This DG/Unitel film was the follow-up to the Otello conducted and directed at the Salzburg Festival in 1971, and revived in 1972 when I was enthralled by most aspects of the venture. Then in 1973, Karajan re-enacted the work in a Berlin studio, exchanging, to rather deleterious effect, the Vienna Philharmonic for its Berlin counterpart. Along the way from Austria to Germany, much of the heart and spontaneity of the original was lost, not least because the singers’ performances were post-synchronised and none-too-believably so. The old-fashioned costumes and inapt make-up (Vickers never even suggests in his looks that he might be a Moor) jar with the attempt artificially to open out the action with simulated waves and singularly unconvincing battlements. Everything looks unreal.

Karajan, whose 1959 Decca audio recording remains one of the most successful sets on CD, here conducts a performance that has almost literally lost the plot. At tempi far slower than those predicated by the composer, he seriously debilitates the score’s dramatic pulse, for which no amount of beautiful sonorities can compensate.

In spite of all these drawbacks, Vickers’s towering portrayal of a once-noble man caught on the rack of jealousy remains quite exceptional. This great man struck down by a fatal flaw sings his heart out in raw, forceful, yet always heroic tones. He touches the extremes of tenderness and cruelty in an overwhelming way that not even Domingo achieves. Freni’s beautifully sung and appealing Desdemona is somewhat marred by a slightly bland interpretation. Peter Glossop’s credible Iago is an insinuating account of the arch-conspirator, but he suffers most from indifferent lip-synch. The supporting cast is no more than adequate.

No, the core of Verdi’s masterpiece is to be found elsewhere on DVD, in the genuine stage experiences caught at La Scala under Muti and a few years earlier under Levine at the Met, with Domingo in the title-part (and the superb Barbara Frittoli and eloquent young Renée Fleming as his respective Desdemonas) and more convincing support. One of those is the choice for the library, but those interested to catch an echo of what a life-force Vickers could be as Otello may like to sample the Unitel version.