Music: Merely Excellent

The trick in Otello, the great tragic opera of Verdi’s old age, is to pile into Scene 1 at full emotional gallop and to keep at it without nagging for three hours. Both vocally and dramatically, it is one of the most difficult works in all opera, as Verdi himself acknowledged (“This lago,” he said grandly, “is humanity”). Last week, after a lapse of two years, the Metropolitan Opera tackled Otello and achieved a performance that did justice to Verdi’s looming vision. It also served as a reminder that the Met is having a brilliant season, one of its greatest in years.

Fausto Cleva, not the Met’s liveliest conductor, this time set his singers a brisk pace, never permitted any sagging in the supple vocal line that Verdi skillfully stitched through Arrigo Boito’s libretto. As Othello, Tenor Mario del Monaco sailed onstage in full joyous shout in his “Esultate,” and from there on through his Act III explosion of jealous rage, never pausing to be subtle, kept the house ringing and the stage dark with passion. Baritone Leonard Warren as lago proved again his ability to soar dramatically or modulate to a mahogany pianissimo, invested his role with an air of sly innuendo that it often lacks. As Desdemona, velvet-voiced Soprano Victoria de los Angeles took her time warming up, but was in soaring form by the third act’s grand ensemble scene; her heavy acting was forgotten as she gave the Willow Song and Ave Maria in Act IV a purity and emotional gloss that held the house in a misty-eyed hush.

At least one critic, the New York World-Telegram and The Sun’s Louis Biancolli, confessed that the last act had reduced him to tears. Such weeping not withstanding, it was not the greatest Otello in Met history. Nor did it have the special attraction of Maria Callas (who scored a triumph the following night as the most convincing and moving Tosca of her time). Otello was merely excellent—and significant precisely because it was the kind of topnotch production that Rudolf Bing’s Met can mount any night of the week it has a mind to.