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Villainy takes center stage in 'Otello'Arizona Opera tackles Verdi's darker adaptation of Shakespeare playBy Kenneth LaFave
Giuseppe Verdi and librettist Arrigo Boito nearly gave the title Iago to their operatic treatment of Shakespeare's Othello. The villain of the piece, they thought, was so much the focus of their treatment as to deserve titular status. In the end they settled for Otello, perhaps the better to make clear the opera's strong relationship to Shakespeare's original. But when you leave the theater following the Arizona Opera's production of Verdi's penultimate masterpiece, don't be surprised if it's grinning villainy you remember more than the doomed Moor of Venice. Boito's adaptation of Otello stays fairly close to the original, but in further intensifying - as unlikely as that sounds - Iago's evil in giving him a Credo to sing in which he glorifies an "Evil God" who is superior to the God of Christianity, he and Verdi threw the emphasis in a direction somewhat different from that of the drama. What motivates a man to destroy the trust of another man in his wife, to take actions he knows will lead to the murder of an innocent, to betray everyone around him? "Maybe he was abused child," says Richard Clark, with a laugh. "The truth is he evil, period," corrects Clark, one of two singers alternating as Iago in this week's Otello. "Everything's just a bunch of lies to him so he tries to be the best liar." And he succeeds. As in the play, he is the essence of deceit. And, also as in the play, he is wholly trusted by Othello, when he is the one man Othello should not trust. The theme of apparent honesty masking real treachery shows up again in King Lear, another Shakespeare drama Verdi wished to set to music, but one he never got around to completing. To lie in the deepest sense is never to be yourself, and Iago is indeed, in this sense, a selfless man. He is an obsequious servant before Desdemona, a devoted friend in front of 0tello, just one-of-the-guys with Cassio. Of course they all die as a result of his "selflessness." Clark finds this duplicity reflected in the score: "When he's trying to be slick with everybody his music is sweet. But the Credo is ugly music. I try to convey the ugliness in the words and music as much as possible." Clark finds it significant that Iago professes no belief in a hereafter. "Theres nothing after death," Clark says of Iago's belief system, "so he's got nothing to lose." Adib Fazah, the second Iago of Arizona Opera's Otello, reads another, earlier line of Iago's as fundamental to his character. "He sings 'Io non sono che un critico,' meaning, 'I am nothing if not a critic,'" Fazah points out. Uttered early in the opera, this line, like the Credo, is strictly Boito's. This somewhat narrows the operatic Boito from the dramatic one. Because Shakespeare's Iago has complex motivations, there have been all sorts of Iagos on the dramatic stage and screen. Christopher Plummer's, in the early 1980s, wickedly went about suggesting unrequited sexual desire for Othello as a root of Iago's hatred. Kenneth Branagh's in the recent film seemed all business, chasing the money and almost nonchalantly perpetrating evil along the way. Jealousy and greed are certainly part of the Shakespeare Iago, but the operatic Iago is pure envy. The critical mentality, taken to its extreme, is envy. It curses something because it is not that thing. That is the definition of the Boito/Verdi Iago. He doesn't want Othello personally, and he doesn't really want his power, either. He simply wants to destroy Othello because Othello is something he can never be. "I don't think he really has any redeeming qualities," says Fazah of Iago. The reduction of lines from Shakespeare's 3,500 to Boito's 800 - it takes much longer to sing something than to say it - means that this irredeemable hatred is concentrated in a very few, potent words. Mihailo Markovic, who gives lectures as part of Arizona Opera's education series, points out that Verdi chose as his first Iago in 1887 a man known for his acting skills at least as much as for his singing: Victor Maurel. (At 2 p.m. today in the Phoenix Central Library, Markovic will present a free lecture on Otello that will include recordings made by both Maurel and the original Otello, Francesco Tamagno.) Fazah confirms the dramatic demands made on the singer who essays Iago: "It is such a drama, it contains such tension, that there is little time between some of the outbursts, and little time to change from one expression to another. You're constantly thinking and concentrating so as to be alive and forceful to the audience." Fazah will sing Iago Thursday and Saturday, with Clark performing the role Friday and Sunday.
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