Gregory Kunde as Otello and Ermonela Jaho as Desdemona, photo by Catherine Ashmore
Moor is Less
Otello, dramma lirico in four acts, music by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto by Arrigo Boito, revival of the 2017 production directed by Keith Warner, Royal Opera House, Monday 9 December 2019, reviewed by Leslie Jones
In ‘Making Shakespeare Sing’, American composer Matthew Aucoin considers the ‘fraught alchemy’ whereby a play is turned into an opera. Some elements, as he observes, “will shrink or evaporate, others are magnified to unrecognisable dimensions”. For Aucoin, Verdi’s Otello is that “exceedingly rare breed…a masterpiece based on a masterpiece”.
When we consider Otello in conjunction with its source, “…what is gained and what is lost” becomes apparent .” (New York Review of Books, Dec 19, 2019, vol. LXVI, number 20). Although Verdi’s librettist Arrigo Boito generally kept to Shakespeare’s plot, the opera only commences when Otello arrives in Cyprus, after a storm. Act 1 of Shakespeare’s play is elided and significant contextual material concerning Venetian mores is thereby lost. Continue reading
Vasilli Grossman, Pilgrim and Prophet
Vasilii Grossman, 1945
Vasilii Grossman, Pilgrim and Prophet
Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations (Jeremiah: 1:5)
Editorial note: over the weekend of the 30th November – 1st December 2019, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a two-part adaptation of Vasilii Grossman’s novel For a Just Cause based on a translated version which was published earlier this year under the title of Stalingrad. Historian Frank Ellis, a regular contributor to the Quarterly Review, author of the first English-language and pioneering study of Grossman (Vasiliy Grossman: The Genesis and Evolution of a Russian Heretic, 1994), will be reviewing both the translation and radio adaptation of For a Just Cause in due course. Meanwhile, as a tribute to one of Russia’s greatest writers, we publish Dr Frank Ellis’s review of the BBC’s earlier adaption of Grossman’s Life and Fate which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 over the period of the 18th September 2011 – 25th September 2011.
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Having completed Life and Fate (1980 & 1988) in 1960, Vasilii Grossman naively believed that a novel in which he had freely drawn parallels between National-Socialist Germany and the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Soviet Union could actually be published in the post-Stalin state. Whereas Grossman and his earlier novel, For a Just Cause (1952) had been subjected to a well organised campaign of public vilification in the state-controlled media, ten years later, Soviet functionaries moved against Grossman with stealth and secrecy. Three KGB officers were dispatched to arrest the novel and to seize all copies of the manuscript. Grossman tried everything to secure its release from the clutches of the KGB. He wrote a personal appeal to Khrushchev and in a meeting with Mikhail Suslov, the Communist Party’s chief ideologue, Grossman was informed that publication of Life and Fate was out of the question; that it was a far more dangerous book than Boris Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago (1957). Publication, Grossman was told, might be possible in another two hundred years or so. At least one copy of the manuscript did escape the clutches of the KGB. Smuggled out of the Soviet Union, this Russian text was published in Switzerland in 1980. Eight years later, marking the high point of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign, the first Soviet edition of Life and Fate was published. A year later, Grossman’s freedom essay, Everything Flows (1970 & 1989), the demolition of the Lenin cult, was also published in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately Grossman did not live to experience his rehabilitation. Three years after the arrest of Life and Fate, with no obvious hope that the novel would be returned to him or ever published, Grossman, a Soviet unperson, died. Continue reading →
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