By Victor Greto
Think of it as a great play on musical steroids.
Take an early 17th-century, gorgeously-written but grotesque play, with ugly, rhyming witches, murdered kings – and a husband and wife who egg each other on to murder after murder, but who break apart like any bickering couple, except their split explodes like steel shrapnel into diatribes on meaninglessness and a sleepwalk to end all sleepwalks.
Take that, I doth say, and dunk it into a bubbling 19th-century gothic cauldron of dazzling, romantic music that condenses scenes and words while intensifying emotion.
When Opera Delaware performs Giuseppe Verdi’s version of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth for three special performances in May, it will be providing audiences with a witches’ brew of magnificent art.
“You know the old saying that less is more,” said Brendan Cooke, executive director of Opera Delaware. “In opera, more is more, and in Macbeth you have one of the greatest works of literature with the grandfather of Italian opera.”
First, Shakespeare.
“Watching this character change from a heroic soldier to a power-mad guy – now that’s a good way to spend a night,” said Sanford L Robbins, a professional theatre director who teaches acting and voice at the University of Delaware.
Then there’s what Verdi does with it.
As the Macbeths wash themselves in the blood of their victims, opera audiences also will be bathed in Verdi’s jagged relief map of sound.
“The music adds a layer of character development that you don’t get in spoken dialog,” said James Wilson, assistant professor of music at Wesley College. “Verdi’s is the height of Italian Romantic opera, and it focuses on telling the human story and expressing human emotion.”
Macbeth is the story of a Scottish general who, after hearing from three witches that he will be king, decides, after being pushed by his wife, to kill the current king to rush the prophecy along. The murder sets off more murders as Macbeth tries to ensure the crown for himself and not his rival, Banquo. Another rival, the noble Macduff, ends the play by slicing off Macbeth’s head, mixing justice with revenge.
But, for audiences, the most powerful theme of the play and opera is watching Macbeth wrestle with his own – and his wife’s – ambition, and then observing both of them spiral apart. Lady Macbeth descends into profound guilt (to the point of trying to wash imagined blood from her hands while she sleepwalks), and Macbeth seems to realize the meaninglessness of his usurpation and his own tragic fate.
“It is larger than life,” Cooke said, and recommends the work for opera-novices who want to know what the fuss is all about.
“It’s hard to expect someone to go from zero to 60,” he said. “But with the pacing of Macbeth and the genius of the score, it would be pretty tough to get bored.”
THE OPERA
Making a great play into an opera isn’t easy, especially if the composer doesn’t read the language of the playwright.
Giuseppe Verdi (yes, perhaps if he had come over to the U.S. via Ellis Island, we might have renamed him simply Joe Green) didn’t read or write English.
“In the case of Verdi and Shakespeare, it had to be translated and then re-versed,” Wilson said. “He wrote out what he wanted in Italian prose, then gave it to his librettist (Francesco Maria Piave, who wrote the text of the opera) and put it into verse.”
Verdi chose carefully what scenes he wanted to use, Wilson said, “and in doing so he cut about half the length. Then he wrote out the elements of the play that he wanted stressed.”
And this is the place where opera, the music, compensates and enhances the lost words of the bard.
“Shakespeare has three witches, and Verdi has a chorus,” Robbins said.
Also, Verdi eliminated an important scene, where Macduff convinces the royal Malcolm to join with him and defeat Macbeth.
“Instead of that scene, Robbins said, “late in the opera, he has Macduff lead the refugee types and becomes a hero, and Malcolm is not as big a deal as he is in the play.”
But the most important changes and enhancements deal with Lady Macbeth.
First of all, Verdi chose a soprano (the voice’s highest range) to play the part.
“It might have been an alto (a lower range),” Robbins said, “so you’ve got a striking difference.”
This choice is important in two scenes, when Lady Macbeth first enters the opera, beginning low (she’s reading her husband’s letter about his run-in with the witches), “in a stage whisper, which reaches a high C” as she asks the fates to “unsex” her and make her ambition a reality.
It also is important in the sleepwalking scene – perhaps the most famous in the play and opera. Her voice starts calm, “then rolls up, as if Verdi is saying, ‘Take that, Shakespeare!’”
With Lady Macbeth, Wilson said, “she can have powerful, forceful lines, rapid staccatos that come off as nagging or persistent. The melodies help develop the character, the contour, color and articulation of what is said.”
Lady Macbeth is not an easy part to sing, he said. “You have to have great actors and singers, so it’s not performed as much.”
Cooke, who took over at Opera Delaware last year, agreed that the opera is not performed often because of “the heroic vocal forces” needed to carry it off.
“Lady Macbeth is one of the most treacherous roles in the repertory,” he said, “because of the extremes of range and emotion. You have to have the power to project over the orchestra. You got to be a gymnast and weightlifter at the same time.”
An ironic or just interesting part of the production, he said, is where the two signers who play the leads come from.
The woman playing Lady Macbeth, Courtney Ames, lives in Wilmington. The man playing Macbeth, Grant Youngblood, lives up the road in New Jersey.
It also was the proto-gothic nature of Shakespeare’s play, his use of the occult and mystery, that attracted Verdi to the work.
“Here’s a play with all these supernatural things, and Verdi was interested in them,” Robbins said.
Like many artistic works from the time it was written (1846), the opera created from Shakespeare’s play is “unabashedly theatrical.”
“Verdi loved that aspect of the play, and he will use it in later, more mature operas,” such as the more famous Rigoletto and La traviata.
The opera is from Verdi’s early period of work, and is often considered by critics to be inferior to the two more famous operas above, as well as the operas Verdi wrote from other Shakespeare’s plays, including Otello and Falstaff.
CURSES!
According to the play’s lure, it’s not only the Macbeths that have been cursed. It’s the play itself.
“In the theater, there’s a superstition, that you can’t say the title of the play,” Robbins said. “There have been a lot of injuries – the stage combat scenes – and the plays have some serious things happen, people getting stabbed, even fatally.”
You’re not even allowed to say the title of the play in a theater. Actors and directors call it “The Scottish Play.”
There are, however, simple earthly reasons why the play has been plagued with difficulty.
“It’s not an easy play to do,” Robbins said. “It moves very quickly – it’s one of the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays – and it tempts producers to do so much fancy ghost effects that they don’t attend to the play itself, so many are overproduced with stage effects.”
The simpler the production the better, he said.
“Even today, if you go in the theater and say the title, people will look at you as if you said a dirty word, and then make you go outside and turn around three times.”
The curse already seems to have struck Opera Delaware’s production, Cooke said.
“But we got ours out of the way two weeks early,” he said.
David Lawton, who conducted the last performance of Macbeth here in 1985, was originally slated to be the conductor.
“But he fell down and broke his ankle,” Cooke said. “I hope that’s our only experience with the Macbeth curse. We were able to get Giovanni Reggioli, with the Washington National Opera and Opera Australia in Melbourne, to conduct for us instead.”