Un bacio un bacio ancora

Legendary tenor Placido Domingo and the divine soprano Kiri Te Kanawa sings Otello’s Love Duet at Royal Opera House in 1992.

Otello begins the duet by singing an extended melody to the text Già nella notte densa s'estingue ogni clamor (Already in the dark night, every sound is silenced). The melody is through-composed, having no interior repetition of melodic content or sequencing of any kind. Desdemona's response to Otello's lines begins at Mio superbo guerrier! (My superb warrior!). This is, in fact, a new melody: it is not a continuation of Otello's phrases, nor a variation on them. At the text Oh! com è dolce il mormorare insieme (Oh! how sweet it is to murmur together), it seems that another melodic idea is introduced, only to be interrupted by te ne rammenti? (do you remember?). Yet another melodic idea appears at Quando narravi l'esule tua vita (When you told me of your life of exile), again seemingly not related to anything that comes before it. The duet continues in this melodic 'patchwork' way until the climax of the duet, the statement of the "bacio" theme at the end when Otello sings Un bacio…un bacio…ancora un bacio (A kiss…a kiss…again a kiss.)😭

A short coda follows.

Compare the structure of this duet with duets from any of Verdi's earlier operas and you will hear an immediate difference. No repetition is involved, no sense of discrete sections that recur (like a refrain), nor is any variation technique applied to the melodic material. This is quite unlike Verdi's past efforts and far beyond the techniques of earlier Italian operatic composers. Dare we say it? It is almost…Wagnerian! Verdi was not ignorant of the music being created by his most famous contemporary; in fact he was quite taken with Wagner's Lohengrin which he saw in Bologna in the 1870s. In sheer technical terms, Verdi's through-composed style for Otello is similar to Wagner's 'uninterrupted melody', but in terms of sheer sound the two techniques are quite dissimilar. Verdi is still an Italian through and through and could never be mistaken for any composer steeped in the symphonic traditions of that parallel universe across the Alps! In fact, what we discover in Verdi's Otello is a technique of constantly interrupted melody, so cleverly crafted that we don't take notice of it and, because it matches the text of the drama so perfectly, we accept it as a naturally progressing melodic flow.



#Otello
#Verdi
#KiriTeKanawa
#PlacidoDomingo
#coventgarden