Arrigo Boito

Poet, critic and composer, Arrigo Boito wrote librettos for Giuseppe Verdi as well as music of his own. Born in Padua and trained at the Milan Conservatory, he joined the Scapigliatura and supplied its polemics in verse. His own Mefistofele failed at La Scala in 1868; he cut it heavily, and the Bologna version of 1875 was successful. Under the anagram Tobia Gorrio he gave Ponchielli the libretto of La Gioconda. His collaboration with Verdi included the revised Simon Boccanegra of 1881 and the librettos of Otello and Falstaff. A second opera of his own, Nerone, occupied him for decades and was left incomplete; Toscanini conducted its premiere at La Scala in 1924, six years after Boito's death. His teacher at the Milan Conservatory was Alberto Mazzucato, and he took the baton himself at the disastrous first night of Mefistofele; Nerone, conceived in the 1860s, was completed after his death by Toscanini together with Vincenzo Tommasini and Antonio Smareglia, while the sketches he made for a Re Lear were never set. He directed the Parma Conservatory on behalf of the ailing Franco Faccio in 1890–1891, and Cambridge gave him an honorary doctorate in music in 1893.