Macbeth (Verdi)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Verdi's Macbeth was born from a single practical decision: a baritone was available. In September 1846, Giuseppe Verdi received a commission from Florence's Teatro della Pergola with no particular opera specified. What tipped him toward Shakespeare's tragedy was the fact that Felice Varesi, the baritone who would sing the title role, was under contract and ready. Without that piece of casting luck, the opera that would become Verdi's most unusual work of his early career might never have existed.

  This was Verdi's tenth opera, and it premiered on the 14th of March 1847. It was also the first time he adapted Shakespeare for the stage. Almost two decades later, he would revise it entirely for Paris. The two versions are so different that scholars still argue about which is superior. What drew the questions that haunt this opera: why did Verdi care so fiercely about a play he had never read in the original language? Why did the revised version fail when critics heard it? And why did the opera nearly vanish from view for most of the twentieth century, only to return as one of his most performed works?

• 2. The Galley Years

  ›

  Verdi himself called the period of his early career his "galley years." Over sixteen years, he produced twenty-two operas. Macbeth arrived in that stretch, after the success of Attila in 1846 and before the trio of works from 1851 to 1853 that made him universally famous: Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata.

  The subject of Shakespeare's Macbeth was suggested to Verdi by his friend Andrea Maffei, a poet and man of letters who moved in the same literary circles as the composer during the 1840s. Maffei had flagged both the Shakespeare play and Friedrich Schiller's Die Räuber as potential opera subjects. Maffei himself was already writing the libretto for I masnadieri, the Schiller adaptation, and would have switched to Macbeth if Varesi had not been available.

  The librettist Verdi chose was Francesco Maria Piave, who worked from a prose translation by Carlo Rusconi published in Turin in 1838. Verdi had not read Shakespeare in English and would not encounter the original until after the opera had already premiered. He had, however, read Shakespeare in translation for many years. In an 1865 letter he wrote: "He is one of my favorite poets. I have had him in my hands from my earliest youth."

  The stakes Verdi placed on the project were enormous. Writing to Piave, he described the source material plainly: "This tragedy is one of the greatest creations of man." He followed that with a challenge: "If we can't make something great out of it, let us at least try to do something out of the ordinary."

• 3. Bullying the Librettist

  ›

  Verdi's working relationship with Piave was defined by pressure. He constantly pushed Piave to revise, demanding corrections and rewriting sections that did not meet his dramatic expectations. Maffei was pulled in to rework specific passages, including the witches' chorus in Act 3 and the sleepwalking scene. The bullying, as Verdi's biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz notes, produced results: from Verdi's insistence on the revision of Lady Macbeth's new act 2 aria "La luce langue" came what she calls "Lady Macbeth's gripping scene."

  The opera's dramatic choices departed from Shakespeare in key ways. Instead of three individual witches, Verdi used a large female chorus divided into three groups, each group singing as a single witch in three-part harmony. The witches, in Verdi's own account, were central to everything. In a February letter to his Paris publisher Escudier, Verdi stated that there were only three real roles in the opera: Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, and the Chorus of Witches. He was explicit: "the Witches rule the drama. They are truly a character and a character of greatest importance." He dismissed Macduff's role entirely in that same letter.

  The final act opens with Scottish refugees near the English border. In the revised version, it closes not with a dying aria from Macbeth but with a chorus of bards celebrating the overthrow of the tyrant. Verdi was determined to drop the original ending, a final aria for Macbeth titled Mal per me che m'affidai, in favor of an offstage death and a triumphal close.

• 4. Rewriting for Paris

  ›

  As early as 1852, Verdi received requests to revise Macbeth for Paris. Nothing came of the early approach, but in 1864 he was asked again. This time the request was specific: add a ballet and a final chorus for a production at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris. Verdi wrote to his publisher Giulio Ricordi asking for the score, explaining that he wanted to "lengthen several pieces to give the opera more character."

  He quickly recognized that small additions would not be enough. He wrote to the theater's impresario, Léon Carvalho, urging patience and describing his own process in three words: "I am labouring, labouring, labouring." What followed through the winter of 1864-65 was a thoroughgoing overhaul. Lady Macbeth received a new aria. Macbeth's aria in Act 3 was completely rewritten. A substantial portion of Act 3 was revised and a ballet added. Act 4 gained a newly composed chorus set to an old text.

  For the translation, Verdi asked for Gilbert Duprez, a tenor who had turned to teaching and in whom Verdi had great confidence, having known him from his first opera for Paris, Jérusalem, in 1847. Verdi also issued specific instructions about one particular moment: the Act 2 duet between the Macbeth couple must retain the words "Folie follie" in the translation, for the dramatic weight those words carried.

  The new version premiered on the 21st of April 1865 in a French translation by Charles-Louis-Étienne Nuitter and Alexandre Beaumont. Verdi refused to attend the Paris performance.

• 5. A Puzzling Failure

  ›

  The early reports from Verdi's Paris publisher Escudier were favorable. Then came the first-night critics, and their verdict was cold. Verdi wrote back expressing genuine bewilderment: "I thought I had done quite well with it...it appears I was mistaken." Later performances in Paris fared no better.

  In Italian, the revised version was given at La Scala in autumn 1865, but very few productions followed in Italy. After a run of just thirteen more performances in Paris following the premiere, the opera slipped from the repertory. It was performed occasionally in Paris up to around 1900, then rarely at all until after World War II.

  Musicologist Julian Budden, writing about the two versions, identified a structural problem: the gap of eighteen years between them was simply too long to allow Verdi to re-enter his original conception at every point. The two versions do not fully cohere. Musicologist Roger Parker and Budden both concede that even the traditional elements of the 1847 score are handled better than comparable passages in earlier works like Attila or Alzira, and that the arias grow organically rather than following a formula. But Deryck Cooke, writing in his 1964 essay "Shakespeare into Music," was less generous, describing the opera as inferior to both Verdi's later Shakespeare adaptations and the original play.

  Cooke singled out one exception: in the sleepwalking scene, which he called the "Grand scena di sonnambulismo," he acknowledged that Verdi had done something genuinely different, foreshadowing the achievements of his final works, Otello and Falstaff, which would come decades later.

• 6. Revival and Return

  ›

  Two European productions helped bring Macbeth back into view before World War II. A Berlin staging in the 1930s and productions at Glyndebourne in 1938 and 1939 were significant. The 1938 Glyndebourne production was the United Kingdom premiere of the revised version and the first to combine Macbeth's death scene from the 1847 text with the triumphal ending from the 1865 revision. That combination was directly against Verdi's stated wishes.

  The United States premiere of the revised version waited until the 24th of October 1941, when the New Opera Company staged it at Broadway's 44th Street Theatre in New York. Fritz Busch conducted. The cast included Jess Walters in the title role, Florence Kirk as Lady Macbeth, and Robert Silva as Banquo.

  Glyndebourne revived it in the 1950s. Teatro alla Scala staged it in 1952 with Maria Callas as Lady Macbeth. The Metropolitan Opera in New York added it to its roster for the first time in 1959. Also in January 1959, the Opera Guild of Montreal presented the Canadian premiere, beating the Metropolitan Opera by two weeks.

  The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden presented its first performances on the 30th of March 1960, with Tito Gobbi in the title role, and returned to the opera in 1981 and 2002. The original 1847 version was given in concert at Covent Garden on the 27th of June 1997. Both versions were presented together in 2003 as part of the Sarasota Opera's complete Verdi cycle.

  The role of Lady Macbeth, written for the soprano Marianna Barbieri-Nini, is considered one of the most demanding in the operatic repertory. It requires dramatic intensity, stamina, a wide vocal range, and the ability to shift between the registers of a low mezzo and a high soprano. Beyond Callas, the American mezzo Shirley Verrett also took on the role at La Scala to great acclaim, at a different point in the same house's history.