Among operas devoted to the subject of jealousy, Giuseppi Verdi’s Otello (1887), based on Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, The Moor of Venice (1604), is surely the best known and loved. Almost 300 years after Shakespeare, Verdi interpreted the feelings of the protagonists in his music, in a way that reveals for all times his great love of humanity and his modern psychological understanding of its problems. From the Verdi celebration year 2001 comes a spectacular production by the Berliner Staatsoper Under den Linden, in which Daniel Barenboim directs his state opera orchestra and a young ensemble of singers (including Christian Franz as Otello and Emily Magy as Desdemona). Jürgen Flimm’s staging favours the post-modern architecture familiar to ordinary people in our contemporary world.