As among modern German music-dramas Tristan and Isolde is the greatest, so is Otello among the lyric dramas of Italy—one might as well include France. Falstaff is their comic pendant as Die Meistersinger is to Tristan. Verdi composed Otello when he was past threescore and ten. The fact seems incredible; in its score seethes the passion of middle manhood, the fervors of a flowering maturity. No one ever dreamed of setting Shakespeare in this royally tragic fashion. Rossini fluted with the theme; in Verdi jealousy, love, envy, hatred, are handled by a master. It is a wonderful opera, and a Shakespearean Verdi began at a time when most men are preparing for death. Reversing natural processes, this phenomenal being wrote younger music the older he grew. After Aïda—Otello! After grim tragedy, joyous comedy—Falstaff! If he had survived ninety years, he might have written a comic opera that would have outpointed in wit and humor Johann Strauss! Otello is a true music-drama; its composer seldom halts to symphonize his events as does Wagner. Boïto, the greatest of librettists, has skeletonized the story; Verdi’s music gives it vitality, grace, contour, brilliancy. And yet the Italian poet has not gravely disturbed the old original. It is but a compliment to his gift of absorbing the Shakespearean spirit to say that Iago’s Credo, that terrific explosion of nihilism and hatred, does not seem out of perspective in the picture. It is Boïto’s intercalation, as are the Cypriote choruses in Act II. All the rest is pure Shakespeare, barring a few happy transpositions from the Senate speech to the duo at the close of Act I. Verdi’s character-drawing is masterly. Do not let us balk at comparisons, or for that matter at superlatives. No composer ever lived—Mozart and Wagner are alone excepted—who could have so drawn the hot-blooded Moor and the cynical cannikin clinker, set them facing each other in the score, and allowed them to work out their own musical fates, as has Verdi. The key to Otello is its characterization—in a musical sense, of course. But the medium in which Verdi bids them move, their fluidity, their humanity—these are the things that almost defy critical analysis. Whether he is listening to his crafty Ancient, or caressing Desdemona, or raging like the hardy Numean lion, it is always Otello, the Moor of Venice, a living, suffering, loving man—Shakespeare’s Otello. The character does not suggest the flashy operatic, the ranter of the footlights. Nor does Iago, whether as the bluff hero of battles and battles, or the loathsome serpent stinging the other’s soul, ever lag dramatically, ever sink into the conventional attitudes of a transpontine melodrama. It is Iago, “the spirit that denies,” underlined perhaps, as music must emphasize ever the current emotions of a character. Desdemona is drawn in relief to her furious lover and warrior, and in relief to her cold-blooded maligner.