Arrigo Boito (whose original name was Enrico Giuseppe Giovanni Boito and who wrote essays under the anagrammatic pseudonym of Tobia Gorrio), was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist, librettist and composer, best known today for his libretti, especially those for Giuseppe Verdi's operas Otello and Falstaff, and his own opera Mefistofele. Along with Emilio Praga, and his own brother Camillo Boito he is regarded as one of the prominent representatives of the Scapigliatura artistic movement.
Although Verdi's aim to write the music for an opera based on Shakespeare's King Lear never came to fruition-despite the existence of a libretto-Boito provided subtle and resonant libretti for Verdi's last two masterpieces, Otello (which was based on Shakespeare's play Othello) and Falstaff based on The Merry Wives of Windsor and parts of Henry IV. Boito died on 10 June 1918 in Milan, Italy.
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