IN DEFENSE OF ‘OTELLO’

How surprising that in Los Angeles, capital of world cinema, instead of sending a film critic to review my screen version of “Otello” your paper chose to offer the opinions of a music critic who operates in a city without an opera house and who, presumably in consequences, shows scant knowledge of Verdi’s work (Sept. 19, by Martin Bernheimer).

This gentleman describes the dance music I have interpolated in the film as “vulgar, stylisticly jolting,” but this was music composed for “Otello” by Verdi himself in 1897. It was the last music he ever wrote, yet it is still full of vitality and style.

Your clearly provincial critic further implies that cutting Verdi’s score to meet the needs of cinema is somehow uniquely wrong.

Anyone who works in, as opposed to those who have merely a third-hand knowledge of, opera knows that stage productions often involve cuts and adaptations.

In his lifetime, Verdi rescored his works over and over again to adjust them for particular voices or theaters or to update them when his thinking had changed. I am sure that were he alive today he would be the first to seize the opportunities a new medium offers.

For one thing I must wholeheartedly thank your music critic--his kindness in pointing out that Verdi was “one of the most sublime geniuses in the history of music theater.”

Unfortunately, this is somewhat diminished by the fact that at the same time he reveals a belief in the old Hollywood cliche that the Emperor Nero, presumably played by Peter Ustinov, burned down Rome!

But why should I be surprised at this farrago when your music critic’s most vitriolic opening ploy is to attack me because Verdi’s name is smaller than my own on the publicity material.

Aside from the fact that such material has nothing to do with me, it is worth noting that should your critic one day leave Los Angeles to visit the nearest opera house in San Diego, he would see that every opera bill does the same.

Then again, may I propose that he look at the covers of the records sent to him for review where he will see that Klieber, Bernstein, Karajan are all billed infinitely larger than the composers they are interpreting--to say nothing of Callas, Domingo, Raimondi, etc.

To present me to your readers as the first person to perpetrate this crime would be merely naive were it not just one among many examples of a vicious attempt to attack my film for matters that are not central to the work.

Fortunately, such pettiness will hardly deter the many people who love cinema and music and who will judge for themselves.

Curiously, the final broken barb of this review suggests that my producers tried to keep the music critics out of our screenings.

We certainly did. Not out of any fear of what might be said, but because we thought it natural to try to get what is in its own right a work of cinema reviewed as just that. Given the standard of musical knowledge displayed in this review, why should we have done otherwise?

FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI

Positano, Italy

Times Arts Editor Charles Champlin responds: Occasionally in the past, The Times has run joint reviews of opera films, with film and music critics each commenting on, for example, Ingmar Bergman’s “The Magic Flute” and Joseph Losey’s “Don Giovanni” (arriving in those instances at a fair unanimity of opinion, pro on the Bergman, con on the Losey). More recently, the music critics have at my suggestion delivered solo verdicts on filmed operas, on the grounds that the films are addressed principally, although certainly not exclusively, to knowledgeable opera enthusiasts and so demanded the opera critic’s special expertise. There is no reason to think a music critic cannot view a film as both a musical and cinematic experience.

On some specific points in Zeffirelli’s letter, Bernheimer notes that Verdi composed the ballet music in 1894 expressly for the production at the Paris Opera, intending, as he wrote to his librettist, that it be used nowhere else. To his publisher, he called the ballet “a weak concession . . . artistically speaking, it’s a monstrosity.” The ballet music itself has been edited and reorchestrated for the film, unsatisfactorily to Bernheimer’s ear.

It was not Verdi’s last music. He completed his “Quattro Pezzi Sacri” in 1898.

For the rest, it is in the nature of the criticized and the critic to disagree, and for audiences to reach their own conclusions. Calendar has run letters from those who disagree with Bernheimer about “Otello.”

For the record, Bernheimer, who is hardly ever in town, has in years past enthusiastically reviewed such Zeffirelli stagings as “Falstaff” and “Pagliacci” at the Metropolitan, “Lucia” with Joan Sutherland and “Tosca” with Maria Callas at the Royal Opera in Covent Garden and “Alcina” at the Dallas Opera.