Word: boito
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...emotional insights of Otello, but it is also marred by trivia, such as a kind of witches' cancan in the first scene. The libretto (by Verdi, put into verse by Francesco Piave) dimly reflects some of the original's greatness, but it is far behind Librettist Arrigo Boito's Otello and Falstaff, and is essentially a choppy, ill-balanced synopsis. The Met's production, while brilliant in most respects, was faulted by some ludicrous details and a kind of Teutonic touch that is alien both to Verdi's Italian music and to Shakespeare...
...entered the Arrigo Boito Conservatory in Parma and began studying voice. In 1940, when she was 18 and on a Christmas visit to her aunt in Pesaro, she got her big break: an audition with famed Soprano Carmen Melis, venerated in Italy as one of the great Puccini singers of all time, and then a teacher at the Rossini Conservatory. Melis took on Tebaldi as a fulltime pupil, made her into the kind of singer she is today. Melis worked on voice placement, taught Tebaldi the piano singing to which her voice is naturally adapted. As models, Melis pointed...
During the months just before and after the end of World War II, Tebaldi and her mother shuttled from one small town to another. During that period, Tebaldi made her operatic debut (as Helen of Troy in Boito's Mefistofele) in Rovigo; on the way there, fighter planes strafed her train. After Toscanini hired her for the Scala opening in 1946, she smoothly embarked on the international operatic circuit. In her rise to the top she has experienced only one real failure-a performance of Traviata at La Scala in 1951 in which her voice broke twice on high...
Fausto Cleva, not the Met's liveliest conductor, this time set his singers a brisk pace, never permitted any sagging in the supple vocal line that Verdi skillfully stitched through Arrigo Boito's libretto. As Othello, Tenor Mario del Monaco sailed onstage in full joyous shout in his "Esultate," and from there on through his Act III explosion of jealous rage, never pausing to be subtle, kept the house ringing and the stage dark with passion. Baritone Leonard Warren as lago proved again his ability to soar dramatically or modulate to a mahogany pianissimo, invested his role with...
...verdict. Giraldo Cinthio's story of the Moor of Venice, his ensign Iago and his wife Desdemona has, in fact, been the source of several superlatives: it gave us Rossini's Otello, his finest serious opera; it gave us the best of all Italian opera libretti (by Arrigo Boito), which, when set to music by Verdi, became the supreme Italian tragic opera of the Romantic century; and it gave us Shakespeare's unequaled, Baroque-styled drama (as distinguished from his Renaissance plays like Romeo and Richard II, and from his Mannerist plays like Hamlet and Lear). It gives...