Verdi's 'Otello' (1887), with a libretto by Arrigo Boito based on Shakespeare's 'Othello,' is not a biblical opera in the way that 'Nabucco' or 'Moses in Egypt' are biblical operas. Yet it contains two of the most theologically charged moments in the operatic repertoire: Iago's 'Credo in un Dio crudel' and Desdemona's 'Ave Maria.' Together, these two pieces create a theological argument about the nature of faith, the distortion of doctrine, and the contest between cynicism and innocent trust that is as precise as anything in Christian moral theology.
Iago's 'Credo' is a deliberate inversion of the Nicene Creed, the foundational statement of Christian faith. Where the Creed begins 'I believe in one God, the Father Almighty,' Iago declares his belief in 'a cruel God who created me in his image and whom in hatred I name.' This parody functions as a theological exposure of what Iago actually is: not a skeptic but a believer - in a malevolent cosmos, in human worthlessness, in the doctrine that evil is the fundamental reality of existence. Boito and Verdi understood that the most dangerous villains are not those who disbelieve in God but those who believe in the wrong kind of God.
The 'Credo' parodies Romans 8:29-30 and Romans 9:11-13 in a grotesque way. Paul's doctrine of divine foreknowledge and election - that God 'predestined' his people to be 'conformed to the image of his Son' - is inverted in Iago's self-presentation as predestined for evil: 'I believe, and I cannot say otherwise, that I am of the stock of worms.' The Calvinist language of election and predestination, transplanted into the mouth of a villain, creates one of opera's most disturbing theological moments. Iago uses the vocabulary of Reformation soteriology to assert that God made him evil, and therefore evil is not his responsibility.
Desdemona's 'Ave Maria' in Act IV is the theological counterpoint. As Iago has parodied Christian doctrine in the service of evil, Desdemona embodies it in the service of innocence. Her prayer draws directly on Luke 1:28 - 'Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you' - the angel's greeting to Mary at the Annunciation. The 'Ave Maria' (Hail Mary) prayer has been set countless times in Western music, but rarely in a context that makes its theological function so dramatically clear: here is a woman praying to the one who was 'highly favored' in the full knowledge that she is about to suffer the consequences of another's jealousy and another's manipulation.
Verdi's musical setting of the 'Ave Maria' is one of the most perfectly judged passages in the entire Italian operatic canon. The soprano voice singing in near-darkness, accompanied by a shimmer of strings, captures both the prayer's otherworldly quality and Desdemona's extraordinary goodness - her capacity to pray for others, including Otello himself, even in the knowledge of her approaching death. The contrast with Iago's 'Credo' could not be more complete: where Iago's faith was a performance of cynicism that corrupted everything it touched, Desdemona's prayer is genuine, trusting, and fruitful in the only sense that ultimately matters.
The opera's biblical-theological architecture - evil presenting itself in theological language, innocence praying with genuine faith - makes it one of the most searching treatments of the problem of evil in Western art. Verdi and Boito were not writing theology, but they were thinking theologically, and the result is an opera that continues to raise the questions its two great theological arias pose without fully resolving them.