Performing Verdi’s Otello in Fin-de-Siècle London

The premiere of Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito’s opera Otello on 5 February 1887 at La Scala, Milan was an event of international significance. The first London performances in July 1889 were given by many of the cast who had participated in the Milan premiere, including Francesco Tamagno as Otello, Victor Maurel as Iago, and the conductor Franco Faccio. This chapter considers the London premiere, arguing that contemporary discussions of subjects such as acting and singing techniques, finance, Wagnerian influence, celebrity, and national versus international style, are all bound up with larger questions of British national identity at the fin-du-siècle. The author also compares the reception of Tamagno’s performance with that of the Polish tenor Jean De Reszke, who took on the part two years later in London. The author contends that debates about these singers’ conceptions of the role recasts an earlier controversy about the relative merits of two of the most famous Victorian Othellos, the Italian Salvini and the British Irving. Shakespeare’s cultural status is, of course, central to all these debates. On the one hand, Victorian commentators on Verdi’s opera assert Shakespeare’s unique and dominant Britishness. On the other hand, the appropriation of the Bard in the ‘foreign’ medium of opera, and by foreign nations and performers, reveals nascent anxieties about the ideological security of Shakespeare, and by implication Britain, in the age of Empire.