Arrigo Boito - Biography

Poet, composer, and writer, born in Padua, NE Italy. He studied at the Milan Conservatory. The brother of architect and writer Camillo Boito, he pursued musical innovation in different fields. In his operas Mefistofele (1868–75) and the unfinished Nerone, he attempted to overcome conventional formulas. In his poetry, which was connected with the scapigliatura movement, words are equated to music, as in Re Orso (1865). As a writer of librettos, he collaborated with Ponchielli (La Gioconda, written under the name Tobia Gorrio) but was at his best with Verdi (Otello, 1887; Falstaff, 1893).

Arrigo Boito (February 24, 1842 – June 10, 1918) was an Italian poet, successful journalist, novelist and composer, best known today for his opera libretti and his own opera, Mefistofele.

Biography

Born in Padua, Boito studied music at the Milan Conservatoire. Boito withdrew the opera from further performances to rework it, and it had a more successful second premiere, in Bologna, April 10, 1875. Other than this work, Boito wrote very little music, completing but later destroying another opera, Ero e Leandro, and leaving incomplete a further opera, Nerone, which he had been working at, on and off, since 1877. As well as writing the libretti for his own operas, Boito wrote them for other composers. His rapprochement with Verdi, whom he had offended in a journalistic piece shortly after they had collaborated on Verdi's Inno delle Nazioni ("Hymn of the Nations", London, 1862), was effected by the music publisher Giulio Ricordi. Boito successfully revised the libretto for Verdi's unwieldy Simon Boccanegra, which premiered to great acclaim in 1881. With that, their mutual friendship and respect blossomed and, though Verdi's projection for an opera based on King Lear never came to anything, Boito provided subtle and resonant libretti for Verdi's last masterpieces, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). When Verdi died, Boito was there at his bedside.

Boito was director of the Parma Conservatoire from 1889 to 1897.