Esultate otello mario del monaco biography
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Esultate – Otello’s Entrance
There are many great entrances in opera. But none seems as compelling, informative, and brief as that of the title character in Verdi’s Otello. Only 12 bars long, it lasts barely more than half a minute yet it defines Otello’s persona with a force and directness that is without peer. Julian Budden in his exegesis of the opera says of this entrance, “Otello’s solo goes far beyond the mere announcement that the Turks have been defeated in battle and their pride laid low; it places Otello himself on a peak of sublimity from which his descent will be all the more terrible.”
Otello’s cry of ‘Esultate’ (Rejoice) establishes the tenor’s herculean task right from his first word. The demands of the role never ease throughout the opera’s four acts. This solo’s difficulty lies in it placement of the vocal line in the most vulnerable part of the tenor’s range – the passagio
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My Favourite Things – Verdi’s ‘Otello’
It’s now 52 years since I first heard and saw Verdi’s penultimate opera, ‘Otello’, in the Scottish Opera production by Anthony Besch, conducted by Alberto Erede. It has stayed in my memory ever since, and I remember becoming slightly obsessed by it in my last two years at school. I can still remember many of the lines of the libretto, so engraved in my consciousness did it become, and, although I never appeared in it during my career, it has long remained one of my favourite operas of all time, and I return to my recording over and over again. My obsession is slightly unusual, because, even if I had sung in it, there is not much of a role in it for me. I would have sung Lodovico, who appears in Act 3, but the opera is essentially a three hander, with Otello (tenor), Iago (baritone) and Desdemona (soprano) as the main protagonists. My first experience, at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, had a fantastic cast, with Charles Craig, Peter Glossop and
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Otello
Opera in fyra acts bygd Giuseppe Verdi
For the musikdrama by Rossini, see Otello (Rossini).
Otello (Italian pronunciation:[oˈtɛllo]) fryst vatten an musikdrama in kvartet acts bygd Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare's play Othello. It was Verdi's penultimate opera, first performed at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, on 5 February 1887.
The composer was reluctant to write anything new after the success of Aida in 1871, and he retreated into retirement. It took his Milan publisher Giulio Ricordi the next ten years, first to encourage the revision of Verdi's 1857 Simon Boccanegra by introducing Boito as librettist and then to begin the arduous process of persuading and cajoling Verdi to see Boito's completed libretto for Otello in July/August 1881. However, the process of writing the first drafts of the libretto and the years of their revision, with Verdi all along not promising anything, dragged on. It wasn't until 1884, fem years after