Improving on Shakespeare?: Verdi's Otello

Met Opera Live HD broadcast of Verdi's Otello yesterday had its ups (Renee Fleming is a great Desdemona, beautiful voice and delicate presence), Iago (suitably gruff but also lyrical and conniving), Cassio (a Met star on the rise no doubt), if you could overlook the shortcomings of Botha's Otello - the voice seemed thin and strained (he had missed 3 previous performances with illness, so that may have been a factor), acting very clumsy - and HD is no friend to a nonglamorous presence like Botha: you're better off in the 20th row rather than seeing the sweat pool and the makeup run. In fact, HD will or maybe has changed the way operas are cast and staged - the singers have to look and act the role, not from 100 rows away from from 10 feet away. Even Fleming, great though she is, pushes the line of credibility when you try to imagine her and Botha as a couple of love-struck newlyweds. Anyway, still a great production musically and all the Met production values are there - and a lot of fun to watch the backstage prep in between acts. Otello is a true rarity, an operatic adaptation of Shakespeare that improves, in some aspects, on the original: obviously Desdmenona's great 4th-act scene and the willow song take a small moment in the play - and the strange incident in which Desdemona recalls a servant from her childhood who dies of love (so odd that she even mentions her name - a character we will never meet - but vivid in our minds as Barbara) - Verdi expands on this with amazing beauty - which is the great gift of lyric opera - taking a dramatic moment and opening it emotionally. In other ways, the adaptation is not an improvement: though the opening scene, as the crowd in Cyprus watches Otello's ship arrive in a storm, is exciting and beautiful, but, to gain unity of place, Verdi sacrificed the scenes in Venice - and as a result we never quite get that Otello is completely ill at east with the sly Italians, and that they're a bit contemptuous of him: they knew they had to hire a stud to be their general, but it doesn't mean they have to like him or let him marry their local beauty - still a familiar theme (in war, and in sports). So in the opera, Otello just seems stupid but in Shakespeare he is more subtly played as a general who doesn't understand the cues in the world of civilians.