Famous Otellos of the past have included Tamagno, the role's trumpet-voiced creator, as well as Giovanni Battista De Negri, Albert Alvarez, Francesc Viñas, Giuseppe Borgatti, Antonio Paoli, Giovanni Zenatello, Renato Zanelli, Giovanni Martinelli, Aureliano Pertile, Francesco Merli, Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, Frank Mullings, Leo Slezak, Jose Luccioni, Ramón Vinay, Mario Del Monaco, James McCracken, Jon Vickers, David Rendall, Jeffrey Lawton and Carlo Cossutta.
Since the three leading roles of the opera (Otello, Desdemona and Iago) are among Verdi's most demanding, both vocally and dramatically, some of the most illustrious singers of the past 130 years have made Otello part of their repertoire. When Verdi read this in a Milan newspaper, he was horrified and, in a letter to Faccio (rather than directly confronting Boito) stated that he wanted Faccio to directly tell the librettist that "I will give him his manuscript intact, without a shadow of resentment, without rancor of any kind". The key point was that Boito, himself a composer, appeared to want to compose the music for Otello himself. While attending a banquet in Naples following the successful presentation of his opera Mefistofele, Boito gave an interview to a journalist and, in trying to keep information about the proposed Otello as quiet as possible, appears to have been misquoted by another journalist who overheard part of the conversation.
There then occurred an event which unsettled both Verdi and Boito, and which nearly caused the project to come to a complete stop. Early the following year, Verdi began to compose and on 20 March 1884, in a letter from Boito to Ricordi, the librettist announced that Verdi had begun with the "opening of first act and seems to be working with fervor".
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