CVera and Ballet
Without the Moor
By DAVID CAIRNS To hear Otello again, even moderately well performed, is to be overwhelmed afresh by its lyrical sweep and intensity, its stifling tragic force and truthfulness; as Wilfrid Mel- lers puts it in his superb chapter on nineteenth-century opera in Man and his Music, the greatest of Italian grand operas owes its grandeur to the fact that it offers not romantic evasion but a fearless admission of our stupidity and our guilt.' But to hear it is also to be reminded of the risk Verdi and Boito took when they removed Shakespeare's Act 1 in the interests of operatic compression, merely grafting some of its principal ideas and lines on to their own first act. (which is, roughly speaking, Shake- speare's second).
The higher music drama aspires the more vulnerable it is in practice. Just because opera, through the unique power of music, incarnates pure concepts of heroism, nobility, innocence, evil, making them precise and alive, it is peculiarly at the mercy of the people who perform it. Otello is an extreme example. It is vulnerable in a particular way as well. A really satisfying performance of the play is rare, but not so rare as a really satisfying performance of the opera— not only because singers as a race are stupider than actors, tenors the stupidest singers of all, and in opera the oracle is habitually gabbled by its interpreters, but because in this opera as it is constructed so much, near the beginning, depends on so little, even allowing for music's ability to say concisely what the spoken word can only express at length.
Verdi and Boito have staked everything on the Love Duet; it is the only extended passage that conveys to us the crucially important ideas of the Moor's supreme nobility (amply conveyed in Shakespeare's council chamber scene) and the immensity and still greater potentiality of the love between him and Desdemona, without which we cannot feel the full horror of his disintegration and of the poisoning of their relationship. It is Otello's first and last chance to establish this fundamental truth; and in most performances the chance is not remotely grasped. The revival of the work at Covent Garden last summer, with Mario del Monaco, failed for the simple but devastating reason that this scene was reduced from a sublime expression of passion to a foolish strife of egos between a grinning Italian tenor and a Bulgarian soprano who sang quite nicely (in the intervals of jockeying for a less disadvantageous position) but suggested almost nothing of the depths of Desdemona's tenderness and admiration.
It cannot be said that Charles Craig, who played Otello in the production which opened the second season of Scottish Opera in Glasgow last week, got much nearer to suggesting the dignity or the subsequent self-destruction of the character than a clubman reading in his Telegraph of another England collapse at Lord's or the latest decadence of socialised Britain, and taking it like a man. With all respect to Mr. Craig, who sang the part better than many imported celebrities, this was Otello without the Moor. Yet
within the limits of provincial opera the Love Duet was much more moving and truthful than in most metropolitan productions, because Anthony Besch had succeeded in producing it, on a bare, raked stage, with grave simplicity and a minimum of gesture. Mr. Besch, whose sound, resourceful production was full of vivid touches, must also take some credit for Peter Glossop's Iago, an ebullient and crafty impersonation which for the first time made me realise what intelligence and dramatic talent was locked up behind those wooden, two-dimensional performances of Scarpia and Rigoletto.
To say that this Otello was highly enjoyable in a context which allowed one to overlook its provincialisms is not to patronise it. I am far too grateful for the experience to want to concentrate on anything except its positive qualities—the competence of the Scottish National Orchestra and the fervour of the strength and specially recruited chorus under Alexander Gibson, the tremendous effect of hearing this music in a smallish house (where the sound conies straight at you and is not diffused), and the evident success of the opera, apparently being performed for the first time in Glasgow for several decades, with the local audience.
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