In an oft-quoted assessment of Shakespeare's Desdemona, Verdi described her as “not a woman, but a type. She is the type of goodness, resignation, self-sacrifice. They are creatures born for others, unconscious of their own egos.” Shakespeare's play, of course, provides ample material for this sort of interpretation, as characters extol her beauty, virtue, selflessness, and other merits. And as James Hepokoski has documented, in recreating Desdemona for their own Otello (1887) Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito were probably influenced by nineteenth-century critical traditions represented by August Wilhelm Schlegel and by Victor Hugo, who viewed Desdemona as “saintly” and as “a spiritualist and almost amystic,” and also seem to have drawn upon such late nineteenth-century literary themes as decadentismo devotional iconology and the femme fragile. Of course devout heroines in peril were nothing new to Verdi, the Leonoras in Il trovatore and La forza del destino being prime examples, while heroines falsely accused had long been stock-in-trade, and Violetta (La traviata) provided a precedent for the physically fragile heroine. So by emphasizing Desdemona's purity, naïveté, and vulnerability, Verdi and Boito adhered to an aesthetic involving the cathartic destruction of a sympathetic female lead with which their audience could readily identify.

Like his predecessors, Verdi relied on an elaborate system of conventions – termed the “customary forms” (“solite forme”) of set pieces (or “lyric numbers”) by Abramo Basevi in 1859 – for organizing introductions, arias, duets, and finales. Gradually narrowing the diversity of approaches found at the end of the previous century, composers such as Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti had “standardized” designs sufficiently that even a provincial critic such as Carlo Ritorni, writing in 1841 about Bellini, could formulate accurate templates for the most extended version of each form. However, while adhering to shared outlines composers also revised internal details for new dramatic effects, a process that Verdi embraced in his own operas. Whereas Rossini's lyric numbers had summarized relationships presented in the scena or reacted to its events, Verdi's take an increasingly expository role in the foreground action, weakening the traditional polarized relationship between an active scena and static lyric number. Dramatic continuity is paralleled by continuity of musical style: the more frequent appearance of lyrical melody in the scena and declamatory singing in lyric numbers allows more flexible expression and stronger characterization in both sections. Innovative treatment of individual movements within the lyric numbers also enhances dramatic momentum, undercutting traditional dichotomies between active and reflective passages and weakening musical disjunctions. Verdi made the presence of these forms less obvious and adapted them to more diverse dramatic circumstances by varying the internal designs of movements, omitting movements, interpolating additional sections (particularly in extended ensemble scenes), and changing the complement of characters within scenes.