The atmospheric music that opens the final act evokes a lonely melancholy similar to Der Abschied of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
It all amounts to one great and tragic Lacrimosa. The expansive writing for orchestra, chorus and soloists is marked by a disarming transparency that belies the density of its forces. Here Verdi manages to capture the brilliant radiance of Mediterranean courtly pageantry as well as the devastating weight of the public/private grief and bewilderment that have so disabled Otello and Desdemona. The third-act finale is an achievement no less impressive than the great comparable scenes in Aida and Don Carlo. The astonishing speed with which Otello is driven to his erroneous assumption is rendered plausible to the audience only by virtue of the persuasiveness of the music. While it finds its apotheosis in his blasphemous Credo, this little phrase continues to metastasize throughout the body of the drama and proves to be malignant as Otello begins to descend into the anguish brought on by his mistaken jealousy. The second act begins with a “germ motive” of Beethovenian compactness-a four-note turn of a phrase that represents the abject evil of Iago. Just as Gounod twenty years earlier used a cello quartet to symbolize the depth of Roméo and Juliette’s ardor, so Verdi uses the same instrumentation to draw us into the ineffable beauty of Desdemona and Otello’s love. It’s evident in the way in which Iago’s first-act drinking song spirals headlong into the boisterous brawl that rouses Otello’s righteous indignation. There is always a sense of inevitability to Verdi’s musical thrust. It defines who he is and gives luster to the glorious heights from which he so precipitously plummets. Sculpted in the indomitable key of C-sharp Major, his opening “Esultate!” is a phrase of stentorian heroism and nobility. Verdi’s relentless cauldron of sound makes the humans who fight against it seem the weak mortals they are, right up until the moment Otello strides ashore victorious. Nowhere in musical art is nature depicted with more elemental aggression.
The orchestra is the storm that rips open the curtain with titanic fury to begin the opera. The degree to which the music of Otello is symbiotic with its drama cannot be exaggerated.
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