Arrigo Boito

Arrigo Boito was an Italian poet, composer and critic, remembered for his one completed opera, Mefistofele, and as the librettist of Verdi's Otello and Falstaff. Trained at the Milan Conservatory, in the 1860s he belonged to the Scapigliatura, whose iconoclasm he put into an ode that gravely offended Verdi. Mefistofele failed at La Scala in 1868 and succeeded, revised, at Bologna. As Tobia Gorrio he wrote La Gioconda for Ponchielli. Reconciled with Verdi through Ricordi, he revised Simon Boccanegra as a trial, and the friendship lasted until Verdi's death, at which Boito was present. Nerone was left unfinished.