Otello: The Night a 73-Year-Old Verdi Conquered La Scala
On February 5, 1887, Giuseppe Verdi's Otello premiered at La Scala in Milan — the triumphant comeback of a composer who had retired from opera fifteen years earlier.
He was 73 years old, rich, famous — and finished. After Aida triumphed in 1871, Giuseppe Verdi retired to his farm at Sant'Agata and announced he was done with opera. For fifteen years, the greatest living Italian composer wrote no operas at all.
It took a patient conspiracy to change his mind. His publisher, Giulio Ricordi, spent the better part of a decade coaxing him, and the librettist Arrigo Boito — a gifted composer in his own right — produced a libretto distilled from Shakespeare's Othello that even the old maestro could not resist. Verdi worked in secret, revising obsessively, telling almost no one.
On February 5, 1887, the secret came out at La Scala in Milan. Franco Faccio conducted. The cast was the finest Italy could offer: the legendary tenor Francesco Tamagno as Otello, the great baritone Victor Maurel as Iago, and Romilda Pantaleoni as Desdemona, with sets by Carlo Ferrario and costumes by Alfredo Edel. Somewhere in the orchestra pit, a young cellist named Arturo Toscanini is said to have been sawing away — years before he became the most famous conductor on earth.
The audience went mad. The applause, by contemporary accounts, was thunderous, with the creators called back to the stage again and again — some reports put the curtain calls at twenty. Verdi, who dreaded public appearances, was dragged into the light to accept the adoration of Milan.
The opera itself was unlike anything Verdi had written. It opens with a storm — no overture, just fury — and barely pauses for breath: Iago's chilling Credo, the great love duet that closes the first act, Desdemona's heartbreaking Willow Song and Ave Maria in the final act. Boito had compressed Shakespeare's five acts into four, and Verdi matched him with music of a continuous, symphonic intensity new to Italian opera, every bar serving the drama.
Why does it matter? Otello is the crown of Verdi's late style — Shakespeare's tragedy compressed into four acts of music of terrifying intensity, composed by a man who had nothing left to prove. It remains one of the pinnacles of all opera, and it proved something artists in every field have clung to since: genius does not retire on schedule. Six years later, at nearly eighty, Verdi would do it once more with Falstaff.
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