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

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