Arrigo Boito

1842–1918 · Italian librettist, composer & poet — wrote the libretti for Verdi's Otello and Falstaff

Arrigo Boito (1842–1918) was an Italian poet, composer and critic best remembered as the librettist who gave Giuseppe Verdi the texts for his two late Shakespearean masterpieces, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). A learned man of letters, he reshaped Shakespeare’s comedy into taut Italian verse — and in the process wrote lyrical lines, like Fenton’s aside to Nannetta, that have no direct counterpart in the English plays.

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“When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew”

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