Othello Overture, op. 93, B. 174

Othello is the last of the three overtures Dvořák conducted in Prague in April 1892 and published two years later, from New York, as op. 93. It is also the darkest, and the only one whose material comes entirely from the nature theme shared by all three — the same melody that opens In Nature's Realm and passes through Carnival, here turned into something else. Dvořák annotated his own score with the drama's course, scene by scene: the lovers, the doubt, the murder. He did not publish these notes, and the overture works without them. But they explain the shape — why the opening is so still, why the music keeps returning to a calm it can no longer sustain. Of the three overtures this is the one that has stayed in the shadow of the other two. Carnival is easier to programme.