Arrigo Boito

Arrigo Boito, born in Padua in 1842, was that rare figure who shaped Italian opera from both sides of the footlights, as composer and as poet. In his youth he belonged to the Scapigliatura, the bohemian Milanese avant-garde that wanted to drag Italian art toward German and northern models, and he made his name as a fierce polemicist against the complacency of Italian opera. Yet his own creative life was dominated by a single, decades-long obsession: Goethe’s Faust, which he turned into his opera Mefistofele (premiered disastrously at La Scala in 1868, then revised into lasting success in 1875). A further opera, Nerone, occupied him for decades and was left unfinished at his death. Boito’s most enduring legacy, however, may be as a librettist: his literary brilliance and deep Shakespearean knowledge made possible the two crowning masterpieces of Verdi’s old age, Otello and Falstaff, for which he wrote the texts. He died in Milan in 1918, equally honoured as composer and as the man who coaxed Verdi back to the stage.