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Otello

A welcome revival of Harry Kupfer’s production
by
ABR Arts 21 February 2022

Otello

A welcome revival of Harry Kupfer’s production
by
ABR Arts 21 February 2022
Marco Vratogna as Iago and Yonghoon Lee as Otello in Opera Australia’s 2022 production of <em>Otello</em> at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Prudence Upton)
Marco Vratogna as Iago and Yonghoon Lee as Otello in Opera Australia’s 2022 production of Otello at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Prudence Upton)

Devotees of Giuseppe Verdi often suggest that the composer’s version of Shakespeare’s Othello is ‘greater’ than the original; a fruitless assertion, but indicative of the esteem in which Verdi’s penultimate opera is held. After Aida (1871), Verdi was enjoying the life of a gentleman farmer. Italian opera of the 1870s and 1880s, however, was facing something of a crisis, threatened by the relentless tide of ‘Wagnerism’, whose theories on opera were embraced by many Italians. Verdi, when asked about his own theory of theatre, drily replied: ‘My theory is that the theatre should be full’.