Live Streaming of Verdi's Otello

Live Streaming of Verdi’s Otello from the Royal Opera House

I wondered about the techniques used in the live streaming of opera when I wrote about Il Trovatore (February 2017). I felt that close up camera work often did the performers no favours and detracted from the staging – an opera’s audience is supposed to see each part in the context of the whole, as presented by the director, set designer and choreographer on the stage.

Viewing the streaming of Otello changed my mind – at least so far as Otello is concerned. This must be one of the most cinematically apt of operas. The camera team is completely justified in concentrating on the emotions and inner dialogues (obviously sung out; it’s opera…) of the principals, using close up framing as emphasis.

The effect is very powerful. Otello is a relentless and focussed portrayal of malice, psychological disintegration and despairing innocence, all the more pitiable because of the pride and tenderness which pervades the story’s beginning.

There are no fantastical contrivances or other-worldly beings. It is a truly human opera, but one that leaves its audience devastated. A tragedy indeed, in the classic sense, of a great man destroyed by a flaw.

And yet… there is a ghastliness about the particular flaw which does for Otello; for first it does for Desdemona – to death.

Iago (portrayed in Otello as evil incarnate) successfully converts Otello’s mind from suspicion to raging jealousy. But it is Otello himself, who once he has been duped into certainty of Desdemona’s guilt, sets his purpose implacably on the killing of her. He does not doubt that she must die. This adds horror and repulsion to tragedy.

We are witnessing an honour killing; or a man that has an implacable conviction that an unfaithful partner “has it coming” and that he is entitled to hunt her to death.

A modern audience’s sympathies (I hope) part company with Otello, and are replaced with horror and disgust.

I found that the music largely melds seamlessly with the emotions being expressed. I was not much conscious of “tunes”, except in the case of a couple of Desdemona’s sorrowful arias towards the end.

Voices and music project concrete human emotions, not the sublime (whatever that might be), and it these that one experiences with the fullest of force.

July 2017