Those of you who resent Rossini for shouldering out previous operatic versions of ll barbiere di Siviglia and Guillaume Tell with his own can take some comfort in the fact that he got a taste of his own medicine with Verdi's Otello. Blam.
Well, you know the story of Othello. Or maybe you don't; I feel like it doesn't quite have the cachet of a Hamlet or Macbeth where most people can at least give you a very basic summary. Also, this is substantially different from Shakespeare. You still have the general idea of Iago planting doubts in Othello's mind about his wife Desdemona's fidelity, leading to murder, but a lot of stuff is stripped out. The main thing is that Rodrigo is upset about Othello and Desdemona's secret marriage: HE was supposed to marry her! And also, her dad Elmiro (Brabantio in Shakespeare) wants his daughter to marry him. Iago's deceptions are also much more straightforward: there's an intercepted love letter and that is IT. Also, here Iago is depicted as another spurned lover of Desdemona, which makes his motivations seem much more comprehensible and banal. The ending is pretty funny: Otello has stabbed and killed Desdemona, and then on the other side of the door, everyone's like, hey, Otello, we all discovered Iago's deception! Now he's dead and everyone thinks you're totally great! Now I, Elmiro, am totes cool with you being married to my daughter! Hooray! Aaaaaawk-ward! Anyway, he opens the door so they can see the corpse, then stabs himself. In this production Rodrigo and Elmiro both kick his body as the opera is ending, which seems a little goofy.
There are some great musical moments, as you'd expect. Most of them, I daresay! So when I'm judging this against Rossini's other operas, I kind of have to fall back on the libretto, which really isn't too great, especially in the latter half. There is a lot of Desdemona just mucking around in a fairly non-compelling way. And as much as I like Cecila Bartoli, she look really distractingly too old for this part. And as much as I like John Osborn, he plays the title character in blackface *screeching brake sounds*.
Now, you might say to me: really, man. Are you actually saying this offends you? It's manifestly obvious that there was no malign intent here, and the character being black does play in to the story, so aren't you just virtue signaling, even if you can come up with some reason to be against the decision in the abstract?
And the answer is: no, I don't quite agree with this. True enough: this performance may not be intrinsically offensive, and I'd say that in an ideal world that contained no racism--in which the very concept of racism was alien--there would be no problem with this sort of thing. It would be a neutral act. But we don't live in that world, and even taking into account that blackface may not have the same cultural baggage in Europe as it does in the United States, the best-case scenario--which, honestly, this probably is--is that the audience is get distracted every time they see the character. If he has to be black, cast a black tenor; it's a very good rule of thumb that you don't use blackface unless you're creating a historical depiction of people who used blackface. Harumph.
Well anyway. I will say that that issue wasn't so big that I can't appreciate the opera on its own or not, and I'd say that my final verdict is: eh. I don't think Rossini was capable of writing bad music, but the opera itself as a whole, I can take or leave.
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