Music History Monday: What to Do About Otello?

Okay, I will fess up: I used to teach a graduate seminar on Verdi’s Otello at the San Francisco Conservatory in the 1990s and I did require my students to watch Olivier’s brilliant performance as Othello – filmed in 1965 - during the first week of the class. Opera is drama set to music, and to my mind nothing can prepare someone better for an exploration of Verdi’s (and Arrigo Boito’s) Italian-language adaptation of Othello better than watching Shakespeare’s English language original. So thought the Chinese-born American composer, pianist, conductor, and Macarthur Foundation Fellow Bright Sheng (born 1955). (A necessary acknowledgment: I know Bright; he is a fine man and a wonderful composer; we stay in touch as Facebook friends.) A member of the music faculty at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor since 1995, in September of this year, Sheng began a class about adapting literary texts into opera by playing Laurence Olivier’s 1965 performance of Shakespeare’s Othello. Instant firestorm.… See the full transcript on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/posts/59275087 See Robert Greenberg Courses On Sale Now at https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/sale/

Om Podcasten

Exploring Music History with Professor Robert Greenberg one Monday at a time. Every Monday Robert Greenberg explores some timely, perhaps intriguing and even, if we are lucky, salacious chunk of musical information relevant to that date, or to … whatever. If on (rare) occasion these features appear a tad irreverent, well, that’s okay: we would do well to remember that cultural icons do not create and make music but rather, people do, and people can do and say the darndest things.