Getting To Know Verdi’s Otello

January 9, 2021September 23, 2020 by Reynolds

A Night at the Opera continues with Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, based on Shakespeare’s classic play Othello.

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 at 8 p.m. Eastern

The webinar is free but advance registration is required.

Verdi had already achieved enormous popularity through his operas when in his 60s he seemed to lose enthusiasm for writing. His publisher got Verdi’s attention with the idea of taking on Shakespeare’s Othello with librettist Arrigo Boito. The opera premiered with great success in 1887. Verdi would write one more opera, Falstaff (1893), also based on Shakespeare. Both are staples of the opera repertoire.

And don’t forget our ongoing series of Hymn Workshops and other Webinars.

And Then There's This . . .

Vince Bielski, When Classical Learning Meets Public Education the Dialogue Isn’t Always Socratic. “Classical education, whose name gained traction in the 1980s to evoke the movement’s focus on liberal arts and the Western canon, is struggling to overcome local political opposition.”

Peter Wood, After College: The Coming Cultural Collapse of Higher Education. “Students graduate with a veneer of knowledge rather than a core. An increasingly obsolescent institution has wedded itself to an increasingly noisome cultural stance.”

Anthony Esolen, Heap Songs Upon Their Heads. “We are the most beauty-starved people, I am persuaded, who have ever trod the earth.”

Gregory Wolfe, The Wound of Beauty. “The time has come to bring beauty back, to give it the glass slipper and invite it to the prom.”