Edited by Alberto Zedda (1976)
Revised edition based on the original sources | NR 132508
The perfection [of the opera] is in that there is an intrinsecal, fatal logic of facts, and in the way passions, and the one which is prominent among the others, are acknowledged (Boito to Verdi, October 18, 1880).
It may be asked why works close to us in time, like Otello, can still present so many surprises to a critical revision. It is unquestionable that Verdi must bear a large part of the direct responsibility for an edition that is not without defects, such as the score of the opera published by Ricordi in 1887. The autograph in fact is not free of flaws: however well edited and rich in performance markings, approximations and contradictions are found, particularly as regards articulation, that is to say slurs and phrasing. Oversights are few as are material errors of notes and accidentals; dynamics abound, even if not always consistent among themselves. Some signs, especially accents and staccatos, frequently imply the need to extend them to analogous patterns.
Otello should pay so little heed to the rules applying to orchestral scores in writing down music, and how a composer who had been able to travel so long a road towards professionalism and the perfection of a complex and refined musical discourse should not have been able to throw off a certain haste from his ‘galley years’ typical of one who had had to compose, orchestrate, prepare and conduct an opera in the brief span of a few weeks.
Incredible as it may seem, the score of Otello was the first opera of Verdi’s to have known the privilege of regular publication. This primogeniture certainly was of little help to the text of Otello: neither Ricordi nor Verdi was familiar with the problems (different for every composer) posed by the transition from manuscript to print. Other scores published in the following years turned out otherwise to be quite faithful to the autograph. Inexperience was probably responsible also for Verdi’s lack of care in revising and correcting the score.
Another reason can be perceived in the technical level of the orchestras that the composer was called upon to face. With very few exceptions, those that worked in Italian opera-houses were formed from inferior players, most often amateurs engaged in humble professions for whom service in orchestras represented an opportunity for a second job.
Not even Verdi was able to free himself completely from the influences of a profession carried on for years with workaday means not always capable of keeping pace with the superb intuitions of his irrepressible genius. Even his more thought-out operas need a scholar’s critical and loving mediation in the moment of setting them down on the printed page.
The sources of the revision are as follows:
- the manuscript vocal score of Act 4 prepared by Michele Saladino, which permits the reconstruction of some interesting alterations in the celebrated “Willow song” and which includes numerous annotations in Verdi’s hand;
- a detailed description of the production and stage layout of the first performance of Otello made by Giulio Ricordi, the opera’s publisher;
- a libretto published for the Milan premiere and annotated by the same Giulio Ricordi on the evening of the premiere: this underlines the most successful sections and details the arrangement of the curtain-calls that crowned the evening;
- letters sent to Ricordi between 1879 and 1897 in which Verdi speaks about Otello;
- the autograph score of the ballet composed for·the Paris premiere of 1894, yielding to the practices of the Opéra;
- the autograph score of a second version of the big Act 3 concertato, rewritten for the same occasion and, so far as is known, not performed again elsewhere. This is a complete re-fashioning of the Act 3 finale, from the Largo of bar 752 (from Desdemona’s line “A terra, nel livido fango”) to the “Fuggite, tutti fuggite Otello” that concludes the Act, with characteristics very different from the familiar version. Unfortunately the letters that are known shed no light on the history of this piece, about which we can only advance hypotheses. Verdi, while re-shaping Act 3 in order to insert the ballet, placed immediately after the arrival of the Venetian ambassadors, would have decided also to revise the succeeding concertato. The new finale re-elaborates part of the thematic material of the original version and is shorter (75 bars instead of 96), simplier and more linear. No longer is there found the intricacy of the vocal, as well as the choral, parts that makes the realization of the original so difficult, and Iago’s plots with Otello and with Roderigo stand out more clearly and are thus more intelligible than in the first version. This concertato often suffers a deplorable, conspicuous cut precisely because of the difficulties it presents, a cut that probably was introduced from the first run of the opera. Verdi, aware that not all theatres would be in a position to respect the integrity of the concertato and yet displeased by this cut, which apart from anything else makes a serious gap in the plot (for precisely in these bars Iago plots with Otello and Roderigo the downfall of Cassio), would have taken steps to compose an alternative, simpler section. Since it was sung in French in the Paris performances of Otello, the original version of this second finale is still unpublished.
Alberto Zedda (1976)