Met Opera Will Drop Use of 'Blackface' in Production of OTELLO

The Metropolitan Opera's production of Otello will no longer be performed with its leading character in blackface. The Met released the following statement:

"Although the central character in Otello is a Moor from North Africa, the Met is committed to color-blind casting, which allows the best singers possible to perform any role, regardless of their racial background. Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko is among a small handful of international dramatic tenors who can meet the considerable musical challenges of the role of Otello, one of the most demanding in the entire operatic canon, when sung without amplification on the stage of the world's largest opera house. In recent seasons, Antonenko has sung the role to acclaim at the Royal Opera in London, at the Paris Opera, and with Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and we look forward to his first performances of the role at the Met in Bartlett Sher's season-opening new production. Antonenko will not wear dark makeup in the Met's production."

The Met season opens with Verdi's masterful Otello, inspired by Shakespeare's play and matching it in tragic intensity. Director Bartlett Sher probes the Moor's dramatic downfall with an outstanding cast: tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko plays the doomed Otello; new soprano star Sonya Yoncheva sings Desdemona, Otello's innocent wife and victim; and baritone Željko Lu?i? plays the evil Iago, who masterminds Otello's demise. Dynamic maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts.

Often cited as Italian opera's greatest tragedy, Otello is a miraculous union of music and drama, a masterpiece as profound philosophically as it is thrilling theatrically. Shakespeare's tale of an outsider, a great hero who can't control his jealousy, was carefully molded by the librettist Arrigo Boito into a taut and powerful opera text. Otelloalmost wasn't written: following the success of Aida and his setting of the Requiem mass in the early 1870s, Verdi considered himself retired, and it took Boito and publisher Giulio Ricordi several years to persuade him to take on a major new work.

All six new productions at the Met will be featured in the tenth season of The Met: Live in HD series, which will feature ten transmissions beginning on October 3 with Il Trovatore, starring Anna Netrebkoas Leonora. Netrebko will also make her New York recital debut in a solo concert on the stage of the Met on February 28, 2016.

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