Word: otello
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Last week, just a year after making his debut in London with only a minimum of operatic training, the tenor was shuttling between London's Covent Garden, where he sang Canio in Pagliacci, and Amsterdam's Nederlandsche Opera, where he sang the notoriously difficult lead in Otello. The months of additional study at La Scala had not spoiled Philadelphia-born Leonard del Ferro, 31. European critics call him one of the most exciting male singers to come their way in years...
Although it is drama--and great drama--the Passion is not Otello. For its fullest effect, it should be led with precision rather than exaggeration and be given a Baroque, not Romantic treatment. One of the egregious examples of this misinterpretation was Richard Burgin's syrupy violin solo in the soprano aria "Erbarme dich." It sounded more like Liszt than Bach...
...over Italian opera, Giulio attended rehearsals at La Scala, recommended the hiring or firing of singers, publicly castigated conductors. A pet hate for a time: Toscanini, whose style he once likened to a "mastodonic mechanical piano." Above all, Giulio commissioned Arrigo Boîto to write the librettos of Otello and Falstaff, which fired the aged Verdi into composing again. Although Puccini drew monthly advances for nine years before paying the money back, their friendship was sometimes stormy. "All composers," Giulio wrote him once, "French, English, German, Turkish and Abyssinian, [are] a bunch of idiots...
...turn Shakespeare's tragedy into another Trovatore. Last week, when Manhattan's Metropolitan staged Macbeth for the first time in its 76-year history, the opera kept moving from the sublime toward the ridiculous. The score contains much hauntingly beautiful music,* prefiguring the 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...
...Covent Garden. Short, stocky and a shouter, Del Monaco commands ringing B-flats that have made a name for him in all the roles-Pagliacci's Canio, Samson, Aïda's Radames-in which vocal volume, height and brilliance are needed simultaneously. His interpretation of Otello, by critical consensus, is the finest in present-day opera...