave
deportment though still youthful. . . . He has great authority both
in his looks and in his speech.
montano
Otello’s predecessor as governor of
Cyprus. A man of war, faithful to
his duty, a good swordsman, a brave
soldier, and a strict officer.
FIrSt CSo
PErFormaNCES
november 23, 1891
(special concert), Auditorium
Theatre. Louis Saar conducting; with Emma Albani, Jean
de Reszke, and Eduardo
Camera, principal soloists
moSt rECENt
CSo PErFormaNCES
April 8 and 12, 1991 (special
concerts), Orchestra Hall.
Sir Georg Solti conducting;
with Kiri Te Kanawa, Luciano
Pavarotti, and Leo nucci,
principal soloists
July 9 and 11, 1970,
Ravinia Festival. István
Kertész conducting; with
Pilar Lorengar, James
McCracken, and Camillo
Meghor, principal soloists
July 23, 2005, Ravinia
Festival. James Conlon
conducting; with Cristina
Gallardo-Domâs, Clifton
Forbis, and Frederick
Burchinal, principal soloists
11
Synopsis of Otello
aCt 1
The people of Cyprus, along with
officers and soldiers of the Venetian
army, await the arrival of their
governor, Otello, during a violent
storm. Otello returns victoriously
to Cyprus after defeating the Turks
in Venice. Iago, who secretly hates
Otello, is enraged when Otello
appoints Cassio his lieutenant.
Iago enlists the help of Roderigo,
who is in love with Otello’s wife
Desdemona, to get revenge on
Otello for not promoting him.
Iago vows to turn Otello against
Cassio. During the following
celebration, Iago encourages Cassio
to drink too much. When the
former governor, Montano, arrives,
Iago manages to have Cassio pick
a fight with Montano; swords are
drawn and Montano is wounded.
Iago sends Roderigo to arouse the
town. Otello enters, furious at the
brawl, and further enraged when
Desdemona appears, awakened
from sleep by the tumult. Otello
demotes Cassio and orders Iago to
restore peace in the village.
Alone, Otello and Desdemona
share a tender moment as they recall
their courtship. They go into the
castle, clasped in each other’s arms.
aCt 2
Iago tells Cassio to ask Desdemona
to plead his case with Otello. When
Cassio approaches Desdemona in
the garden, Iago deviously plants
jealous and suspicious thoughts of
this encounter in Otello’s head.
Otello becomes annoyed when
Desdemona asks him to forgive
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Cassio and reinstate him as
lieutenant. Blinded by jealousy of
Cassio, Otello complains that his
head is throbbing. Desdemona
offers him her handkerchief
(Otello’s first gift to her), but
he throws it to the ground, and
her attendant, Emilia, retrieves
it. Iago takes the handkerchief
from Emilia to plant in Cassio’s
quarters; he then tells Otello that
Cassio has it. Otello becomes
increasingly agitated and furious
at Desdemona’s alleged infidelity. He swears vengeance on
Desdemona and Cassio, and Iago
joins him.
aCt 3
A herald announces that the
Venetian ambassador’s ship is
approaching. Iago suggests that
Otello might learn more by eavesdropping on a conversation set up
between Iago and Cassio.
Desdemona enters and again
pleads for Cassio. Otello demands
to see her handkerchief. When
Desdemona cannot produce it, he
accuses her of being unfaithful and
cruelly dismisses her.
Otello listens to a staged meeting between Iago and Cassio,
hearing just enough to condemn
Desdemona. Cassio shows Iago
Desdemona’s handkerchief, which
Cassio found in his house. The
enraged Otello recognizes it and
vows to kill Desdemona that
very night.
Otello greets the Venetian
ambassador Lodovico, who brings
a dispatch from the Doge: Otello is
summoned to Venice and Cassio is
named governor of Cyprus.
aCt 4
In her bedroom, Desdemona asks
Emilia to lay her wedding gown
on the bed and to ensure that she
is buried in it when she dies. She
remembers a song sung by her
mother’s attendant, another girl
who was forsaken by her lover, and
sings it for Emilia. The two women
embrace before Desdemona kneels
in prayer.
Otello enters and asks
Desdemona if she has prayed that
evening. He again questions her
fidelity. Unconvinced by her tearful
denials, he smothers her.
Cassio, Emilia, and Montano
enter and each reveal a part of
Iago’s plot, so that the whole
scheme is now clear. Confronted,
Iago denounces Otello and informs
him of Desdemona’s innocence. In
anguish, Otello stabs himself and
dies next to his virtuous wife.
© 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Losing control at this news,
Otello pushes Desdemona to the
floor, shouting insults. He orders
everyone out and collapses. Iago
takes the handkerchief and tauntingly waves it over Otello before
throwing it on the Moor.
Supertitle system courtesy of Digital Tech Services, LLC, Portsmouth, VA
Supertitles by Sonya Friedman © 2011
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