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Updated: June 1, 2025
It has been reported that he is at work upon a new opera, "Othello," the words by Arrigo Boito, the composer of "Mephistopheles;" but nothing more than the report has been heard from it during the past three or four years. The great melodist now spends a very quiet life as a country gentleman upon his estates near Busseto.
Boito thinks like a symphonist, and his purpose is profoundly poetical, but its appreciation asks more than the ordinary opera-goer is willing or able to give. Bayard Taylor's Translation. "Mefistofele" had its first performance in New York at the Academy of Music on November 24, 1880. Mlle.
Although 'Mefistofele' is unsatisfactory as a whole, the extraordinary beauty of several single scenes ought to secure for it such immortality as the stage has to offer. Boito is most happily inspired by Margaret, and the two scenes in which she appears are masterpieces of beauty and pathos. In the garden scene he has caught the ineffable simplicity of her character with astonishing success.
This notion, equally convenient to an indolent man or a colossal egoist I do not believe that Boito is either has been nurtured by many pretty stories; but, unhappily, we have had nothing to help us to form an opinion of Boito as a creative artist since "Mefistofele" appeared, except the opera books written for Verdi and Ponchielli and the libretto of "Ero e Leandro."
He studied Wagner's music also very closely, and to such purpose that after the first performance of this opera at La Scala, in 1868, the critics called him the Italian Wagner, and, in common with the public, condemned both him and his work. After Wagner's "Lohengrin" had been produced in Italy and met with success, Boito saw his opportunity to once more bring out his work.
It is well known that Boïto, Ponchielli, and Verdi in his latest operas, approximate the German style; and their admirers will doubtless ere long adapt their taste to this change. Nevertheless, there are not a few remaining who look upon opera as a sort of vocal acrobatics.
Un uom ti si prosterna Innamorato al suolo Volgi ver me la cruna Di tua pupilla bruna, Vaga come la luna, Ardente come il sole. "Here," says Boito, "is a myth both beautiful and deep.
Of course, if Berlioz had wanted to make an opera out of Goethe's drama, he could have done so. He would then have anticipated Gounod and Boito and, possibly, have achieved one of those popular successes for which he hungered. When the Faust subject first seized upon his imagination, he knew it only in a prose translation of Goethe's poem made by Gerald de Nerval.
In the Ride to Hell, which concludes Berlioz's "Damnation de Faust," the infernal horsemen are greeted with shouts in a language which the mystical Swedenborg says is the speech of the lower regions. Boito also uses an infernal vocabulary. His witches screech "Saboe har Sabbah!" on the authority of Le Loyer's "Les Spectres."
Here Boito borrows a poetical conceit from Goethe's scene in the witches' kitchen, and makes it a vehicle for a further exposition of the character and philosophy of the devil. Mefistofele has seated himself upon a rocky throne and been vested with the robe and symbols of state by the witches. Lo, here is the world!
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