The chaos of a life without daily beauty

Examining motive in Shakespeare’s "Othello” and in Verdi’s “Otello”

Iago by Edwin Austin Abbey (detail)

Creating a work of art based on another has long been common practice, and, unless the original is to be pointlessly replicated, changes must inevitably be made. This is particularly the case when the medium of the new work is different from that of the original – when, say, plays are transformed into musicals or operas, or novels into films: that which works in one medium does not necessarily work in another. When these changes are such that the new work falls far short of the original, the question “why did they bother?” does legitimately come to mind, but there have also been cases aplenty of the new work equalling or even surpassing the original: virtually all of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, are based on earlier, existing works. And those plays of Shakespeare, themselves adaptations, have subsequently been subjected to all sorts of metamorphoses into all sorts of different forms, with results that have been good, bad, and indifferent. And, occasionally – but only occasionally – magnificent.

For some, Verdi’s opera Otello is an even greater work of art than Shakespeare’s play Othello. I certainly wouldn’t go so far, not because I have any doubts about the magnificence of the opera, but because the play seems to me an unsurpassable masterwork in its own right. But it may be maintained, I think, that Verdi’s Otello (or, rather, the Otello of Verdi and Boito, since the librettist in this instance is no mere adjunct to the creative process) is as great an opera as Othello is a play.

The background to the composition of the opera is intriguing. Verdi revered Shakespeare, and – like Britten after him – had harboured unfulfilled ambitions to compose an opera based on King Lear. Verdi had, some decades earlier, composed an opera based on Macbeth: it’s a quite wonderful work, though, it may perhaps be said without offending Verdians, not really a work that can stand much comparison with the play. For various reasons – mainly, one suspects, because he never came across a librettist who he thought could do justice to such a project – Verdi’s Shakespearean ambitions had remained unfulfilled. But in the early 1880s, all that changed. Verdi was now approaching 70, and was officially retired: Aida, composed some 15 years earlier, had been intended as his farewell to the opera. It is true that after Aida, he had composed the magnificent Requiem Mass – a work of elemental cosmic power – but he appeared to have little interest in composing another work for the stage. At this point, it was suggested that Arrigo Boito collaborate with Verdi in creating a new opera. Verdi was initially somewhat dubious about the proposal: Boito was what is known nowadays as a “Young Turk” – an extravagantly talented but brash young man who had been openly scathing of the Italian arts establishment; and, since Verdi was far and away the most established of all establishment figures in Italy’s artistic landscape, he had taken this criticism personally. Boito, on his part, jumped at the chance of working with Verdi: for all his criticism, he knew genius when he encountered it. But he had to be diplomatic: Verdi was sensitive to the point of being touchy. Indeed, even when their work on their joint project was well under way, Verdi took offence at an interview given by Boito in which he seemed to imply that he would have liked to compose the opera himself (Boito was a gifted composer as well as a gifted poet): Verdi threatened to pull out, and Boito had to employ all his tact to placate his elder colleague. The two men became very close friends over time, but the early stages of their collaboration was not without hitches.

But for all that, the opera was completed by the end of 1886 (when Verdi was seventy-three years old), and the opening performance was a triumph. Perhaps it was the case, given Verdi’s public stature, that whatever he composed would have been enthusiastically received, but the very obvious qualities of this work left no room for doubt: it was clearly a masterpiece. However, its relationship with Shakespeare’s play remains problematic to this day. For many, Verdi and Boito had simply translated the play into an operatic form. I can’t say I agree. The two works are very different, as indeed, they must be, given that a play and an opera are very different forms. But further, it seems to me that Verdi’s and Boito’s conception of the drama was very different in nature from Shakespeare’s. Indeed, Verdi and Boito did with Shakespeare’s material what Shakespeare himself had done with Cinthio’s: they took what they needed from their source to create something that was new, that was their own. The opera is no mere translation.

The very opening of the opera places us in a world somewhat different from that of Shakespeare’s play: we find ourselves immediately in the midst of a storm. Shakespeare’s Othello featured a storm also at this point of the story – although Shakespeare’s storm appears at the start of Act 2, rather than at the opening of the work: Boito and Verdi had dispensed with Shakespeare’s first act, although certain materials from that act are found scattered throughout the opera. But Shakespeare’s storm does not have the astounding violence and elemental quality of the musical storm Verdi unleashes. We seem to be back in the Dies Irae of his Requiem Mass. The orchestra seethes and churns, lashes and pounds us with the most brutal and terrifying power, and the chorus seems suitably struck with awe.

This storm scene sets the emotional temperature of the work. Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn had famously asked for a film that starts with an earthquake and then builds up to a climax, but this is effectively what Verdi gives us: it starts with a storm of preternatural power and intensity, and builds from there. The passions unleashed in this work are so terrifying, so violent, that there are times it seems as if the music will not be able to contain them: they erupt with volcanic power, and sweep all before them.

Otello emerges from this maelstrom of warring elements with the most heroic and commanding of musical lines. This is a man in control even of the elements. But by the time this act finishes, we begin to see cracks. Some half way through this act, Otello emerges to break up a drunken brawl that has broken out: the principal offender is Cassio, whom Iago (Jago in the opera) had deliberately plied with alcohol. This scene occurs in Shakespeare’s play as well. In the play, Othello, purely on the basis of the gravity of Cassio’s transgression, demotes him. And it is only after this demotion that Desdemona appears, disturbed from her slumbers by the brawl. But Boito and Verdi shift the order of events to cast the incident in a somewhat different light: here, Desdemona appears before the demotion, and Otello, seeing her disturbed by the clamour, is furious on her behalf, and demotes Cassio on the spot. The musical line that begins with Otello’s perturbation on Desdemona’s appearance ends with Cassio’s demotion: that the latter is a consequence of the former can hardly be doubted. It is a decision arrived at not by weighing up dispassionately the rights and wrongs of the situation, but made on the spur of the moment. This is not the Otello we had seen emerging so confidently from the tempest.

The first act ends with a long love duet between Otello and Desdemona – amongst the most beautiful music even Verdi had ever written. Boito had initially wanted this to be a trio: he had wanted Jago – the serpent in the garden – observing Otello and Desdemona and commenting upon them. But Verdi had overruled that. However, all is not well even in this serpent-free Eden: towards the end of the duet, Otello, once again, loses control over himself:

Ah! La gioia m’innonda si fieramente
Che ansante mi giaccio…

(Ah! Joy floods my breast so piercingly
That I must lay me down and pant for breath…
– Translation by Avril Bardoni)

Otello does not, it seems, even require the serpent in the garden: he may be in perfect control while leading men into battle, even when battling storms at sea, but in his personal life, he appears dangerously volatile and unstable.

We see further evidence of this in Act Two: even before Jago begins to apply his poison, we witness once again in Otello this volatility, this dangerous lack of control. At this point of the drama, in Shakespeare, Othello is given these lines:

For she had eyes, and chose me. No, Iago,
I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove;
And on the proof, there is no more but this,–
Away at once with love or jealousy!

This is a man confident in himself, and in control. But in Boito’s libretto, that confident assertion (“For she had eyes, and chose me”) is removed; and, while the rest is close enough to Shakespeare’s original, Verdi gives it a musical line bespeaking a passion that is, one might have thought, unwarranted given the immediate dramatic context: it more than hints at the horrors to come. This Otello is already on edge, and is in danger of tipping over even without Jago’s push. And by no stretch of the imagination is this Shakespeare’s Othello.

Jago, too, is different from Iago. The most striking departure comes in a monologue given to Jago at the start of the second act, the “Credo”:

Credo in un Dio crudel
Che m’ha creato simile a sè,
e che nell’ira io nomo…

(I believe in a cruel God
who created me in his image
and whom in fury I name…
– Translation by Avril Bardoni)

There is no equivalent passage in Shakespeare’s play; and, moreover, Shakespeare’s Iago never came close to thinking along such lines. The Iago of Shakespeare’s play has very limited horizons, and is certainly not the master dramatist and genius, or even a sort of stand-in for Shakespeare himself, that certain critics claim he is: he thinks only in the short term (in his soliloquies, we see him literally making things up as he goes along); and he never bothers himself with metaphysical matters. But Verdi’s Jago is very different.

Unlike Shakespeare’s Iago, this Jago thinks about the nature of evil. In his “Credo”, a blasphemous parody of the Credo from the Catholic Mass, he tells us that he believes in a God who is essentially cruel. After all, since God has made Jago in his own image, Jago can, by examining himself, obtain an idea of what kind of being God is. And within himself he can sense “il fango originario” – the primeval slime, that has existed from the beginning of time itself. And since it exists in Jago, who is made in the image of God, it must exist also in God. And so, humanity, all humanity, the creation of this cruel God and created in God’s image, is, must be, by its very nature, evil; and those who think or act otherwise are merely fooling themselves, merely living a lie; and that he, Jago, by accepting this terrible truth and living according to it, is, ironically, being honest.

Jago does not find this easy to accept: this God, who has placed within him the fango originario, he names, as he says, in fury (“e che nell’ira io nomo”). This makes him very different from Shakespeare’s Iago, who doesn’t have the depth or scope of thought even to address such matters, nor even, one suspects, the intensity of emotion to feel fury. In the play, Iago has more lines than any other character, and is on stage longer than any other; and he lets us into his thoughts in considerable detail. And nothing he says indicates any depth either of thought or of feeling. The language he uses throughout is of the plainest, conspicuously lacking even the most rudimentary flight of poetic fancy. Iago has been compared – to my mind, absurdly – to Milton’s Satan, but even a cursory comparison of the magnificence and grandeur of Satan’s language to the relative poverty of Iago’s should be enough to dispel this notion: the consequences of Iago’s evil are immense, but the evil itself has its source in a creature who is small and, frankly, rather pathetic. Hannah Arendt’s famous dictum about the “banality of evil” comes to mind.

This obviously raises the question of why so small a character as Iago commits such overwhelming acts of evil. He gives us two motives – first, that he was overlooked for promotion, and second, he suspects Othello with his own wife – but, as ever, the language he uses does not suggest a man who feels either of these things very strongly. The two different motives seem almost to negate rather than to strengthen each other: it’s almost as if he is searching for a motive – some motive, any motive – to justify a pre-existing hate. It all takes us back to Coleridge’s famous formulation of “motive-hunting of motiveless malignity”. Of course, his hatred of Othello can be seen as a motive in itself, but either we accept this hatred simply as a brute fact, with no explanation possible (in which case, we’re back to Coleridge’s “motiveless malignity”); or we delve further. And when we try to delve further, it is difficult to find a clear answer.

Here, of course, individual interpretations will vary. My own, which I find myself holding on to despite acknowledging the legitimacy of others (some others, at least: by no means all!), is that Iago’s malignancy springs from his sensing a lack in his life of a certain beauty, a certain nobility, that is apparent in the lives of others: his own small mind, he intuits, cannot accommodate such things. He admits as much in one of the most startling moments in the play: speaking of Cassio, he says “He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly”. Since he cannot hope to aspire towards this daily beauty, he must, in his resentment, destroy it. And he must destroy it primarily in Othello, his superior both in social and in military echelons, and also, crucially, in some more intangible hierarchy that Iago vaguely senses, but cannot quite articulate.

And this, it seems to me, is the source of Iago’s hatred. For the play isn’t – despite our modern obsession with the topic – primarily about race; neither is it primarily even about jealousy: both elements play a major part in the drama, but the drama itself seems to me about something more fundamental than either. It is about how we lose our very souls once we lose sight of that something that is beautiful and noble. This something Cassio has in his daily life; Othello also has a vision of it in his love for Desdemona; but Iago knows he does not. And it is not enough for him merely to bring about Othello’s downfall: he must first rob Othello of that glimpse of Heaven, so that, by the end, Othello loses more than just his life.

Othello, from the start, knows what is at stake: it is his very soul:

… Perdition catch my soul

But I do love thee! And when I love thee not,

Chaos is come again.

I can think of no other work that depicts with such gut-wrenching intensity the chaos that overtakes our lives once we lose sight of Heaven.

This seems to me a very different drama from the opera of Verdi and Boito, in which everyone, in some way or other, is mired in the fango originario, wherever its origin may lie. Otello, I think, is certainly mired in this primeval slime; and even Desdemona, towards the start of the great ensemble in Act 3, speaks of being “nel livido fango”. Boito and Verdi, it seems to me, had taken Shakespeare’s play, and had created from it something that, though much the same in outline, is very different where it really matters.

But there is one point where the thematic aspects of the play and of the opera seem to intersect. There is no counterpart in Boito’s libretto of the line “He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly”, but, in Act Three, there is a remarkable passage that lays bare the beauty in Cassio’s life, and the lack of it in Jago’s. It happens when the handkerchief is produced in Act Three. Jago sings some cynical lines to a catchy but trivial little tune; but Cassio, quite unexpectedly, sings at this point the most exquisitely beautiful passage admiring the handkerchief’s handiwork (“Miracolo vago dell’aspo e dell’ago”). The melody is short-lived: it disappears almost as soon as it is heard. In purely dramatic terms, it may be judged superfluous, but it leaves its mark. That which inspires in Jago merely a trivial and cynical little ditty contrasts sharply Cassio’s heartfelt perception of that which is beautiful. This ability to perceive is a mark of the beauty Cassio has in his daily life, that makes Jago ugly. Jago in the opera, unlike Iago in the play, appears not to sense this, but it’s there all the same. Although the play and the opera do seem to me significantly different, moments such as this indicate just how thoroughly Verdi and Boito had absorbed Shakespeare’s work, before going on to express their own artistic vision.

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