Great Maestros of the Human Heart

Larry Wolff attends the October 2025 Parma Verdi Festival to write about ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Otello,’ and ‘Falstaff.’

By Larry WolffJanuary 17, 2026

• Music

IN THE ANNALS of genius encountering genius, there is nothing quite like the spiritual meeting across three centuries of Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest Italian composer of Romantic opera, and William Shakespeare, the supreme dramatist of the English Renaissance. “Ah, Shakespeare, Shakespeare!” Verdi once exclaimed. “The great maestro of the human heart.” As a young composer, Verdi boldly reimagined 19th-century opera with Macbeth in 1847, and four decades later, in his very last operas, he tackled Otello in 1887 and then Falstaff in 1893, rethinking the fundamental issues of his own musical career in these capstone masterpieces. Italy’s most important Verdi festival, happening annually in the composer’s native region of Parma around his birthday on October 10, celebrated its 25th festival year by programming all three of Verdi’s Shakespeare operas.

Macbeth was produced in 2025 in the tiny 300-seat jewel box Teatro Verdi in Verdi’s hometown of Busseto. Containing Macbeth, both dramatically and acoustically, in such a small space was electrifying, with some of the haunting claustrophobia that we associate with Poe, who was writing his classic horror stories in the 1840s, the decade the opera was first staged. “Horrore” and “terrore” are the repeated musical exclamations, with Verdi rendering Shakespeare’s scenario “Romantic” by stressing the horror in the political and psychological drama, from the opening bars of uncanny phrasing from the oboe, clarinet, and bassoon. “The roles of this opera are three, and can only be three: Lady Macbeth, Macbeth—and the chorus of witches,” Verdi later explained. “The witches dominate the drama; everything derives from them.”

Shakespeare cast boys in women’s roles and limited himself to three principal witches, but Verdi expanded the witches into a full female chorus that both witnesses and stokes Macbeth’s political ambition and psychological collapse. Shakespeare was often interested in a metatheatrical play-within-the-play, and the witches, who actually present a pageant of the future to Macbeth, are in some sense producing the drama of his rise and fall. At Busseto, they were a silent presence even in scenes where they did not sing, projecting King Duncan’s fatal processional entrance into Macbeth’s castle as a magic lantern show. Furthermore, Lady Macbeth at her first appearance, robed in black, was herself clearly one of the witches, staging Macbeth’s political ascent. Verdi characterized her as the opera’s “dominating demon.”

The Italians adopted Shakespeare as their own from the 19th century onward, with the classic translations by Giulio Carcano published in the 1840s. And Italians continue to feel that Shakespeare belongs to them—because so many of the plays have Italian settings and sources. Macbeth is set in Scotland, but Verdi’s opera was prepared in 1847 for a premiere in Florence, where Macbeth would certainly have been understood in relation to the great Florentine Machiavelli, whose ideas about princes as self-made men—boldly seizing power and unscrupulously maintaining it—belonged to Shakespeare’s Renaissance era. Verdi’s Macbeth brought Machiavelli home to Florence, with the un-Machiavellian twist of a prince who was haunted and emotionally undermined by the murders that paved his way to power. The opera also features a chorus about the “patria oppressa,” the oppressed fatherland, that went well beyond what either Machiavelli or Shakespeare might have imagined, for Verdi was composing in the age of modern nationalism; even when imagining Scotland, he was channeling Italian national sentiment for a peninsula that lay divided into fragmented principalities and was dominated by foreign powers.

The subject of the “Patria oppressa” was important enough to Verdi that he composed the chorus twice, a stirring anthem for the original 1847 version (as performed this year in Parma) and then again, more hushed and haunting, when he revised the opera for Paris in 1865. It is worth noting that when Verdi revised Macbeth in 1865, he was working in the political context of the wars of Italian unification and the American Civil War. (The American historian Garry Wills, best known for 1992’s Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, also published Verdi’s Shakespeare: Men of the Theater in 2011.) For much of his career, Verdi even contemplated—but never composed—an opera on the utter devastation of a Shakespearean kingdom: Re Lear.

“Bleed, bleed, poor country!” exclaims Shakespeare’s Macduff, while Verdi gave this sentiment the modern choral form of oppressed Italian nationhood. In 2025, the “Patria oppressa” chorus took on new meanings, when the oppressed nation could have referenced embattled Ukrainians—who, at that moment, faced Russian missiles and drones attacking apartment buildings, railway trains, and power grids—or the oppressed Palestinian civilians of Gaza, under Israeli assault, confronting increasingly catastrophic conditions. As Macbeth was being performed in Busseto the evening of October 3, Italian labor unions began a 24-hour general strike in response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. There were huge processional protests in Italian cities, causing political controversy and leading to the cancellation of Verdi’s Falstaff in Parma on October 4, due to the absence of the electrical and technical teams needed to prepare the house. Shakespeare’s and Verdi’s Falstaff is such a marvelous monster of self-satisfaction, enormous appetite, and endless lechery that he might have been “canceled” at any moment during these recent years, so there was some irony in seeing the gargantuan knight—who proudly declares his paunch to be his kingdom—canceled on account of Gaza. In fact, even as Falstaff was being scrubbed, Israel and Hamas were getting ready to accept President Trump’s peace terms for Gaza, paving the way for a ceasefire. Shakespeare’s study of tyranny in Macbeth and Verdi’s lament for oppressed peoples continue to resonate in new ways in a world where law and legitimacy seem increasingly insecure.

For Verdi, adapting Shakespeare involved breaking down the conventional aria forms of opera and replacing them with something a little more like sung declamation, as in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. The brutality of the Macbeths preoccupied Verdi when he thought about casting the roles in 1847, and he stipulated that he did not want singers who would sing beautifully. Rejecting the soprano Eugenia Tadolini, Verdi wrote,

Tadolini has a beautiful and attractive appearance, and I would like Lady to be ugly and evil. Tadolini sings to perfection, and I would like Lady not to sing. Tadolini has a stupendous voice, clear, limpid, powerful, and I would like Lady to have a harsh, stifled, and hollow voice. Tadolini’s voice has an angelic quality. I would like Lady’s voice to have a diabolical quality.

Verdi again and again uses the word “cupa”—dark, hollow, bleak—for the vocal parts of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and he often stipulates that he wants them singing “sotto voce,” as if whispering in the dark. In Parma, soprano Maria Cristina Bellantuono opted for a daringly unbeautiful performance; in the aria of the first act, when she conjured demons with fierce bel canto ornamentation—“Or tutti sorgete, ministri infernali”—she sang with an incantatory hypnotic quality but also, at moments, with a disturbing shrillness of tone.

Baritone Vito Priante as Macbeth gave particular attention to the variation of dynamics in his role, from hushed whispers to horrified exclamations, crucial to Verdi’s declamatory setting of the libretto, as adapted from Shakespeare by Francesco Maria Piave. The claustrophobic quality of the performance emphasized Macbeth’s own psychological distress: his tormented insecurities, fears of retribution, and pangs of conscience were represented not only in his vocal line but also in the uncanny effects of the orchestra, conducted by Francesco Lanzillotta. After murdering Duncan offstage, Macbeth returns, and the orchestra stops altogether so that he can enunciate the six syllables “Tutto è finito” (“everything is finished”), all on a monotone middle C, except for the penultimate syllable, which barely rises half a tone to a sustained D-flat before subsiding to C again. Verdi specifies “con voce soffocata” (“with a suffocated voice”)—as if it were Macbeth himself who had been murdered.

Decades later, in the 1880s with Otello and the 1890s with Falstaff, Shakespeare offered a now-venerable Verdi the inspiration to rethink the operatic premises of his own towering success. Verdi had thought he would finish composing operas with Aida, which had its premiere in Cairo in 1871 after originally being commissioned to mark the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, but in the 1880s, the charismatic poet Arrigo Boito, himself a composer, tempted Verdi out of his semiretirement with Shakespeare as bait—“for the joy of seeing you take up your pen again for my sake, for the glory of being your collaborator, for the ambition of hearing my name coupled with yours, and both our names with Shakespeare’s,” Boito wrote to Verdi in 1884. Boito created libretti for both Otello and Falstaff, Verdi’s last tragedy and his first comedy in 50 years, neither of them really recognizable as a conventional 19th-century Italian opera. Otello in particular moved in the modernist direction of Wagnerian musical drama, while the modernism of Falstaff lies in its recovery of the older forms of Mozartean and Rossinian opera buffa, concluding with a neobaroque choral-fugue setting of the lyric “Tutto nel mondo è burla” (“Everything in the world is a joke”). Oddly, the Milan premieres of Otello in 1887 and Falstaff in 1893 both starred the same French baritone, Victor Maurel, who dominated the stage in the radically different roles of Falstaff and Iago. Verdi, who was born in 1813 as a subject of the Napoleonic empire in Italy, presented Otello and Falstaff in the age of light bulbs, telephones, and early automobiles, and we actually have phonograph recordings of Maurel singing a three-minute excerpt as Iago (definitely not an aria), just the length to fit on one side of a very early 78 rpm Victrola record.

Even more than the witches in Macbeth, Shakespeare’s Iago stands in for the playwright, in the sense that he craftily stages the whole drama of Othello’s downfall and his manipulation of the other characters offers a sort of metatheatrical tribute to Shakespeare’s own dramatic ingenuity. Boito also provided a text quite alien to Shakespeare, in which Iago is allowed to soliloquize in his “Credo”—an anti-Christian anthem that begins with his roaring out his belief in a “cruel god” and ends by bringing the music to a full stop as he declares that after death there is nothing. Shakespeare’s scheming Jacobean villain becomes for a moment a modern Nietzschean moral nihilist. In Parma in 2025, at the Teatro Regio, the role of Iago was sung by a rising star, the young Mongolian baritone Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar, who, having begun his training in Ulaanbaatar, now showed himself a master not only of idiomatic Italian vocal style but also of every subtle shift in Iago’s intrigue and the unusually varied dynamics that Verdi brought into play. As Iago recounted to Otello the (false) story of Cassio’s sexual dream of Desdemona—“Era la notte”—Roberto Abbado, the renowned Italian conductor, was totally focused on the soloist Ganbaatar, guiding him phrase by phrase through the musical moods of Iago’s insinuating falsity, the villain almost whispering “sotto voce.” This was, in fact, the excerpt that Maurel recorded in 1904, and it was thrilling in 2025 to watch a great conductor focus on a young singer taking on one of the most challenging baritone roles in the operatic repertory.

The role of Otello is hardly less challenging, with its exclamations, rages, and agonies of jealousy punishing the tenor voice in its upper reaches. In Parma, the company went through three tenors in three performances: Italian Fabio Sartori, then Azeri Yusif Eyvazov, and finally American Brian Jagde. Beauty of tone is most important in the first-act love duet, introduced by gorgeous cello lines, with Desdemona and Otello trading phrases, and Verdi finding the perfect ascending melodic line for Shakespeare’s framing of the romance: “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them.” In the following acts, however, Otello writhes and howls, and Eyvazov actually delivered some of his third-act lines in Sprechstimme, the musically notated speech that would not be invented by Arnold Schoenberg until 25 years after the Otello premiere. Desdemona, by contrast, sings with angelic lyrical purity, the mark of a clear conscience, from beginning to end, right up to the final act (which Verdi almost dedicated to her), with the marvelously poignant “Willow Song”—introduced and accompanied by the pathos of the English horn—and the exquisite “Ave Maria” as she anticipates her own murder. Italian soprano Mariangela Sicilia was perfect for this role in Parma: she had the vocal power, when she needed it, to rise above the entire ensemble and chorus at the end of the third act, kneeling in a red sequined gown, after Otello has humiliated her in the presence of the Venetian envoys.

Verdi’s Otello was conceived on the premise that this is a Venetian-Italian story, with a cast of Italian characters and one North African immigrant: il Moro, the Moor. Race plays little explicit role in the libretto, though it is true that Verdi and Boito nicknamed the whole project “Il Cioccolato,” and the opera’s premiere in 1887 did coincide with the Italo-Ethiopian colonial war. While it would be rare nowadays to perform Otello (or Othello) in blackface, the notion of him as a North African Moor registers powerfully in the current Italian context, where illegal immigration across the Mediterranean from Africa is a deeply polarizing political issue. Iago’s baiting, misleading, gaslighting, and undermining of Otello now suggests a particular contemporary nastiness.

Verdi fully appreciated that Shakespeare’s Othello was not merely about the destruction of a marriage but rather about the undermining of a public official in his public role, to the point that he is unable to control himself even in front of the Venetian envoys. When Otello then lies prostrate, Iago mocks him and relishes his public abasement, the triumph of the cruel god. Yet Verdi’s Falstaff, even in the context of comedy, rejects moral values almost as vehemently as Iago. Boito creatively transposed into the libretto, based on the play The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff’s monologue from Henry IV, Part 1: “What is honour? A word.” Verdi abjures the traditional aria form once again in Falstaff, in the process creating a magnificent orchestral accompaniment for the declamation of the monologue, and enjoying the Shakespearean spirit to the point of adding: “Can honor fill your stomach?” The emptiness of honor for Falstaff is clearly related to Iago’s belief in a cruel god and the nothingness of death, and both roles were created by Maurel on the same La Scala stage, marking the end of Verdi’s career with his final Shakespearean masterpieces.

Falstaff is a comical rascal and Iago a tragic villain, and Verdi, setting them to music, brought them both almost to the threshold of the 20th century. Alongside the third Verdian-Shakespearean baritone, Macbeth, they create outrageous havoc while mocking and undermining the values of their respective societies. Verdi lavished attention on extraordinary baritone roles throughout his career, but, paradoxically, the baritone range stands closest to the typical human male singing in the shower, with neither the profound depths of the basso nor the heroic strain of the tenor high notes. In Parma in 2025, at a moment of extreme international catastrophe and fierce Italian political polarization, Verdi and Shakespeare spoke to each other once again, and to all of us, across the centuries.

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Featured image: Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar as Iago, from Otello, Festival Verdi 2025, Parma, Italy. Photo by Roberto Ricci.