Rossini simplifies the musical textures to afford insights into psychological and to portray naked brutality. Act III takes a further step into the 19 th century.

A distraught Desdemona sings something akin to a “mad scene,” filled with wild, nearly unsingable, vocal roulades. Otello and Rodrigo, rivals for Desdemona’s hand about to fight a duel, fling high C’s and D’s at one another like violent sword thrusts. In Act II, however, Rossini intensifies the dramatic tension, recasting bel canto style in a more powerfully conflictual manner.

The first act is packed with bubbling major-key bel canto numbers more similar to his comic works and thus unsuited to tragic melodrama. One hears these innovations in Otello’s score. Yet it is Otello that marked a turning point in Rossini’s own work – and the history of opera.įor the next decade and a half, Rossini would devote himself almost exclusively to tragedy, for which he crafted a new style of operatic expression. The latter two are acknowledged masterpieces. ( Oxford, 1988), II, 629–65 (for Maurel's version of Act IV, see 664–5).Gioachino Rossini finished Otello in 1816, the same year as his comic masterpieces, Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola. Google Scholar Hans Busch reprints Maurel's account and summarises its questionable accuracy in Verdi's Otello and Simon Boccanegra (Revised Version) in Letters and Documents, 2 vols. Maurel elaborates on this comment in a way that squares with neither my view of a tri-partitioned discourse nor the basic information in the score. In his Dix ans de carrière (Paris, 1897), Victor Maurel - Verdi's first Iago - recollects that the composer insisted on a special quality of voice for the word ‘Salice!’. Hepokoski, and Ferrero, Mercedes Viale, Musica e Spettacolo ( Milan, 1990), 46, 79n54. Hepokoski observes that the Ricordi Production Book demands four vocal qualities of Desdemona: for ‘Salice!’ for the rest of the Willow Song for the text representing her present and for her references to the past Google Scholar see Otello di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Weaver, William and Chusid, ( New York, 1979), 160. 14 Quoted in Chusid, Martin, ‘Verdi's Own Words: His Thoughts on Performance, with Special Reference to Don Carlo, Otello and Falstaff’, in The Verdi Companion, ed.

Verdi opera with desdemona