A Few Points about Otello

 I just heard Otello performed in concert tonight at the National Symphony in DC. If it weren't already three in the morning I'd write a long post about Otello.

A few points:

1. Otello is a greater work than Othello. Othello is towering, but it's two plays awkwardly shoehorned into one: Othello's descent into jealous madness, and the rise of Iago's evil powers. Verdi, as practical a man of the theater as the Bard, streamlines it to one story by making Iago evil personified from the first word. Othello sprawls into a hundred directions. Otello is a masterpiece of concision. You know exactly why every note is there.
2. The way Verdi cuts Othello in half is through Iago's Credo, which literally sets a trifling prose poem Boito wrote as a vent for his own domestic frustration that had nothing to do with Otello. The setting would be astonishingly modern even in Wagner, and it is one of the core glories of all opera. While Shakespeare's Iago evolves, Verdi's Iago is. Iago, like Hagen, is evil: not only is he evil, he is evil itself.
3. Race is obviously near the core of Shakespeare's conception. One of Shakespeare's many tropes is to show that a villain from a disparaged race is the way they are because circumstances forced them to be. Just as Shylock is a Jew forced into his own stereotype, Othello is a moor forced into his. They are both villains and figures of great pathos. But the primary concern of the Othello story in any form is jealousy, but whereas Shakespeare's Othello is concerned places jealousy in a racial context, Verdi's Otello places it in the context of relationships, how envy leads friends to betray each other, and how envy leads to abusive domestic relationships.
4. There are moments when what happens in the music is so violent that one can only speculate that the music expresses what the stage directions lack. After Verdi sets Shakespeare's line, 'I took thee for the cunning whore of Venice,' the wrath of the music is so terrifying that one can only infer the actions the music implies.
5. Next time you hear Otello's shout of 'a terra, e piangi!' think of Pagliacci. Note for note, Leoncavallo literally sets the same musical cell as 'ridi Pagliaccio!'
6. Much is made by musicologists the subtle ways Iago insinuates his evil machinations in Act II, at least much is made by Ernest Newman. It's important to pace Act II relatively quickly, as Gianandrea Noseda did tonight (too fast elsewhere), because Iago's insinuating chromaticism can seem like mustache twirling unless it's done at the speed of conversation. Whether in Shakespeare or Verdi, Iago has to seem plausibly normal in order to make his devestating effect.
7. Late Verdi is a master, maybe the master, at coming up with the proper onomatopoetic musical gesture for every action. Such gestures are everywhere in Falstaff, but until tonight, the extent of it in Otello didn't quite occur to me. The Act III domestic squabble proceeds like so many fights do. It starts with one partner's cutting remarks that just barely keep civility's veneer, while the other partner does everything they can to subtly imply the unpleasant thing they need, only to proceed to the place of hurt, where the lid of respect falls off. Points of aggravation are repeated over and over again. And in the worst fights, there is always a place where the unforgivable thing is said, the point from which there is no return.
8. As the composer who perfected the tropes of grand opera, Verdi is in a unique place to play around with them. At least twice, Verdi seems as though he is about to go into an aria, once with Iago in Act I, once with Otello at the end of Act III, and probably half a dozen times between them in Act II, only to interrupt what seems like an introductory melody for something far more naturalistic.
9. We always talk about the importance of key and harmony in Wagner, but barely anyone speaks of Verdi as though he has any sort of tonal plan. And yet the harmonic plan in Otello is so clearly laid out. The love of Otello and Desdemona is played out in the tonality of E. The kisses are in a blissful E-major, but the jealousy takes root in b-flat minor, the most distant key from E. The constant rebukes and insinuations are always in a much more complex E-major, like a love that is struggling to remind itself that it exists. But at the most harrowing moments of domestic strife, the music turns to E-minor. The opera ends again in E-major but the most resigned, morendo E-major.
10. But the harmonic masterstroke is that the Willow Song is in C-Sharp minor - E-major's relative minor. The very note E has become the source of Desdemona's pain, and when it comes time to sing Ave Maria, she sings it in the dominant of C-Sharp, A-flat major. It's like a harmonic signal that heaven hears her pain, and will save her for it. All of which leads us back to the low E on the double basses with which Otello makes his final entrance.

...one half-hour later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqEgG2nSCM8