The final duet is filled with tenderness as both characters resign themselves to being apart. Its bold strokes wake me to the depths of human feeling. From the opening storm, I am riveted by the rich texture of psychology and music, and all I want is to be face front, right there — the human condition at its heart, its beat and its cessation. This is not the world, I know, but of it, and one of the best ways I can enter it and connect.
I crave it. He has been called a virgin in the landscape of love, and Iago knows it well; and so does Desdemona, whose belief in her power over her warrior compels her to try to pry him from his anger against Cassio. What an ingenious web Iago weaves.
His mind is like a stiletto, which deeply penetrates the heart. The music tracks the shifting emotion with precision, the rising passion of the lovers, the rising anger and confusions, the suspense, the mysterious by-play of hope and aspiration.
There is no resting point. The whole is one fabric of sounds that shift just like feeling: for example, Otello burning in existential anguish when Iago whispers in his ear that Desdemona has bedded with Cassio.
For instance, the ironic drinking scene which shows the apparent jollity and camaraderie of the soldiers and locals is the first rip in the fabric. The gorgeous love scene follows with the exquisite duet that rises right out of this atmosphere.
Who is who is no longer a question, Otello beset with feelings of awe and vulnerability soldier, general, Desdemona, free from parental constriction, and filling moment by moment with her passion , and us, privy to an intimacy perhaps we should not be. The air is thick, hard to breathe, but we cannot escape. Poised we are before their bed, the bed that two acts later, becomes the tomb for the two of them, and it is here that we watch their complete naked hearts.
The finale envelopes us in stench and obloquy. Here we sit in near suffocation. Such dark forces are beyond us. That is the final stroke. What is worse? Verdi brings us to that shore: we cannot go beyond, for as the music breaks over us is the unbearable bearableness of the circumstance. Even a great Otello must hold both aspects of his nature in tandem, if he is to survive. Both the music with its heart-breaking melodies and alternating zones of rebellion to the sweet and sensuous, the human duality — the boundary-less-ness and the constricted.
This is its paradigm. We are not one thing, as Otello is not, nor Desdemona, nor Iago. We might wish it could be so. But Verdi shows us, as Shakespeare before him, that immortality is in the conflict not in the triumph, the suspension not its resolution. The finale forces us to reckon with its desolation.
We have no choice in that. But in his only complete opera he sought to realise his own rather different ideal of opera.
Debussy conjures a half-lit, atmospheric dream-world, in which the dynamics rarely go above mezzo-forte and silence is as powerful as music. Read our reviews of the latest Debussy recordings here.
A revolutionary chord heralds the start of modern opera and a new way of thinking. Around Wagner , reaching a creative block with the Ring, decided meanwhile to compose a popular, easily performable opera on the Tristan legend. Being Wagner , what he came up with was a vastly profound psychodrama whose very opening chord challenged traditional harmony, inspiring and liberating a subsequent generation of composers.
Its score intertwines motives in darkly sensuous chromatic harmonies which find resolution only in death. There are storms in opera and there are storms. But there is no musical storm quite so shattering as the tidal wave of sound that Verdi unleashes at the start of Otello. Is this the end of the world, with those trumpets summoning the dead from their graves? Otello was written by a composer who was already into his seventies and who thought that he had retired. But, given the opportunity, he was also a composer who embraced the idea of renewing his musical style as confidently as a man half his age.
And nowhere more so than in the Act I love duet for Otello and Desdemona. Verdi had a master librettist working with him who was also more than half in love with William Shakespeare. The death of Desdemona would make stones — and us — weep. An opera of perfect proportions, both thematically and musically balanced. The work that Rossini claimed he would most liked to have composed himself is driven from start to finish with timeless power and brilliance.
Dmitri Tcherniakov Aix-en-Provence, Read our reviews of the latest Mozart recordings here. Monteverdi gets to the hearts of his characters with music of spellbinding beauty and verve. When modern listeners shudder at the triumph of Cupid as Poppea is crowned, they should remember that in the wake of this apparent happy ending comes yet more violence.
Musically, in Tosca Puccini broke new ground in representing the violent actions — torture, attempted rape, murder and execution — that pervade the drama, as well as in the darker emotions that these acts both engender and feed on. In portraying these dark situations and characters — notably the unforgettable evil police chief Scarpia — in his score, Puccini opened up novel areas of harmonic and orchestral expression. To its first audiences Tosca represented a new kind of opera — one that was fast moving, realistic and violent, as well as deliberately shocking.
Long before the term was coined, Puccini here created an operatic genre: the political thriller. Jonathan Kent Covent Garden Read our reviews of the latest Puccini recordings here. DeMille historical blockbuster. This opera was a turning point for Verdi who allowed the various strands of the plot to evolve with a naturalness, almost entirely avoiding the short-term, high-impact, thrills of his earlier work.
Falstaff Totally free of the usual operatic set pieces and crowd-pleasing virtuoso numbers Falstaff , one of the greatest operatic comedies of all time and one of the best Verdi works, is composed of a seamless flow of musical poetics. The story is an amalgamation of scenes from Shakespeare, primarily drawn from the comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Verdi truly saved his best until last! La Traviata La Traviata had an initially lukewarm reception, but after Verdi revised the work in it became enormously successful.
Otello Otello was one of the great musical come-backs — at the premiere Verdi was called out by the weeping audience over 20 times and then his carriage was dragged back to his hotel by adoring fans.
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