VERDI’S OTELLO

The announcement that Otello is to be presented by the Chicago Opera Association next Tuesday evening at the Manhattan Opera House is interesting to lovers of Verdi’s hot-blooded music drama. That it is not often heard is because of the difficulty in finding singing actors to interpret the work. Since Tamagno and Victor Maurel, the ideal Otello and the ideal Iago, we have had no two such interpreters. Antonio Scotti was a remarkable Iago, and from time to time some unhappy tenor attempts to bend the bow of Ulysses, but the two artists who set the town on fire twenty-five years ago have not been rivalled. Tamagno with his barbaric cry, “Sangue, sangue”—“Blood, blood!”—is unforgettable. In the killing of Desdemona he fell short of his great dramatic model, the elder Salvini, because, as we have elsewhere related, he left his spectators in doubt as to the disposition of the pillow. But then his Desdemona was the lovely Emma Eames, and that, no doubt, accounted for the indecision of the murderous and amorous Moor at the fatal moment.

Otello in 1887 set the musical world agog with surprise, curiosity, and delight. It reveals little of the narrow, noisy, violent, and vulgar Verdi of 1850. The character drawing is by a man who is master of his material. The plot moves in majestical splendor and the musical psychology, especially in the case of Iago, is often subtle. Verdi has at last flowered. Much of his earlier music, despite the admirable melodic flow in Traviata, Rigoletto, Trovatore, smelling ranker of the soil, showing abundant thematic invention, was but the effort of a hot-headed man of the footlights, a seeker after applause and money. In Otello his musical provincialisms have well-nigh vanished. The writing is clear, the passion controlled, the effects aimed at easily compassed. The masterly craft of Iago is cleverly contrasted with the fiery passion of Otello, and Shakespeare is suggested; although an Italian Shakespeare. However, the English poet is more Italian than the Italian in this moving drama.

Otello is veritable music drama; its composer seldom halts to symphonize his events as does Wagner. Arrigo Boito, most intellectual of librettists, has skeletonized the story; Verdi’s music endows it with vitality, grace, fleshly contours, brilliancy. The Italian poet has not gravely disturbed the original text. It is but a compliment to his assimilation of the Shakespearian spirit to state that Iago’s credo, an explosion of nihilism and hatred, does not seem out of perspective in the picture. It is an intercalation of Boito’s, as were the Cypriote choruses in Act II. The rest is Shakespeare undefiled, barring a few happy transpositions from the Senate speech to the duo at the close of Act I.

As we have said, the characterization is masterly throughout. Do not let us balk at comparisons, nor, for that matter, at superlatives. With the exceptions of Mozart and Wagner, no composer has thus far lived who could have painted the hot-blooded Moor and the cynical cannikin-clinker, set them facing each other, allowing them to work out their fates, musically speaking, as has Giuseppe Verdi. The key to Otello is its characterization. The medium in which Verdi bids his puppets of destiny to move, their fluidity, their humanity, with the complete dissection of their secret springs of action—these elements are almost incalculable. Criticism can only endeavor to disentangle them. Whether he is listening to his cunning Ancient, or caressing Desdemona, or raging like the hardy Numæan lion, it is always Otello, the Moor of Venice, a loving, suffering, living man—Shakespeare’s Othello transposed to a fresco of magnificent tones.

The character does not evoke a flashy, operatic ranter. Nor does Iago, either as the bluff soldier or the loathsome serpent stinging his chieftain’s soul, ever lag dramatically, ever mimic the conventional attitudes of transpontine melodrama. It is always Iago, “the spirit that denies,” perhaps underlined, for music must emphasize the emotions. Desdemona is drawn in relief to her furious lover and warrior, and as a white cloud of purity in contrast with her cold-blooded maligner. Verdi has assigned her gentle music, the Ave Maria, the Willow Song. She is a sweet background upon which was etched the darker, sinister motives of the play. No masculine shadow but her lord’s has been projected across her snowy, virginal soul. Delicacy and vivacity reveal, little by little, the inner workings of her girlish nature. The other figures, Cassio, Emilia, are sketches on the second plan, but figures that contribute to the density of the dramatic scheme without detracting from our interest in the protagonists.

From the opening storm to the strangling scene the music flows as swiftly as does the action of the spoken drama. Rich, varied, eloquent, the orchestra seldom tarries in its acute and vivid commentary. There is scant employment of typical motives; the kiss theme in Act I is sounded with psychologic fidelity when Otello dies. Only in the handkerchief trio is there pause for instrumental elaboration; but in the main old, set forms are avoided, and while there are melodic currents they seldom crystallize. The duo at the end of Act I, the Credo of unfaith and Otello’s frenzied exhortation in Act II; the tremendous outburst in the following act, with Iago’s sardonically triumphant exclamation, “Behold the lion!” as he plants his scornful heel on the recumbent Otello—then the final catastrophe—these about summarize the high lights. Throughout there are picturesque and poignant strokes, effects of massed splendor, and hovering about the tempest-stirred souls is an atmosphere of gloom, doom, guilt, and melancholy foreboding.

Verdi felt the moods of the poet and made them live again in his score. Otello and Iago grow before our eyes and ears from act to act. The simple-hearted, trusting general with his agonized cry, “Miseria mia,” develops into a ferocious savage thirsting for blood. He is the jealous male, who sees red. The multitudinous music is incarnadine with blood. And it is all vocal. It is written for the voice, which is the centre of gravity in this astounding drama of souls bedevilled, and not the orchestra. The pedestal is not bigger than the statue, as is the case with Salammbô. Another such Iago, subtle, sinister, evil incarnate, withal a dangerously attractive fellow, such an impersonation as Victor Maurel’s, may never be duplicated. And this remarkable singing actor had the advantage of Verdi and Boito’s advice when the music drama was produced at Milan, in 1887. Verdi’s first idea of a title was Iago. This idea does not seem strange after a performance of Maurel.

The two most satisfying Iagos I remember were Henry Irving and Edwin Booth. Maurel’s interpretation paralleled them at every point. Admitted that the singing heightened the impression, though it weakens the characterization, Maurel’s Iago never betrayed a tendency toward the melodramatic; as difficult as treading on eggs without crushing them, he held a middle course, and he was both a picture and a dramatic happening. Malignant he was, but that is the “fat” of the part, but he underlined the reasons for his wicked actions. Iago is also a human being with a sound motive for revenge. I know you will remind me that critical “whitewashing” is become the fashion, that Nero, Simon Magus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Casanova—nay, even Lucifer, Prince of Morning, has Anatole France for a defender (in The Revolt of the Angels)—are only getting their just dues at the hands of various apologists. De Quincey, a master casuist, has said that without Judas the drama of Jesus crucified would not have occurred. Everything is necessary. Nero was a much-abused monster, though Renan believes him to be the Beast mentioned in the Apocalypse—it seems now that there were no “atrocities” during the fabulous persecutions of the Christians, that Rome was not burned by Nero, who had no fiddle technique; but in the case of Iago there is something to be said in his favor. A pure devil, as we conceive devils to be, he was not.

A rough, hard-drinking soldier of fortune, he admits himself to be, and to call his advice, “Put money in thy purse,” cynical is to contravene worldly wisdom. Otello had wronged him, Iago hated him for it, hated his wife for her alleged infidelity—Emilia denies her treachery—therefore, his revenge is credible. It is his method in achieving this revenge that revolts our sensibilities. The innocent Desdemona is crushed between the upper and lower millstones of inexorable destiny. Maurel did not paint his conception all black, but with many gradations and nuances. Not a movement but meant something; even that famous “psychological crook of Iago’s left knee.” Maurel was economical in gesture. His was an objective characterization. The drinking song was memorably, totally unlike his drinking lyrics in Don Giovanni and Hamlet. Suffice to say that Verdi intrusted him with the difficult task of “originating” two such widely-sundered rôles as Falstaff and Iago. With them Victor Maurel made operatic history.

And now what is the most surprising thing about Otello? I think that it is the fact that it was composed when Verdi was past three score and ten. This seems incredible. It seethes with the passion of middle manhood, with the fervors of a flowering maturity. No one before him had dreamed of setting Shakespeare in this royally tragic fashion. Rossini but fluted with the theme. In Verdi, jealousy, love, envy, hatred, are handled by a master music dramatist. It is a wonderful thing that Verdi began it at a time when most men are preparing for the Great Adventure. Reversing the usual processes, this extraordinary Italian wrote younger music the older he grew. After Aïda, Otello. After grim tragedy, joyous comedy—Falstaffio. If he had survived until ninety years, Verdi might have bequeathed us an operetta that would have outpointed in wit and sparkling humor the mercurial Johann Strauss. And when we think of the later Verdi we should not forget his faithful friend and famulus, who played Wagner to his Faust—Arriga Boito.