BOITO, ARRIGO. - Musician and man of letters, b. in Padua on 24 Feb. 1842, d. in Milan on 10 June 1918. Of a Venetian father and a Polish mother, he studied at the Conservatory of Milan (1854-62), then traveling to the various countries of northern Europe. He subsequently lived almost always in Milan, where he formed the living flame of that fertile circle of artists known by the name of the "Milanese Scapigliatura" (1862-74), a movement of fervid genius, which was also called the "second Romanticism," or "Lombard Romanticism."
He wrote opera librettos for G. Verdi (Falstaff, Otello, Simon Boccanegra), A. Ponchielli (La Gioconda), F. Faccio (L'Amleto), G. Bottesini and L. Mancinelli (Ero e Leandro); he himself set to music Mefistofele and Nerone. He also left a mediocre Libro di versi, some short stories and various cantatas.
In 1864 he sculpts with a few incisive strokes the code, as he conceived it, of opera in music: "1) the complete obliteration of the formula; 2) the creation of form; 3) the realization of the widest possible tonal and rhythmic development; 4) the supreme incarnation of the drama." In this eventism that seeks to break the bonds of the conventional in order to bring to life on stage the human torment of the dramatic story, he sees melodrama reconstituted in its primordial unity of music and poetry, no longer heard since the Greeks. Indeed, if Mefistofele (1868) is still called an "opera," Nerone (1901) receives the title of "tragedy," more consonant with the criteria of reform enunciated and realized by the author.
A fertile genius, there is alive in his pages, sometimes latent and sometimes manifest, a fervid religious inspiration that often blossoms here and there in accents of intense lyricism. Let us recall, for example, the choruses of the angels and of the penitents, Margaret's prayer in Mefistofele, the Ave Maria in the libretto of Otello, for Verdi's music; the Pater, the Beatitudini and other evangelical passages in Nerone, a work in which the yearning of faith in the fervor of nascent Christianity is most throbbing. However, his religiosity does not seem to go beyond a Romantic sentimentalism.