A conversation with stage director Leo Muscato
Bonn Opera’s new production of Verdi’s Otello had a deep emotional impact on me.
Femicide is an issue getting some attention these days but is certainly nothing new: Just go back to Shakespeare’s Othello, who strangles his wife Desdemona out of jealousy.
Whereas the original drama can be said to have racist overtones – Othello, a „moor,“ or swarthy skinned (today we’d say black or brown) man being depicted as hot-tempered, naive and manipulable – the operatic setting by Giuseppe Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito is somewhat less so.
Italian stage director Leo Muscato shows the title character as a man whose failings derive not from his background but from his experience, a man broken by war.
Without changing the substance of the story, Muscato tweaks it a bit: Rather than 16th century Venice, the setting is Cyprus in 1974. Otello is a white man. Desdemona isn’t a sovereign, but a war correspondent. Why this? The director answers these questions himself – for which my deepest thanks go to him.
Rick Fulker: The setting in this production is the war in Cyprus in 1974. Why did you choose this time and place? Or could we just as well see this as somewhere else and at some other time?
For me and my creative team, the 1974 Cyprus war was not so much a historical choice as a visual suggestion. We needed a wartime context that felt closer to us than the 16th century world evoked by Shakespeare’s tragedy and by Verdi and Boito’s opera — something recognizable, yet still coherent with the locations mentioned in the libretto.
What struck us in particular were many photographs of Cypriot women from that time, holding pictures of husbands, sons, and brothers who had gone missing. These were Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot women protesting together, asking for the return of their relatives’ bodies. Looking at them, we realized how familiar they felt: those faces, those clothes, those gestures — they could have been our mothers, our grandmothers!
That image stands in stark contrast to one of the opera’s early choruses, “Victory! Destruction!” where, after Otello announces his triumph, the people — who in our reading are soldiers — celebrate not so much the victory itself, but the annihilation of the enemy, using words that evoke extreme violence, almost a desecration of the dead. It is one of the most disturbing aspects that wars, unfortunately, have never stopped producing.
From there came the idea of setting the story in a concrete, Mediterranean world, architecturally close to southern Italy.
Of course, this was not the only possible choice. There have been — and still are — far more violent and immediate conflicts. But we didn’t want to move too close to the present, because the risk would have been to touch on still-open wounds without truly being able to address them, and to end up seeming superficial. In Otello, war is a background — a “given circumstance.” The core of the opera is a private, brutal story of envy, manipulation, jealousy, possession, and blindness.
Bringing the story closer to our own time allowed us to remain faithful to the deeply realistic nature of Verdi and Boito’s work, which moves away from Shakespeare’s poetic framework and focuses instead on a psychological — almost psychoanalytic — dimension that feels strikingly modern.
Everything unfolds in less than twenty-four hours: a very short time in which a state of shock can cause the mind of a war hero to collapse, making him vulnerable and easily manipulated. And that is precisely where Iago operates: a lucid, calculating, almost demonic presence, comparable, if you like, to figures such as Keyser Söze from the film The Usual Suspects by Bryan Singer.
Apart from the location, are there parallels between the Cyprus war and the storyline of Otello?
No parallelism. It’s all invented.
As is often the case with Shakespeare, the historical settings of his tragedies carry no real historiographical intention — they are frameworks, not reconstructions. The same applies to Verdi and Boito. We followed that principle very closely.
The Cyprus war was, for us, a visual starting point, not a model to replicate. From there, we built an autonomous world that does not aim for naturalism or historical accuracy.
Even the most concrete elements, such as the military uniforms, are entirely invented, both in their design and in their colors. We were not interested in telling that war, but in using its echo to give shape to a story that ultimately remains deeply human and profoundly private.
The character of Desdemona is rather submissive and mainly victimized in the text. In your staging, she’s a photo reporter. Can you explain why she is portrayed this way?
This choice also stems directly from the idea of setting the story in a more recent time. The question was inevitable: if Otello is a military commander leading a militia, who is Desdemona? And what is she doing, in concrete terms, in a war zone?
In this context, the image of a young Venetian woman who runs away from her father for love and follows her husband into a battlefield would feel anachronistic, if not simply unconvincing. It needed to be rethought.
So we imagined Desdemona as someone who lives the war, not someone who experiences it from a distance — someone who can stand beside Otello as an equal, even when speaking about Cassio’s situation.
For a long time we hesitated between making her a military doctor or a war photographer. In the end, we chose the latter: being a witness and a transmitter of what happens on the front line, constantly exposed to suffering without being able to relieve it, seemed to us an even more painful condition.
It makes her more fragile, but also more empathetic — and above all, deeply immersed in the world in which the story unfolds.
Otello is a problematic character: racially different, a stranger and foreigner, naive and choleric, not in control of his feelings. Shakespeare’s version of him is even more negative than the librettist Boito’s – sometimes with racial or even racist undertones. Do you think that Otello’s outsider status is a result of his rage, or maybe the cause of it?
Otello is an extremely complex character. The theme of racism is central in Shakespeare, especially in the Venetian act, which is entirely absent in the opera. But that doesn’t mean it disappears — it remains as a constant pressure, an implicit judgment. Otello lives under a continuous gaze, as if he constantly had to prove more than others that he is worthy.
Verdi and Boito don’t tell us where he comes from, but they show us what he has become: a man who appears integrated, married to a Christian woman, and yet always on edge, always exposed.
Rather than asking whether his condition as an outsider is the cause or the result of his anger, I think the two feed into each other. Otello is fragile precisely because he is forced to control himself at all times — and when that control breaks, the collapse is total.
The task of a director — and of a performer — is not to judge, but to understand. Every character acts from their own sense of truth, even when doing something terrible. That’s where they become human.
In our production, we imagined an Otello who is “broken,” marked by war more than anyone else — not only a witness, but perhaps even a participant in extreme actions. When he arrives, welcomed as a hero, it takes Desdemona only a glance — or a photograph — to realize that something in him has been irreparably damaged.
This is already evident in the love duet: The passion, which might seem archetypal in the collective imagination, is already exhausted. What remains is a hollowed-out man, no longer even capable of kissing the woman he loves.
Nowadays it would be impossible to blackface the main character. Did you try to find some other means to depict him as a member of a discriminated class?
In this context, I chose to work in the opposite direction. Rather than looking for a visual equivalent of racial discrimination, I imagined an Otello who is fully integrated—a charismatic leader, deeply admired and respected by everyone.
Precisely for that reason, when something in him begins to crack, the effect is even more disturbing. There is no mistrust around him, only disbelief. No suspicion, only blind trust. And this makes his fall much more violent.
In this way, the tragedy does not arise from marginalization, but from the collapse of a man everyone believed to be unbreakable — and above all, from the collective inability to recognize the dark side when it reveals itself.
In this sense, the story feels very close to our own reality: a form of violence that often erupts within intimate relationships, in domestic or emotional contexts, where trust is at its highest — and therefore the blindness is even deeper.
Sometimes I see Verdi’s characters as rather static. Rather than developing over a period of time, they quickly reach a certain inner state and then stay there. Do you see the characters in Otello like this? And does this make them easier to stage, or more difficult?
I understand — and partly agree with — the idea of Verdi’s characters as somewhat monolithic, especially in his early works. But when Verdi stays closer to his original sources, the characters become far more layered and complex.
That is the case with Otello. Here, Shakespeare’s material offers an extraordinary depth, which tradition has often flattened into overly simple archetypes. The task today is precisely to free these characters from those rigid forms.
When we place them back into a context we recognize, they stop being symbols and become people again. Many of us — unfortunately — have encountered someone like Iago. And many have felt, at least once, as fragile or naïve as Cassio, capable of ruining everything in a matter of minutes because of a weakness.
That’s where the character opens up. Cassio, for example, becomes far more tragic if we imagine him as someone struggling with a dependency, who gives in at the worst possible moment and is then overwhelmed by something larger than himself. He is no longer a narrative function — he is a human being.
And this does not make the characters easier to stage. It makes them more real — and therefore, inevitably, more complex.
If we lose the human element, what is left?
