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Otello State Opera Vienna - Wien Thu 04.Sep 2025 19:00 replace me !Otello State Opera Vienna - Wien Mon 08.Sep 2025 19:00 replace me !Otello State Opera Vienna - Wien Thu 11.Sep 2025 19:00 replace me !Desdemona has fallen in love with the foreign general Otello and married him against her father's wishes.
Iago, a scheming, malicious ensign of Otello's, wants to destroy him. And he actually succeeds in doing so in a clever way: he is able to gradually convince Otello that his idol Desdemona is cheating on him. It is only after Otello has murdered his wife in a fit of hatred and jealousy that he realizes her innocence. Full of remorse, Otello stabs himself and, dying, bids farewell to his beloved dead wife with a kiss.
Musically, the setting of Shakespeare's Othello represents the culmination of Verdi's lifelong efforts to breathe the breath of true drama into the standardized schematism of Italian melodrama . The forms and formulas are subordinated to the "whole" that Verdi had been striving for since the 1850s at the latest and are no longer musical ends in themselves, but arise solely from the immanent lawfulness of the drama that authenticates them.As great as Verdi's enthusiasm for Shakespeare's work was, in the end only three of his operas were based on works by the English playwright - apart from Macbeth , these were his last two works for the musical theater, Otello and Falstaff, both of which he composed on libretti by his former artistic rival Arrigo Boito. The joint work on Otello lasted around seven years before the opera was successfully premiered at La Scala in Milan on February 5, 1887. Within a very short time, Otello was performed all over the world, including in Vienna, where the opera received its Austrian premiere on March 15, 1888 at the Hofoper, now the Staatsoper.
The four-act opera, which was originally to have been titled Iago , has some obvious external differences compared to Shakespeare: for example, the first act of the play was omitted, but Iago's Credo , a self-reflection, was inserted, which makes him appear more clearly comprehensible as a villain than in the play.(Source: wiener-staatsoper.at)
