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Verdi, Otello: (Premiere) Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, Carlo Rizzi conductor, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 19.9.2008 (GPu)

Conductor: Carlo Rizzi

Director: Paul Curran

Set Designer: Paul Edwards

Lighting Designer: David Martin Jacques

Chorus Master: Stephen Harris

Otello: Dennis O’Neill

Desdemona: Amanda Roocroft

Iago: David Kempster

Cassio: Wynne Evans

Roderigo: Robin Tritschler

Emilia: Claire Bradshaw

Montano: Julian Boyce

Lodovico: David Soar

Herald: James Robinson-May

Actors: Iain Robert Goosey, Stuart Hulse, Al Russell, Alastair Sill

Amanda Roocroft (Desdemona), Clair Bradshaw (Emilia) and Robin Tritschler (Roderigo)

Two quotations, passages that kept running through my head, before and after this Otello:

“The truth is that instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespear [sic], Othello is a play written by Shakespear in the style of Italian opera. It is quite peculiar among his works in this aspect. Its characters are monsters: Desdemona is a prima donna, with handkerchief, confidante, and vocal soli all complete; and Iago, though certainly more anthropomorphic than the Count di Luna, is only so when he slips out of his stage villain’s part. Othello’s transports are conveyed by a magnificent but senseless music which rages from the Propontick to the Hellespont in an orgy of thundering sound and bounding rhythm; and the plot is a pure farce plot: that is to say, it is supported on an artificially manufactured and desperately precarious trick with a handkerchief which a chance word might upset at any moment. With such a libretto, Verdi was quite at home: his success with it proves, not that he could occupy Shakespear’s plane, but that Shakespear could on occasion occupy his, which is a very different matter”.   (George Bernard Shaw)

“In opera, Boito pits words against music, and verbally teases or torments the simpleminded optimism of song ... Thus Otello became a quarrel between drama and music – the witty speech of Iago (who at first was to have the title role) against the lyrical rhapsodies of Desdemona; Boito against Verdi. The struggle in Otello is less for the hero’s soul than for the possession and definition of opera. Boito saw the work in a characteristically schizoid way. He called the finale to the third act – with Desdemona humbled before Lodovico, pouring out her grief while Otello rants and Iago continues plotting – ‘a lyrical melodic piece beneath which runs a dramatic dialogue. The principal figure on the lyrical side is Desdemona, on the dramatic side Iago’ … Othello is a domestic drama, fussing over handkerchiefs and bed sheets. The music of Otello makes it elemental”. (Peter Conrad)

Amanda Roocroft (Desdemona) and Dennis O’Neill (Otello)

 

It is precisely Boito who is left out of things in Shaw’s reductive if delightfully clever (and therefore characteristic) formulation (“The truth is that instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespear, Othello is a play written by Shakespear in the style of Italian opera”). Conrad tries to explain Boito’s importance in the creation of this, one of the greatest of all operas. If one accepts his idea of the work as embodying a struggle between the lyrical and the dramatic, between the music and the words, then in performance it must be a struggle in which no victory is achieved, in which the tension is unresolved, this tension being the very thing that gives the work its essential energy.

Every time I see or hear Otello I am struck afresh by what a superbly designed piece of work Boito’s libretto is, how utterly it is conceived in operatic terms (which is to say, how useless it would be as spoken text). It is, as we know, the work of a composer experienced in the writing of opera – and how evident that is.

One thing that follows from all this is that a good production – simple as the demand sounds – should let the story happen, unhindered by too much extraneous baggage of ‘interpretation’; it doesn’t need it, and it can rarely do other than get in the way, masking the “elemental” nature of the work. In that regard Paul Curran’s production for WNO deserved some considerable respect. Certainly Curran seems to have had such an idea in the foreground of his thinking about the production. In a feature in Wales’ national daily newspaper, the Western Mail, published on the morning of the première, Curran is quoted as saying “I only want to communicate, to let the audience follow and understand the story moment to moment … I’m not interested in concept for concept’s sake. Human life is more complicated than one thing, one concept”.

Not that the production is without ideas – I was struck, for example, by one governing metaphor. To see a relationship between lovers as, metaphorically, a ship is an ancient trope. Shakespeare himself alludes to it in Act II scene I of Othello (which corresponds, of course, to the opening of Otello), when Cassio prays:
 

                    Great Jove, Othello guard,

                    And swell his sail with thine own powerful breath,

                    That he may bless this bay with his tall ship,

                    And swiftly come to Desdemona’s arms …

Othello’s (and Otello’s) ship is not just a Venetian galley returning from victorious war; it is also his marriage to Desdemona. The off-stage rocks are avoided in the first scene of the opera (‘Il rostro piomba / Su quello scoglio!’ sings an alarmed Roderigo). But, having got safely to land, the ship of their marriage will yet run aground on the ‘rocks’ that are Iago (who is already declaring ‘ Stolto / É chi s’affoga per amor di donna’. In Curran’s production  a group of rocks were on stage throughout and much of the action revolved around them. In a lovely touch, as the curtain rose at the beginning of Act Two, a large snake (picking up both on the libretto’s repeated talk of poison and the allusions to Eden) slithered beneath the rocks, just as Iago emerged from behind them. Cyprus, it is also worth remembering, was the island of Venus (‘Venere splende’ sings Otello in the final words of the love duet which closes Act I) and beneath the headland of Cape Andreas, on which her temple stood, were rocks on which very many ancient ships were wrecked, viewed as emblematic of the fortunes of love.

David Kempster (Iago)

Visually there was much to enjoy in this production – the sixteenth century Venetian costumes made many of the crowd scenes look like the paintings of Veronese or Tintoretto in three dimensions. Curran and his designer Paul Edwards were not afraid of spectacle and vivid colour, and in the interplay between crowded public scenes and stripped down private episodes there were some very effective contrasts.

Musically, the work of the WNO Orchestra came close to stealing the show. The opening storm scene was aurally magnificent, played with a thoroughly Italianate passion and making a tremendous impact. The subversive orchestral insinuations which open Act III had a sinuous menace of which I have only rarely heard the equal. Throughout, Carlo Rizzi’s support for the singers and sense of pace was superbly judged. (A friend who was sitting near the offender tells me that the look in Maestro Rizzi’s eyes would have done credit to Iago when a bleeper went off during – of all things – Desdemona’s ‘Ave Maria’).

Having achieved the status of National Living Treasure in Wales, Dennis O’Neill has little left to prove. It is no exaggeration to say that he has been one of the most distinguished Verdi singers that Britain has produced in the last thirty years. The voice doesn’t have the tonal variety and flexibility it had in its prime; now he is at his best when singing full voice and is rather less convincing when mezza or sotto voce. He sings the role with an assured sense of idiom and a directness of emotion well suited to Otello. The difference in age between his Otello and Amanda Roocroft’s Desdemona plausibly contributed to the character’s sense of insecurity and O’Neill was, generally speaking, more persuasive in his embodiment of Otello’s vulnerability than of his heroism. In the closing scenes he was a genuinely moving presence, poignantly and plausibly broken by an abrupt return to sanity.

Amanda Roocroft was a persuasively innocent and gently naive Desdemona and was, generally, in pretty good voice, especially rich in the middle register. This was, in most respects, a fine performance … and yet. I felt somehow a slight failure of identification with some aspects of the role. Lovely as much of Roocroft’s singing was, it is as if there is, deep down in her something quintessentially English which is a trifle embarrassed about expressing emotions as directly as the role requires, and which leads her, doubtless unconsciously, to maintain a kind of distance and self-awareness at moments which call for real emotional abandonment. At times, indeed, the voice was almost too beautiful – more lyrical than dramatic to go back to Boito’s words quoted at the beginning of this review. Her farewell to Emilia, though, came close to a scream and was marvellously powerful. Her ‘Ave Maria’ had real dignity, a moment to which Roocroft’s poise of voice and manner were perfectly suited. This was, all in all, a fine performance which yet, somehow, didn’t quite move one absolutely.

David Kempster was singing Iago for the first time. He perhaps lacked the last degree of intensity that one encounters in the very finest interpretations of the role but his was a powerful performance and one that convinced one of the further potential of Kempster, already quite experienced. After a slightly uneasy opening he became a compelling stage presence, vocally direct and achieving a plausible degree of hypnotic power in his manipulation of Otello, Roderigo and Cassio. His ‘Era la notte’ had a thoroughly disturbing plausibility, a minor masterpiece of hushed, evocative menace. Kempster’s Iago was a definite success. His approximation to speech rhythms was, at times, very effective and throughout he was sensitive and thoughtful in his interpretation of Boito’s text.

Most of the small roles were very competently handled, with Wynne Evans a somewhat gullible Cassio, struck with a kind of hero-worship of Otello and Robin Tritchler’s Roderigo a ready dupe. In truth roles such as those of Roderigo, Lodovico and (to a degree) Emilia are little more than devices essential to the plot which leave little scope for real characterisation or for a singer to make any great impression. One minor puzzle – why was Emilia costumed as though Iago had found his wife in some otherwise unknown Red Indian Reservation in the Veneto? And while we are querying details of production, it surely wasn’t a very good idea that the dagger with which Otello stabs himself should be handed to him by Cassio, rather than (as in the libretto) produced by the Moor from beneath his gown. For him to be dependent on Cassio at this climactic moment rather damagingly reduced Otello’s affirmation of self in a kind of quasi-Roman honourable suicide.

So, a good production and performance well worth the seeing and hearing, if not as overwhelming a theatrical and musical experience as Otello can be. I return to Peter Conrad (whose discussion of the opera in his 1989 book A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera is superb), for the observation that “Otello sums up all the previous tragic operas, and from the traditional vocal typology makes a map of the moral universe. Desdemona the soprano is an angel, Iago the baritone is a devil. Between them the tenor Otello constitutes the turbulent nature in which they do battle …”. For all the metaphors of storms inner and outer, in stage imagery, in words sung and orchestral music heard and felt, this WNO production doesn’t quite scale the opera’s heights of possibility. But, blessedly free of the irritations which many an over-interventionist director insists upon, it lets Boito’s words and Verdi’s music tell a great and resonant story – for which we should be grateful.

Glyn Pursglove

Pictures: © Catherine Ashmore

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