Met School Membership Program
Macbeth
Teacher Study Guide
Metropolitan Opera Guild
Education Department
70 Lincoln Center Plaza
New York, NY 10023
www.operaed.org
Macbeth
Performance Information
Music: Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto: Francesco Maria Piave, after Shakespeare’s play, as translated by
Giulio Carcano
Date of Performance: Saturday, January 12, 2008
Timing:
1:30-5:10pm ***
1 intermission
Act I: 82 minutes
Intermission: 26 minutes
Act II: 62 minutes
Cast:
Lady Macbeth:
Macbeth:
Macduff:
Banquo:
Maria Guleghina
Željko Luĉić
Dimitri Pittas
John Relyea
Conductor:
Production:
Set Designer:
Costume Designer:
Lighting Designer:
Choreographer:
James Levine
Adrian Noble
Mark Thompson
Mark Thompson
Jean Kalman
Sue Lefton
Special Thanks: Lou Barrella, William C. Bassell, Judith Jonathan Dzik,
Zeke Hecker, Mike Minard
In addition, warm thanks to all MSM members who gave us insightful feedback
about the program. Your comments and materials have been instrumental in
creating this guide.
_______________________________
***Please note that the ending time of this rehearsal is approximate. This is a working
rehearsal, and so the conductor may wish to make some last-minute changes to the
performance before opening night. Please plan on staying 15 minutes past this ending time to
allow for any conductor changes.
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Production Information
2
What is Opera, Anyway?
A Not-so-brief History of Opera Music and Production
Who Does What at The Met: The Basics of Opera Production
4-15
4-10
11-15
The Composer: Giuseppe Verdi
16-17
Background
Verdi, Shakespeare and Macbeth
The Making of Macbeth
18-22
18-20
21-22
Meet the Characters
23
The Story of Macbeth
24-25
The Music of Macbeth
26-27
The Production Process at The Metropolitan Opera
What to Watch
Who to Watch
When to Watch
28-37
29-32
33-36
37
Activities
To Introduce Students to Opera
To Introduce Students to Macbeth
To Introduce Students to the Production Process
Research Ideas
38-53
39-40
41-47
48-52
53
Resources
Using Macbeth to Teach Humanities
by Zeke Hecker
Using Macbeth to Teach Music
by Jonathan Dzik
OPERA NEWS Article: “Open Letters”
by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, March 5, 1994
Metropolitan Opera Facts
Glossary and Definitions
54-85
55-65
3
66-76
77-80
81-82
83-85
WHAT IS
OPERA
ANYWAY?
4
A NOT-SO-BRIEF HISTORY OF
OPERA AND ITS PRODUCTION
Opera, unlike almost all other art forms, was invented. It all started
around 1600, when a group of men in Florence decided to revive the
ancient Greek tradition of performing plays by singing every word.
The culprits were the Florentine Camerata. In 1600, the word of the day was
polyphony: popular composers mastered difficult, mathematical rules that
allowed them to layer many melodic lines on top of each other, producing new
and increasingly striking harmonies. Then, suddenly,
Camerata composers like Peri, Corsi, Caccini and Monteverdi
starting writing music that was just the opposite– one singer
singing one melody with minimal instrumental support—
monody. Instead of using many overlapping voices to explain
moments of extreme emotion, Camerata composers displayed
all that feeling with only one voice – the aria was born. But
monody was useful for a second, more radical purpose: to
connect the arias, by having singers sing speech-like
rhythms to move the plot along or convey dialogue. When
they combined this new discovery, recitative with the arias
Front Page of Le
they already invented, opera was ready to roll.
Nuove Musiche,
the first book to
introduce monody
Man is the measure of all things
The invention of opera was the perfect capstone to the
musical Renaissance period. During this time, many musicians reading Greek
texts for inspiration focused on Plato’s doctrine of ethos – the idea that music
does not merely depict emotions but can arouse them. According to this
doctrine, music had the potential to be more than just a tribute to God – the
right music could alter men’s feelings and actions. Some people worried that
the doctrine of ethos only worked when the music was perfectly aligned with
the words. Therefore, a madrigal, in which active polyphony meant that the
words could not easily be distinguished, did not have the same potential to
change someone’s emotions. Many of these critics were members of the
Florentine Camerata, and they believed that monody was the answer. Monody
not only allowed the music to transform the listener, but it also asserted the
humanist values of the day– that one voice alone has the power to make real
change. Many early opera writers underscored this point by choosing the myth
of Orpheus, both showing and telling the audience the power of the solo voice.
5
The late Baroque gets serious
Many of the world’s first operas were part of a genre called opera seria:
starring gods and heroes dressed in elaborate costumes singing in front of
state-of-the-art backdrops painted to look like 3D
landscapes (trompe l’oeil). Although opera seria
echoes Greek drama in its subject matter,
setting, and unity of time and place, opera seria
writers were innovators too, frequently insisting
on the importance of Christian justice and
forgiveness. In fact, many opera serias conclude
with a happy ending. These distinctly Baroque
adaptations were made for the aristocratic
A Baroque opera house in Switzerland audiences, who took the moral lessons in opera
very seriously. In Italian opera seria, these orderly endings had to be achieved
by the human characters, without the intervention of gods– providing an
idealized model for rulers to follow. A spoonful of sugar made the medicine go
down: these operas were an entertaining way to remind oneself of the
responsibility of leadership. The attempts at tidiness in the libretto, as well as
the often formulaic nature of the music, caused many later opera writers to
disregard opera seria as outmoded or inflexible.
It’s a hit!
Opera boomed in popularity– 35 opera houses were
built in the twenty years after its invention– and the
production teams didn’t have time to (or care to) keep
up. Creating an “ideal world” is expensive– trompe l’oiel
sets with multiple-point perspective, lavish costumes,
complex stage machinery and even blocking were reused from production to production. An opera set in
ancient Rome would look exactly the same as an opera
set in England. The music was also interchangeable!
Singers were allowed to substitute arias from other
operas at any point so long as the central emotion
remained the same.
An example of
Baroque costume
Opera seria is less frequently performed today not only because it is regarded
as stiff and overly formal but because the music itself requires specialized
singers. Male opera seria heroes sing what is for us unusually high. In their
day, these roles were sung by castrati: men who had been castrated before
puberty in order to preserve their high voices. Castrati were the best-trained
and most popular singers in the opera seria world.
Castrati became the first opera stars– commanding
astronomical fees and enticing throngs of female
admirers.
Pretension Police! Classical composers develop opera
for the people
By the end of the 18th century, things weren’t looking
good for European aristocrats. Revolutionary rumblings
were spreading through the French middle class, and
6
A portrait of Christoph Gluck
England already felt the blow of the American Revolution. Forward-thinking
Enlightenment composers changed with the times, writing operas for the
increasingly literate middle class. Some, like composer C. W. Gluck and his
librettist Calzabigi, tried to do so by stripping away the excess of opera seria to
form a more direct, personal message: reform opera. Other composers
championed an existing alternative to opera seria: opera buffa, or comic
opera. Some librettists, like da Ponte, used dramas with revolutionary political
messages to create their opera buffa libretti, like the anti-aristocratic Le Nozze
di Figaro. To make opera more accessible, composers sometimes wrote opera in
the country’s vernacular or included spoken dialogue in a singspiel or opera
comique (German or French operas, respectively, which include spoken
dialogue). Some writers turned opera into something new altogether– the
ballad opera– a comic play with musical interludes set to popular tunes sung
by the actors themselves, the predecessor of American musical theatre.
Out with the old, in with the new
The same reforms which brought opera seria down to size influenced
production: gods no longer needed to be hoisted in with cranes, and heroes did
not need to don expensive-looking armor. Audiences wanted a show to be
realistic. Many sets portrayed the insides of houses and the outdoors, while
costumes began to draw from contemporary as well as historical dress. Even
French opera houses, the last stronghold of frilly aristocratic opera, began to
strip down their style when Gluck’s reform operas became popular in France.
Bel Canto sets off vocal fireworks
Even though the composition of opera seria waned after 1800, composers in
the Romantic period were still interested in ornate, beautiful singing–
sometimes at the expense of dramatic plots. Italian composers like Donizetti,
Bellini, and Rossini invented a new elaborate, lyric style called bel canto. Like
opera seria arias, bel canto arias usually followed a predictable formula- a
smooth, sustained cantabile section followed by a bravura section where the
singer got a chance to show off. The Romantic era put a premium on personal
artistic expression– singers were allowed and even expected to improvise
ornaments onstage.
Under pressure
Each bel canto opera may seem as if it took forever to write, but many bel
canto operas were actually written in less than a month. Each Italian city-state
supported several opera houses, and each wanted to outdo its neighboring
provinces. Every season, an opera house would employ a resident composer,
who was expected to rapidly write operas custom tailored to the demands of
both the house’s impresario and the individual singers. Sometimes, composers
were forced to change huge aspects of their work with very little notice. When
the impresario of the Teatro Argentino in Rome told Rossini that he did not like
the original overture to Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Rossini simply swapped in
another overture that he had already written– which has become some of the
most beloved music of the entire opera.
Viva VERDI!
Composer Giuseppe Verdi wrote highly inventive, impressively tuneful, and
intensely dramatic operas which are some of the most frequently performed
7
today. But even Verdi didn’t come out of nowhere– many of the themes
expressed in his operas are great examples of late Romantic ideology. His
works explore the deep tension between individual needs and duty to society,
perhaps the most important conflict for artists in the 19th century. His
involvement in the Italian Risorgimento– the unification of individual city-states
into one nation– reflects a resurgence of nationalism all over Europe. During
the Romantic period, Russian, Czech, Hungarian, and many other nations’
musical styles really came into their own when composers like Mussorgsky,
Janacek and Dvorak wrote operas culling from the rich folk musical traditions
of their respective countries.
Lions and Tigers and Bears: On stage?
Verdi often wrote in a style called grand opera, a term which has as much to
do with how opera looks as how it sounds. Grand opera came from France,
where opera productions were the Hollywood blockbusters of their day. Operagoers craved novelty, seeking increasingly heart-wrenching plot-lines, complex
stage
illusions
and
inventive
orchestration.
Productions worked with huge budgets and attracted
massive crowds. The “super-sizing” of opera’s
production
demanded
some
re-organization
backstage. The previously subordinate role of the
stage director (then called the metteur en scene)
took on much more importance, as they had to
control the vast numbers of singers with small parts,
chorus members, supernumeraries, and animals who
flooded the stage; to ensure that performers knew
how to respond correctly to special effects; and to see
that principals were not lost in the huge new sets.
A production of Aida
It’s not over until the fat lady sings
Richard Wagner changed everything. Though he was Verdi’s exact
contemporary during the late Romantic period— both composing from about
1845-85— they wrote in very different styles. Wagner wrote operas with
continuously shifting music– no distinctions between aria and recitative– where
the voice is just one thread in the complex musical fabric. Like many German
Romantic composers, Wagner made full use of the expanded orchestra to
create a complex chromatic atmosphere full of strange and unexpected chords–
sometimes beautiful and sometimes upsetting. In order to keep listeners from
getting lost during his extremely long operas, Wagner associated short musical
fragments with characters or ideas, and strung these pieces together to help
tell the story. This invention– the leitmotif– changed opera forever.
Gesamtkunst-what?
Wagner isn’t just famous for his epic operas; he
introduced a theory called gesamtkunstwerk, or
“total art work.” He wanted people who saw his
operas to enter a fully realized artistic dream world–
and he did it all himself. It started when Wagner
traveled to Bayreuth, Bavaria to look at a possible
8
The orchestra plays in a covered pit
at the Festpeilhaus
opera house in which to perform his famous Ring Cycle. Dissatisfied with the
existing options, he made plans for a completely new opera house for Bayreuth,
the Festspeilhaus, which continues to produce his work to this day. Wagner
wrote all his own libretti and supervised the construction of his sets and
costumes. He even designed his own curtain which could be pulled back
instead of up, to further invite the audience to enter his magical world. As if
that wasn’t enough, Wagner invented his own tuba to play notes that no
instrument in the orchestra could reach.
Torchbearers: Strauss & Puccini
The works of Wagner and Verdi are sometimes celebrated as the most supreme
accomplishments of composition possible in opera – how could anyone attempt
to write opera after such titans? Yet two bold, inspired composers of the late
19th century decided to see what else could be done with the art form. Richard
Strauss followed Wagner in the celebrated German tradition, creating operas
that featured huge orchestras, adventurous harmonies, and libretti that were
scandalous or intellectual—or both. In Italy, Giacomo Puccini picked up where
Verdi left off, composing operas that featured gorgeous melodies, strong
characterizations, and crowd-pleasing, action-packed plots.
Verismo!
In the 1890s, an operatic style called verismo arose from a growing trend
towards stark realism in French painting and literature. Artists became
increasingly interested in the strenuous lives of the middle or lower-class,
attempting to recreate their struggles accurately and objectively. The Italians
caught on, writing plays depicting the local customs and dialect of
unsophisticated characters without sentimentality. Soon, composers began to
use these literary models as material for new verismo operas– the first being
Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. The music of verismo opera is as forthright as
the libretto: direct and dramatic, uninterested in showoff-y arias. Puccini often
wouldn’t write overtures, because he felt that they were an unnatural
ornament.
Thinking outside the box
In the early twentieth century, opera’s production was the subject of visual
art’s trend toward abstraction. Recoiling from the realism of war and the
colossal death count it wrought upon Europe, many operas chose minimal sets
to evoke rather than connote settings. Booming post-modern literary theory
encouraged designers to treat operas as ahistorical works, often updating or
removing elements which fixed a production to a previous time or specific
place.
9
You can teach an old dog new tricks
Through the second half of the twentieth century, opera proved that it could
stretch to encompass rapidly shifting cultural values and expanding definitions
of music itself. Schöenberg and Berg adapted their twelve-tone compositional
rules to opera with surprisingly popular results; Berg’s Wozzeck is a staple of
the modern canon. The multiculturalism which has become a hallmark of
twentieth-century life has had its stamp on opera–
notably with Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, bringing
popular and pervasive jazz and blues sounds to the
opera stage. Tan Dun’s The First Emperor, which
premieres at the Met in December 2006, is a muchanticipated union of conventional Chinese opera and
folk song and the Western operatic tradition. Who
knows what the rest of the twenty-first century will
bring!
10
WHO DOES WHAT AT THE
METROPOLITAN OPERA
Far more goes into an opera than what you see on stage during a
performance. Hundreds of singers, musicians, dancers, actors, designers,
stagehands and many other Met employees work incredibly hard to
prepare for an opera– sometimes, many years in advance. One of the
exciting things about attending a Director’s Rehearsal is that you can see
all of the people that are usually behind-the-scenes doing their jobs right
in front of your eyes.
The conductor
The conductor is the music director of an opera; he or she has the last word on
all musical decisions. One of the biggest decisions is the speed of the music, or
tempo, which he or she conveys to the orchestra by keeping time with a baton
or hand (though the baton tells the orchestra other things, too). The conductor
also determines the balance of the music– which parts to emphasize and bring
out. No matter what musical interpretations the conductor makes, he or she
must be sure to keep the orchestra and singers together and to ensure that the
singers can be heard above the orchestra.
According to James Levine, the true job of the conductor is to “get the music’s
character right. You never hear of composers complaining about inadequate
technical execution, or that the horns were cracking or the wind chords weren’t
together. What you hear composers complaining about is falsification of what
they’ve written, a misunderstanding of the point, the spirit, the… substance of
the piece, of what it is all about.”
The stage director
The stage director is sometimes called the producer in opera, but they are
more like the director of a play or movie than a theatrical producer. Just as the
conductor makes musical decisions, the stage director has the final word on all
theatrical choices. First, the stage director decides the over-all concept for a
production. Then he or she works with a design team of the set designer,
costume designer, choreographer, and lighting designer to create images
and moods that convey their interpretation of the opera to the audience
visually. He or she also collaborates with the conductor to make sure that the
music and the staged show complement each other and create a unified
performance. The director helps singers develop their characters and express
them in keeping with the spirit of the production. Since one director cannot
assist many characters at once and because rehearsal time is very short, the
stage director is aided by several assistant stage directors, who stand on
stage and literally walk characters through their movements in rehearsals.
11
The technical director
The designers, who are all hired to work on a single production, answer to a
permanent member of The Met’s staff– the technical director, currently Joseph
Clark. The technical director oversees the physical side of design. He or she
makes sure that the designs that artists submit are brought into reality– that
the sets are compact enough to be stored, light in weight enough to be changed
quickly, and strong enough to support themselves. Once the technical director
gives approval, The Met’s resident, unionized carpenters, painters, set and
prop makers, costume shop staff, and wigmakers construct everything that
goes onstage in a given production. New productions at The Met are designed
to last for twenty years… the technical director makes sure that they will.
Principal singers
An opera singer’s work begins long before he or she is hired by The Met. For
their voices to be able to fill enormous spaces without amplification, opera
singers must train for many years. This is partly because they are trying to
isolate and train their vocal cords: a mechanism about the size of your little
finger nail. This is made doubly hard by the fact that unlike other musicians,
singers can’t see their instrument, so all of their learning has to be by
sensation.
Unlike almost every other type of performer, opera singers must memorize their
entire part before rehearsals even begin. Fortunately for most singers, they are
not singing a new role every single time; they often refresh roles that they have
sung before. An opera singer has a repertoire of hundreds of hours of music
that they can sing professionally after a very short period of preparation.
Singers also have to be able to pronounce and understand the many languages
in which operas are written– Italian, German, French, Russian; even Czech!
Opera singers also have to be convincing actors, taking on some of the most
complex characters in literature. They sing and act while onstage under hot
lights, performing blocking that can be awkward or difficult. Opera singers
have to be able to sing running, jumping, dancing and even lying down! Period
costumes like hoop skirts, cloaks and corsets can also be hot and
uncomfortable. Opera aficionados have good reason to obsess over their
favorite opera stars!
12
A QUICK GUIDE TO VOICE PARTS
Soprano: Sopranos have the highest voices. They usually play the
heroines of an opera. This means they often have lots of show-off arias
to sing, and get to fall in love and / or die more often than other
female voice types.
Mezzo-soprano, or mezzo: This is the middle female voice, and has a
darker, warmer sound than the soprano. Mezzos spend a lot of their
time playing mothers and villainesses, although sometimes they get to
play seductive heroines. Mezzos also play young men on occasion –
these are called trouser roles.
Contralto, or alto: The lowest female voice. Contralto is a rare voice
type. Altos usually portray older females or character parts like
witches and old gypsies.
Countertenor: Also known as alto, this is the highest male voice, and
another vocal rarity. Countertenors sing with about the same range
as a contralto. Countertenor roles are most common in baroque
opera, but some more modern composers write parts for countertenors
too.
Tenor: If there are no countertenors on stage, then the highest male
voice in opera is the tenor. Tenors are usually the heroes who get the
girl or die horribly in the attempt.
Baritone: The middle male voice. In comic opera, the baritone is
often the ringleader of whatever naughtiness is going on, but in
tragic opera, he’s more likely to play the villain.
Bass: The lowest male voice. Low voices usually suggest age and
wisdom in serious opera, and basses usually play Kings, fathers, and
grandfathers. In comic opera basses often portray old characters that
are foolish or laughable.
Vocal coaches
Fortunately, singers get help. The Met has voice coaches who help singers
pronounce words, make sure that their singing style is in keeping with the
style of the production and smooth out any rough spots. But the coaches don’t
teach singers technique! To get to the Met, a singer must already be very
accomplished.
13
The prompter
The best coaches are asked to be prompters. Prompters stand in a hooded box
at the foot of the stage and help give singers cues, keep them in time with the
orchestra, and remind them of any blocking or music they may have forgotten.
Most importantly, the prompter must know the particular singers and be able
to anticipate their problems before they arise. Because they must memorize all
the music, words and blocking in an opera, the prompter is one of the hardest
jobs at the opera house.
The orchestra
The orchestra plays the music of the opera. You can see them in the pit, below
the foot of the stage. The Met has a regular orchestra with 92 members, as well
as 44 associates who are scheduled as needed. Often opera orchestras include
special effects specific to the opera being performed. Sometimes you can see
unusual instruments in the pit. Some previously used at The Met include
airplane propellers, type writers, and guillotines!
A QUICK GUIDE TO THE FAMILIES OF THE ORCHESTRA
Strings: violins, violas, cellos, double bass
Woodwind: piccolos, flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons
Brass: trumpets, trombones, French horns, baritones and tubas
Percussion: bass drums, kettle drums, timpani, xylophones, piano,
bells, gongs, cymbals, chimes
The chorus
The chorus at the Met isn’t a consolation prize; it’s an intense, full-time job.
Unlike the principals, the 82 member chorus (sometimes bigger for operas like
Aida and Boris Godunov) must have perfect ensemble– anything less than
immaculate attacks and cut-offs would detract from the production. The Met
chorus has to learn large chunks of music for each opera, spend hours in
rehearsals and sometimes perform in several different operas a week! In each
opera, chorus members have to remember just as much as the soloists – the
only difference is that they sing together rather than on their own.
The dance corps
The Met has a regular corps of sixteen dancers. The Met can also call on more
than sixty associate dancers based on the style of dance required by each
opera, such as classical ballet, flamenco, or modern dance.
14
The stage manager
In order to keep all of the elements of opera under control, the stage manager
must be highly skilled in many different areas. This makes being an opera
stage manager a much tougher position than a theatrical stage manager. He or
she must follow the score throughout the opera to give all the technical cues,
as well as be an expert in stage craft, making sure that the lights, costumes,
sets, stage machinery and choreography work on stage. A stage manager must
also be able to cope with the enormous pressure of keeping such a complicated
operation running smoothly. There are usually assistant stage managers as
well, who not only assist the stage manager in cueing lights, special effects and
scene changes but make sure that artists, props, furniture, and costumes are
backstage when needed.
The crews
Many people assist the artistic designers in making their designs look great.
Stagehands set up the stage, while flymen raise and lower sets fixed to the
grid, or “fly” above the stage. Costumers, make-up artists and wig staff
make the principals look stage-ready.
But that’s not all!
In many respects, The Metropolitan Opera is a business just like any other. It
needs many administrators, publicity representatives, a technology support
staff, development advisors, and even security personnel. But because it is the
Met, there are some employees that you would never find at your average
business– like the archivists, Met Titles writers and the many people that work
together to make the weekly radio broadcasts happen. 1,500 people work for
the Met every season… no wonder it is considered one of the greatest opera
houses in the world!
15
THE COMPOSER
Giuseppe Verdi
The People’s Composer
Verdi was born in 1813. Though he was not a
peasant, his family wasn’t rich—his parents were
innkeepers in Roncole. Apprenticed to the town
organist at a young age, Verdi showed enough
aptitude to pursue studies in the nearby town of
Busseto. His education was underwritten by a
fatherly benefactor, greengrocer Antonio Barezzi.
Barezzi helped Verdi go to Milan, where he was
rejected by the conservatory on the grounds that he
was 19, which was considered too old, and not
proficient enough at keyboard playing. So, Verdi
studied privately with an accompanist at Milan’s
famous La Scala opera house and attended the opera
regularly. In 1836, Verdi married Barezzi's daughter
Margherita. Three years later, his first opera, Oberto,
was staged at La Scala.
Giuseppe Verdi
An Unfortunate Series of Events...
Then tragedy struck. At the beginning of April 1840 Verdi's little boy fell ill and
died. His young daughter died just two days later. In June his wife Margherita
fell ill, and before long she had also passed away. Verdi's entire life was
shattered. He returned home to Busseto. He even considered abandoning
music.
We Have a Winner!
It wasn't until two years later, when Verdi discovered the libretto Nabucco, that
his interest in opera revived. The libretto told the story of the exiled Hebrew
people, who eventually triumph over their oppressor, Babylonian king Nabucco,
and convert him to their religion. Verdi was moved by the powerful story, and
decided to make it into an opera. Verdi’s audience recognized the opera as a
political statement about Italy, which at that time was struggling to throw off
foreign rulers and unify as a single country under a single king. Nabucco
became a huge success, and Verdi's name became synonymous with the
movement to free and unify Italy.
16
Verdi the Musician
Verdi went on to compose some of the world’s most beloved operas, including
Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, Un Ballo in Maschera, Don Carlos, La Traviata, and Aida.
These operas are still performed year in and year out at opera houses across
the globe.
Verdi the Politician
Verdi played a major role in the Risorgimento (Reunification), the movement to
free Italy from foreign rule and unify the Italian Peninsula into a single nation.
Themes like abuse of power, political oppression, patriotism, and national unity
resonated through many of his operas. Even Verdi’s name became a
Risorgimento rallying cry. Nationalists forbidden to voice their support for
Victor Emmanuel, who they wanted to crown King of a unified Italy, chanted
“Viva VERDI!” Outsiders guessed they were fans of the composer, but the call
was an acronym for “Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’Italia”—Victor Emmanuel, King
of Italy.
In 1848, while Verdi was working at the Paris Opera House, revolts broke out
across Europe. Hearing that a revolution had started in Milan (an Italian city
ruled at that time by the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Verdi promptly returned
to Italy. When Italian unification was complete, Verdi became a member of the
first Italian national parliament.
No Rest for the Weary
At the age of 58, Verdi retired to his farm-estate Sant'Agata with his second
wife, the well-known soprano Giuseppina Strepponi. Over the next several
years he wrote his famous Requiem Mass and a string quartet. Much later, at
the age of 74, Verdi surprised the opera world with yet another success: Otello.
Based on Shakespeare’s play, it was considered by many experts the greatest
Italian opera ever written. Six years later, at the age of 80, he produced yet
another masterpiece, again from Shakespeare: Falstaff.
A Funeral Fit for a King
In the winter of 1901, at age 88, Verdi suffered a stroke in his hotel suite in
Milan. Although he requested a simple funeral, he was given one, in public, the
size and kind usually reserved for chiefs of state. At his funeral, thousands of
people lined the streets. Singers from La Scala sang the chorus “Va, pensiero”
(from Nabucco) in honor of the late composer. Amazingly, the thousands
present softly joined in singing the famous chorus.
17
BACKGROUND
Verdi, Shakespeare, and Macbeth
Verdi and Shakespeare
Verdi idolized Shakespeare. He was enthralled by the grand scope of
Shakespeare’s stories, their profound psychological insight, their fluid
juxtaposition of light and dark, high and low. Throughout his career, he strove
to emulate his hero’s epic achievements. He wrote to his music publisher
Ricordi: “Shakespeare was a realist, only he did not know it. He was a realist
by inspiration; we are realists by design, by calculation.”
Before Verdi, most operas based on Shakespeare changed the Bard’s stories to
conform to operatic tastes and conventions. For instance, in one Hamlet
adaptation, Gaetano Andreozzi’s 1792 Amleto, the curtain rises on the King of
Denmark’s funeral, where the royal funeral urn spontaneously bursts into
flame. Verdi’s approach was radically different. Far from squeezing
Shakespeare into an operatic template, he transformed opera to do justice to
Shakespeare. In Verdi’s Macbeth, we hear a young composer push the
boundaries of Italian opera to begin developing his unique dramatic voice.
Verdi’s Years in the Galleys
Today it may seem as if Verdi emerged from his musical education fully formed
and ready to revolutionize the world of opera. However, he spent the years after
his first hit Nabucco churning out as many commissions as possible. During
his time “in the galleys,” he wrote I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata, Ernani, I due
Foscari, Giovanna d’Arca, Alzira, Attila, and more. They weren’t all great operas:
he was later heard to remark on Alzira, “That one is really bad.”
The heavy workload often made Verdi physically ill. After the premiere of Attila,
his doctor ordered him to rest for six months. Verdi and his friend Andrea
Maffei, a poet who translated Schiller and Shakespeare into Italian, worked
together at Recoaro. Verdi had a commission for Florence’s Teatro della Pergola
on the horizon. Maffei suggested two subjects, Schiller’s Die Räuber (Verdi
would later set this as I Masnadieri) and Macbeth. The decision rested on the
singers at hand: a great baritone was available to play Macbeth.
The subject gave Verdi a new sense of purpose. “This tragedy is one of the
greatest creations of man!,” he wrote to his librettist Piave. “If we can’t do
something great with it, let us at least try to do something out of the
ordinary…” The composer brought plenty of ideas to the table. He later
remembered: “I made the synopsis myself; indeed I did more than the synopsis.
I wrote a full prose version of the drama, showing the distribution of the acts,
the scenes, the musical numbers and etc…then I gave it to Piave to versify.”
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A New Type of Opera
In many ways, Macbeth is a strange subject for a bel canto opera. It has no
central love story, no subplots, and no major role for a tenor. But Verdi was
determined to remain faithful to Shakespeare, no matter how many operatic
rules he had to break. One famous example is the first-act duettino for Macbeth
and Banquo. At this moment, when the witches tell Macbeth he will be King, it
would have been traditional to give Macbeth a grand double aria. Instead, Verdi
preserved the outline of Shakespeare’s original scene, giving Macbeth and
Banquo a series of realistic, broken lines as they react to the witches’
prophecies.
Verdi filled the opera with dark music to evoke the nocturnal world of the play:
the howl of the wind, the cry of the owl, and the otherworldly shrieks of
witches. Macbeth is not a typical bel canto tragedy, with standard-issue
musical “numbers” easy to cut and paste into different contexts. The opera’s
dark “tinta” colors everything, making it a more organic and distinctive work.
Not Quite Shakespeare
Verdi’s respect for Shakespeare did not keep him from seeing what he wanted
to see in Macbeth. Verdi transformed many aspects of the play, including the
main character. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a fundamentally good man. He’s a
loyal warrior, beloved by his king and respected by his friends. His internal
battle, against the temptations of the witches and his wife, is the heart of the
play. Verdi’s Macbeth, in contrast, is happily rotten from the beginning—a bad
man with an even worse wife. The lack of inner conflict changes the meaning of
the drama. When we watch Shakespeare’s Macbeth, we see a good man
becoming a monster. When we watch Verdi’s Macbeth, we witness a monster
destroying a country.
What inspired this metamorphosis? The answer may lie in the composer’s
politics. Verdi’s Nabucco was propelled to fame by the patriotic chorus “Va,
pensiero,” which perfectly captured his audiences’ frustration with the Austrian
occupation of their Italian home. Verdi became one of the leading figures of the
Risorgimento, the movement to unify Italy and free it from foreign domination.
He saw Macbeth as a symbol of his movement’s enemies: oppressive,
illegitimate, dangerous, rapacious, immoral, and even satanic. The chorus of
the oppressed Scots, “Patria oppressa,” was a patriotic call to arms.
Macbeth Onstage
The 1847 Florence premiere of Macbeth was successful and the opera soon
spread through Italy. Verdi dedicated the work to his father-in-law Barezzi, who
had supported his musical education and early career: “Here is this Macbeth
which I love more than all my other operas, and which I think the most worthy
present to you.”
Verdi made a number of revisions for an 1865 production at Paris’ Théâtre
Lyrique. Because it was traditional for all operas in Paris to include a ballet,
Verdi added a third act ballet for the witches. He also made several changes to
the score, adding new arias and duets, a revised chorus for the oppressed
Scots, and a new closing scene. But to Verdi’s astonishment, the Paris
production was a failure. He wrote to his French publisher Léon Escudier:
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“Taking everything into consideration, Macbeth is a fiasco. Amen. But I confess
that I did not expect it. I thought I had done pretty well, but it seems I was
wrong.” The opera, however, has stood the test of time; Macbeth is now
considered one of Verdi’s most important works.
The Final Masterpieces
Verdi’s love affair with Shakespeare did not end with Macbeth. Throughout his
career, his operas grew steadily more Shakespearian. In Un Ballo in Maschera,
Verdi experimented with adding comic relief to a dark tragedy. The epic
dramatic sweep of La Forza del Destino recalls Shakespeare’s history plays. But
perhaps Shakespeare’s most important influence on Verdi can be found in the
three-dimensional characters of works like Rigoletto and Don Carlos.
After Verdi’s official retirement, he decided to write a Shakespearian opera just
for himself. The groundbreaking Otello beautifully captured the spirit of
Shakespeare’s original. British playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw
marveled: “instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of
Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of an Italian
opera.”
The success of Otello inspired Verdi to compose Falstaff, his final masterpiece
and the ultimate expression of his operatic ideas. Here, Verdi achieved a truly
Shakespearian range of effects and emotions. Each dramatic moment is
painted with different colors, each thought with a different melody. The
orchestra rages, then laughs; voices soar, then giggle. Anger, love, grief, rage,
laughter, and serenity take the stage, then vanish. Verdi’s Falstaff celebrates
the vast and beautiful variety of life, and tries to embrace it all at once. Once
again, Shakespeare had helped Verdi discover new operatic horizons.
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THE MAKING OF
Macbeth
Casting the Composition
Verdi was known for writing vocal parts for certain
singers. He would choose which singer he wanted for a
specific character, and then assign them to the role.
Often, he would change the vocal part so that it would
suit the singer’s vocal range. Macbeth was no exception
to the rule. A famous baritone, Felice Varesi, played the
first Macbeth, with soprano Mariana Barbieri-Nini as the
voracious Lady Macbeth. Verdi was adamant that Lady
Macbeth should not be sung by a famed soprano of the
time, Eugenia Tadolini. He said that Tadolini’s voice was
far too perfect and pretty; he wanted Lady Macbeth to
sing with a stifled, hallow sound – in order to bring out
the dark side of her character.
Varesi:
The first Macbeth
Behind the Scenes
Verdi didn’t stop working when his music was written; he also influenced the
decisions of the costumes, sets, and acting. He was even particular about the
theater that opera would be performed in. He often wrote opinionated letters
on the topic:
“…For these operas – good or bad, as you please, but made with other ideas – a
superior intelligence is needed to regulate the costumes, the scenery, the
properties, the staging, etc., in addition to a musical interpretation beyond the
ordinary.” (Verdi in a letter to Cesare de Sanctus) 1
Appropriate characterization was especially important to Verdi. He wrote
letters to both of his star singers, Varesi and Barbieri Nini, giving them specific
instructions for their parts. In a letter to Varesi, he writes:
“I shall never cease recommending you to study closely the dramatic situation
and the words: the music comes of itself….Keep in mind the situation, which is
when you encounter the witches, who predict the throne for you. You are
bewildered and terrified at that announcement, but at the same time there is
born in you the ambition of reaching the throne.” 2
Such specific instructions from the composer were a new idea to the artists
and producers of 19th century opera. During his entire career, Verdi strived to
1
From Verdi’s Ideas on the Production of his Shakespeare Operas by Frank Walker. Proceedings of the Royal
Music Association, 76th Session (1949 – 1950)
2
From Verdi’s Ideas on the Production of his Shakespeare Operas by Frank Walker. Proceedings of the Royal
Music Association, 76th Session (1949 – 1950)
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bring the ideas of his operas to life; he worked endlessly to assist and guide the
production process for his works. He even sent the set designer to a lecture on
Scottish and English history.
36…37…38…
The first performance of Macbeth was at the Teatro della Pergola on March 14,
1847. The audience was enamored with the opera; Verdi received 38 curtain
calls for the successful work. Almost 20 years after the premier of Macbeth,
Verdi was asked to provide additional music for a production at the Théâtre
Lyrique in Paris. He added a ballet to the opera, and while he was at it, he
revised many sections of the original. The first performance of the “Parisian”
version of Macbeth was April 21, 1865. The Parisian Macbeth is the version
that is most commonly used today.
For information on the current new production of Macbeth, watch an
interview with director Adrian Noble at:
http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/newseason_video.aspx
The Teatro della Pergola. The first performance of Macbeth was staged here.
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MEET THE CHARACTERS
Lady Macbeth, Soprano: The manipulative wife of Macbeth, she plots
murder with her husband.
Her Lady-in-Waiting, Mezzo-Soprano: One of the many servants to
Lady Macbeth.
Hecate, Dancer: The head goddess of witchcraft.
Macbeth, Baritone: The title character, a general. After becoming the
Thane of Cawdor, he sets his ambitions high for the throne of Scotland, leading
to numerous murders.
Banquo (BAHN-kwo), Bass: A general and friend of Macbeth. He has been
told that his descendents will be kings.
Fleance (Flee-ahnce), Mute: Banquo’s son.
Macduff, Tenor: A Scottish nobleman. Macduff recognizes Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth as viscous murderers.
Malcolm, Tenor: The son of Duncan. After the murder of his father, he
flees to England.
Physician, Bass: The doctor to the Macbeth family, and a witness to Lady
Macbeth’s demise.
Duncan, Mute: The King of Scotland.
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THE STORY OF
Macbeth
Royalty to be
Scotland. Macbeth and Banquo, leaders of the Scottish army,
Act I
meet a group of witches who prophesy the future. They address
Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor and King of Scotland and tell Banquo that he will
be the father of kings. The two men try to learn more, but the witches vanish.
Messengers arrive with news that Duncan, the current King of Scotland, has
made Macbeth Thane of Cawdor. The first part of the witches’ prediction has
come true.
Greed, conspiracy, scandal, and death
In Macbeth’s castle, Lady Macbeth reads a letter from her husband telling her
of the events that have just transpired. She resolves to follow her ambitions
(“Vieni! t’affretta!”). A servant announces that Duncan will soon arrive at the
castle, and when Macbeth enters, she tells him that they must kill the king.
Duncan arrives, and Lady Macbeth invites him to spend the night. Macbeth
has a vision of a dagger, then leaves to commit the murder. On his return, he
tells his wife how the act has frightened him (“Fatal mia donna”). She replies
that he needs more courage. They both leave as Banquo enters with Macduff, a
nobleman, who discovers the murder. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth pretend to
be horrified and join the others in condemning the crime.
Hail King Macbeth!
Act II
Macbeth has become king. Duncan’s son, Malcolm, is suspected
of having killed his father and has fled to England. Worried about
the prophecy that Banquo’s children will rule, Macbeth and his wife now plan
to kill him and his son, Fleance, as well. As Macbeth leaves to prepare the
double murder, Lady Macbeth hopes that it will finally make the throne secure
(“La luce langue”). Outside the castle, assassins wait for Banquo, who appears
with his son, warning him of strange forebodings (“Come dal ciel precipita”).
Banquo is killed, but Fleance escapes.
An Apparition Appears
Lady Macbeth welcomes the court to the banquet hall and sings a drinking
song (“Si colmi il calice”), while Macbeth hears news that Banquo is dead and
his son has escaped. About to take Banquo’s seat, Macbeth has a terrifying
vision of the dead man. His wife is unable to calm her husband. The courtiers
wonder about the king’s strange behavior. Macduff vows to leave the country,
which is now ruled by criminals.
Three Tips of Advice
Act III
The witches gather again, and Macbeth enters their cave,
demanding more prophecies. Apparitions warn him to beware of Macduff and
assure him that “no man of woman born” can harm him, and that he will be
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invincible until Birnam Wood marches on his castle. In another vision, he sees
a procession of future kings, followed by Banquo. Horrified, Macbeth collapses.
The witches disappear, leaving him on the heath, where his wife finds him.
They resolve to kill Macduff and his family as well as Banquo’s son.
Act IV
Reclaim the Land!
On the English border, Macduff has joined the Scottish refugees
(Chorus: “Patria oppressa”). His wife and children have been killed (“Ah, la
paterna mano”). Malcolm appears with British troops and leads them to invade
Scotland. Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking, haunted by the horrors of what she
and her husband have done (“Una macchia”).
Birnam Wood Comes to Dunsinane
In another room in the castle, Macbeth awaits the arrival of his enemies. He
realizes that he will never live to a peaceful old age (“Pietà, rispetto, amore”).
Messengers bring news that Lady Macbeth has died, and that Birnam Wood
appears to be moving. English soldiers appear, camouflaged with its branches.
Macduff confronts Macbeth and tells him that he was not born naturally but
had a Caesarean birth. He kills Macbeth and proclaims Malcolm king of
Scotland.
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THE MUSIC OF
Macbeth
To Bel Canto, or Not to Bel Canto?
When it comes to the music of Verdi, it might be both! Bel Canto, or “beautiful
singing” is an Italian musical term that refers to the style of singing most
prominent during the late 16th century to the early 19th century. Many of the
popular composers preceding Verdi, including Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini,
wrote most of their works using this style of singing. Bel Canto singing
represents a skilled vocal technique, involving smooth lines, a clear upperregister, vocal agility, and a sweet vocal quality. This technique often allowed
singers to flow through difficult passages and fast scales, making them sound
easy and light.
Macbeth was written in 1846-1847, which was just after the height of bel canto
singing. While some features of the bel canto style can be heard in the arias of
Macbeth, Verdi made a decisive request: he wanted Lady Macbeth to sound
rough, dark, and powerful – anything but pretty. This certainly did not fit the
bel canto mold, but it did dramatize the character of Lady Macbeth.
Throughout the opera, references to the grotesque character of Lady Macbeth
are made through her singing, but some stylistic features of bel canto can also
be heard:
•
Listen to Lady Macbeth’s aria, La luce langue (CD 1, Track 14). The
menacing tone of voice can be heard through the first half of the aria;
this is not considered bel canto.
•
Towards the end of the aria, beginning with the new verse of O voluttà del
soglio! there is a sudden change of style. Lady Macbeth begins singing in
typical bel canto fashion as she marvels at her new position on the
throne.
“Serve the Poet”
During his lifetime, Verdi was well-known for his involvement in the production
of his operas. He held a dominating role in the creation of sets, costumes, and
special effects. For the production of Macbeth, his endless precision and
attention to details drove the cast and crew to an intense frustration. It is said
that for a famous duet in the First Act of Macbeth, Verdi rehearsed the singers
over 150 times!
•
Listen to the duet between Lady Macbeth and Macbeth (CD 1, Track 810). The duet begins with an aria by Macbeth, where he sees a dagger
before him, before he commits his first murder. The dark music is
reflective of Macbeth’s murderous thoughts.
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•
When Lady Macbeth joins Macbeth for the duet (CD 1 Track 9), the
music slowly transforms into a fast, nervous melody. Lady Macbeth
mocks Macbeth, as he guiltily recounts his action.
•
As the music changes again (CD 1 Track 10), the uppity rush of notes
brings a certain irony to the scene; Macbeth and his wife are brushing-off
their shady deed.
Because of his influence in the new productions of his operas, singers were
given specific directions – straight from the composer. For Verdi, it was crucial
that the singers emulate the essence of their character. He often told them to
“Serve the poet before the composer.” Verdi wanted the singers to pay special
attention to the libretto of the opera: by understanding the words and being a
convincing character, the music could flow beneath the singer, creating an
environment for high drama.
•
Listen carefully to Lady Macbeth’s aria, Vieni! t’affreta! (CD 1, Track 5).
The strings waltz beneath her melody, and eventually join her, playing
the same line as the vocal part.
Musical Characters
In his conviction that the music should serve the words, Verdi carefully
orchestrated his opera to do just that. The orchestra part follows the libretto
and the singer, often adhering to a theme. The three main characters in
Macbeth are Macbeth, the witches, and Lady Macbeth.
The witches in Macbeth are always introduced with a similar style of musical
writing, or thematic material. In the first act, the witches come together to
announce the first set of prophesies for Macbeth and Banquo.
•
Listening to the music of the witches (CD 1, Track 1), it sounds heavy,
dark, and extremely loud. Verdi uses brass instruments and percussion
to make strong statements, creating an atmosphere for their entrance.
•
When the witches sing, the music is short, staccato, and dry; the violins
play quick trills and runs, adding to the sinister setting.
•
Each time the witches return to the scene, it is with the same music (CD
1, Track 4).
•
The witches are introduced a final time, in Act Three (CD 2, Track 1).
The musical theme of the witches is used here as well; intense dynamics
create lightning and thunder, as the witches sing along to a melody of
short and crisp words.
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THE
PRODUCTION
PROCESS
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WHAT TO WATCH…
On Stage
As guests in the Metropolitan Opera house, we are lucky enough to watch as
the art of hundreds of singers, musicians, dancers, actors, designers and
stagehands comes to life onstage. During your trip it is important to
understand and respect all the immensely hard work that goes into the
production you are watching.
Opera singers
What? No microphones?!
The Met auditorium is 72 ft tall, 100 ft wide and 230 ft wide. The auditorium
alone is like a seven-story building that covers one quarter of a city block.
Opera singers make themselves heard through the whole house, over a full
orchestra – without amplification. There are no microphones hidden in the set!
Instead, opera singers use their training and the acoustics of the building to
project their voices. In order to do this, opera singers train for longer than
doctors. This is partly because they are trying to isolate and train their vocal
cords: a mechanism about the size of your little finger nail. This is made
doubly hard by the fact that unlike other musicians, singers can’t see their
instrument, so all of their learning has to be by sensation.
Amazing feats of memory
Opera singers have to memorize several hours of music for each opera. Operas
are usually performed in the language in which they were written, which
means that opera singers must perform in – and understand – Italian, German,
French, Russian; even Czech!
Phew!
Opera singers do all of these things while they are onstage under hot lights,
performing blocking that can be awkward or difficult. Opera singers have to be
able to sing lying down, running, jumping, dancing and performing all kinds of
other tricky moves. Period costumes like hoop skirts, cloaks and corsets can
also be hot and uncomfortable.
Who sings what?
Here is a very rough guide to the different voice types, starting with the highest
(soprano), going right down to the very deepest (bass):
Soprano: Sopranos have the highest voices. They usually play the heroines of
an opera. This means they have lots of show-off arias to sing, and get to fall in
love and / or die more often than other female voice types.
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Mezzo soprano, or mezzo: This is the middle female voice, and has a darker,
warmer sound than the soprano. Mezzos spend a lot of their time playing
mothers and villainesses, although sometimes they get to play seductive
heroines. Mezzos also play young men on occasion – these are called trouser
roles, for obvious reasons.
Contralto, or alto: The lowest female voice. Contralto is a rare voice type.
Altos usually portray older females or character parts like witches and old
gypsies.
Counter tenor: Also known as alto, this is the highest male voice, and another
vocal rarity. Counter tenors sing with about the same range as a contralto.
Counter tenor roles are most common in baroque opera, but some more
modern composers write parts for counter tenors too.
Tenor: If there are no counter tenors on stage, then the highest male voice in
opera is tenor. Tenors are usually the heros who get the girl or die horribly in
the attempt.
Baritone: The middle male voice. In comic opera, the baritone is often the
ringleader of whatever naughtiness is going on, but in tragic opera, he’s more
likely to play the villain.
Bass: The lowest male voice. Low voices usually suggest age and wisdom in
serious opera, and basses usually play Kings, fathers, and grandfathers. In
comic opera basses often portray old characters that are foolish or laughable.
The conductor
The conductor is in charge of keeping the orchestra and all the singers
together. He or she decides on the speed (tempo) for the music and decides
which parts of the music to emphasize and bring out. It’s also the conductor’s
job to achieve the right balance of sound, making sure that the singer can be
heard above the orchestra. The conductor keeps time throughout the opera
and has the last word on all questions of musical interpretation.
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The orchestra
The orchestra plays the music of the opera in the pit. As a general rule of
thumb, orchestras are divided into the following sections:
Strings: including violins, violas, cellos, double bass
Woodwind: including oboe, clarinet, flute and bassoon
Brass: including trumpets, trombones, tuba, French horns
Percussion: including bass drum, kettle drum, timpani, and xylophone
Often opera orchestras include special effects specific to the opera being
performed. Sometimes you can see unusual instruments in the pit. Some that
have been used at the Met in recent years are airplane propellers, type writers,
and guillotines!
The chorus
Most operas have a chorus. The chorus at the Met have to learn large chunks
of music for each opera, and sometimes perform in several different operas a
week! In each opera, chorus members have to remember just as much as the
soloists – it’s just that they sing together rather than on their own.
The audience
Last, but my no means least, are the audience. Hundreds of artists work every
day just to produce spectacular, beautiful, exciting opera for their audiences.
You can show that you appreciate their hard work (whether you like the opera
or not!) with your applause – and with your politeness during the performance.
Being quiet during the opera is not only polite to the performers – it’s a gift to
your fellow audience members, and it means you won’t miss any of the action.
Hurray! Bravo!
Opera is all about extremes and this extends to the audience too. Although
you should be as quiet as a mouse during all the action, there are points at
which you can clap and yell ‘bravo’ at the top of your voice. Here are some
guidelines:
•
•
•
•
Definitely clap when the conductor comes out to his podium (but not while
the orchestra is tuning up!)
Clap when the curtain comes down and when performers take a bow
You can also applaud if the conductor stops the orchestra for applause after
an aria – but it’s always rude to applaud over the orchestra!
If you really love a particular singer’s performance, by all means yell at
them. You yell ’bravo’ to a man, or ‘brava’ to a woman. This lets singers
know that you especially loved their performance.
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Absolutely NO whispering during the performance!
There is no whispering or talking allowed inside the opera house. This means
not to discuss the opera, not when the orchestra gets loud; not even to ask to
borrow binoculars.
Part of the reason that we, the audience, can hear opera singers so clearly
without microphones is that the Met Opera House has incredible acoustics.
This means that when sound comes from the stage, it bounces around the
house and reaches your ears without getting lost in dead space. In other
words, the house itself is a huge echoing tunnel that amplifies sound. In the
same way as you can hear everything that the orchestra and singers perform,
they can hear every whisper, candy wrapper, and cough in the audience very,
very clearly. It is a fact that if you stand on stage at the Met, you can hear
anyone at the back of the audience whisper!
Acoustics at the Met: Did you know...
• There are no hard corners in the Met opera house. Hard corners eat up
sound, whereas the curved surfaces at the Met reflect sound back to the
audience, so that none is lost in transit.
• Even the chandeliers at the Met are designed to bounce sound back towards
the audience!
• All of the wood veneer in the Met auditorium comes from a single African
rosewood tree. This means that all of the wood resonates at exactly the
same frequency, amplifying sound. It’s as if the auditorium itself is a huge
musical instrument!
Quick checklist for enjoying opera
Before the show:
• Read the story
• Work out how long the opera is
• Turn your cell phone off – along with anything else that might beep
• Have some food
During the show:
• No snacks, food, gum, or drinks allowed inside the auditorium
• No eating, chewing gum or drinking during the performance
• No cell phones, beeping watches, radios, cassette recorders or cameras
• No feet on seats of railings
• No clapping out of turn
At the end of the show:
• Clap as much as you like and yell bravo at your favorite singer!
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WHO TO WATCH…
Biographies of the Cast and Crew
Maria Guleghina (soprano): Lady Macbeth
Maria Guleghina began her professional career at the State
Opera in Minsk, and a year later made her debut in La Scala
as Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera under Maestro Gavazzeni
opposite Luciano Pavarotti. Her voice of great power and
warmth, and her immense acting ability made her a
permanent and welcome guest everywhere. She is particularly
noted for her interpretation of the title role in Tosca. Her
repertoire also includes the title role in Aida, Manon Lescaut,
Norma, Fedora, as well as Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, Abigaille
in Nabucco, Leonora in Il Trovatore, Oberto and La Forza del
Destino, Elvira in Ernani, Elisabetta in Don Carlo, Amelia in
Simon Boccanegra, and Un Ballo in Maschera, Lucrezia in I due Foscari,
Desdemona in Otello, Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana, Maddalena in Andrea
Chenier, Lisa in Pique Dame and Odabella in Attila.
Maria Guleghina has performed many solo recitals including appearances at La
Scala, Gran Teatre del Liceu, Lille, Sao Paolo, Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall,
Suntory Hall, Osaka, Kyoto, Hong Kong, Rome and Moscow to name a few!
Many of the productions in which she has appeared have been broadcast on
the radio as well as televised, and she has performed with many of the world’s
leading singers and conductors, in venues all around the globe. Maria has been
the recipient of many prizes for her contribution to opera performance, and was
recently appointed onto the Honorary Board of the International Paralympics
Committee.
Dimitri Pittas (tenor): Macduff
Tenor Dmitri Pittas has performed many roles at
opera theaters around the world. He has
previously performed at Opéra de Bordeaux, Opera
Leipzig, l’Opéra de Montréal and The Metropolitan
Opera. At The Met Opera, Pittas has performed in
Don Carlo, Lucia di Lamermoor, Romeo et Juliette,
Fidelio, and Parsifal.
Having recently completed his studies at The Metropolitan Opera Lindemann
Young Artist Development Program, Pittas has earned many awards, including
a George Landon award and the prestigious Vienna Prize. In 2004, Pittas took
first price in the Licia Albanese/Puccini Foundation Competition and also
earned first prize in the 2006 Elardo Competition. Most recently, he received a
Richard Tucker Career Grant in 2006.
33
Željko Lučić (baritone): Macbeth
Baritone Željko Lučić was born in Yugoslavia and
made his operatic debut in 1993 as Silvio in I
Pagliacci in Novi Sad. Since then, he has enjoyed
international success at opera houses throughout
the world. Lučić made his debut at The Met as
Barnaba in La Gioconda this past year.
During the 2006-07 opera season, Lučić performed
with the Dallas Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, and
the Vienna Staatsoper. He also appeared with many
orchestras, including the Hessicher Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra, Belgrade
Filharmony, and RTB Symphony Orchestra. Having studied with famed mezzo
Biserka Cvejic, Lučić has won many awards, including first prize at the 1997
International Competition Fransisco Viñas in Barcelona.
He has also been a member of Oper Frankfurt’s ensemble since 1998, where he
has performed roles in Faust, La Traviata, Volo di notte, Falstaff, Macbeth, Les
Huguenots, among many others. This past season, Lučić performed in La
Traviata, Pique Dame, Simon Boccanegra, and Un ballo in Maschera.
John Relyea (bass-baritone): Banquo
Bass-baritone John Relyea has achieved international
fame as an opera singer. He has appeared in the
world’s finest opera houses including San Fransisco,
Santa Fe Opera, Seattle Opera, Royal Opera House,
Paris Opera, Munich State Opera, and the Vienna State
Opera.
This past season, Relyea made his debut at the Vienna
State Opera as Escamillo in Carmen. He also returned
to New York to sing at The Met in Rodelinda and Lucia di Lammermoor. He also
performed as Banquo in Macbeth in Covent Garden.
Active as a recitalist, Relyea has presented performances in New York at Weill
Hall and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has also performed at Wigmore
Hall in London, the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, and the University
of Chicago Presents series. In collaboration with opera theaters and
professional orchestras, Relyea has recorded with Emi and Deutche
Grammaphon. As an alumnus of the Merola Opera Program and a former Adler
Program at the San Fransisco Opera, Relyea received a Richard Tucker award
in 2003.
34
James Levine, Conductor
Since his 1971 company debut leading Tosca, Maestro
Levine has conducted over 2,000 operatic performances at
the Met—more than any other conductor in the company’s
history. Of the 81 operas he has led here, 14 were
company premieres (including Moses und Aron, La
Cenerentola, Bluebeard’s Castle, Porgy and Bess, Oedipus
Rex and Lulu). He also led the world premieres of
Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles and Harbison’s The
Great Gatsby. This season, Maestro Levine will conduct 43
performances at the Met, including the opening-night
premiere of Madama Butterfly, new productions of Il
Trittico and Orfeo, the new abridged English-language
version of The Magic Flute, and revivals of Idomeneo, Don Carlo, Die Zauberflöte
and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. He also appears at Carnegie Hall with the
MET Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra, and at Carnegie’s Zankel
Hall with the MET Chamber Ensemble. Maestro Levine returns to the Boston
Symphony Orchestra for his third season as music director, and following
Tanglewood and Verbier Festival residencies next July and August, takes the
BSO on tour to Europe for the first time for two weeks of concerts at the
summer festivals.
Adrian Noble, Director
Adrian Noble has worked extensively in theater in
England and across the globe, most prestigiously as
Artistic Director and Chief Executive at the Royal
Shakespeare Company. He was born and educated in
England, attending college at the University of Bristol.
Although his production of Macbeth is new to the Met,
Noble is very experienced in directing the plays of
Shakespeare, including directing the theatrical version of
Macbeth in 1988 and 1993.
Many of his other
productions include: The Recruiting Officer, Edinburgh
Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Scotland. The Forest, Royal
Shakespeare Company (RSC), The Duchess of Malfi, A
Doll's House, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Measure for Measure, The
Comedy of Errors, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Henry V, The Desert Air, and
As You Like It, as well as musicals in London’s West End.
35
Mark Thompson, Set & Costume Designer
Mark Thompson is well established in the realms of theater
and opera. His theater designs have been seen at the Queen’s
Theatre (London), Royal National Theatre (London),
Haymarket Theatre (London), Vivian Beaumont Theatre (New
York), and the Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles).
In opera, Thompson’s designs include Ariadne auf Naxos,
Falstaff, Hansel and Gretel, Montag aus Licht, Peter Grimes,
Queen of Spades, and The Two Widows. These operas have
been produced internationally at Scottish Opera, La Scala,
Opera North, The Metropolitan Opera,
English National
Opera, and the Royal Opera House.
Thompson has been awarded several Laurence Olivier Theatre Awards, two
London Critics Circle Theatre Awards, and has twice been nominated for
Broadway’s Tony Award.
Jean Kalman, Lighting Designer
French designer Jean Kalman has been working
in the field since 1979. He has designed for
theater and opera in France, Great Britain,
Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, and the United
States.
In theater, Kalman’s work has appeared in shows
such as Peter Brook’s The Cherry Orchard and The
Tempest; Pierre Audi’s Tourist Guide, and Undivine
Comedy; Richard Eyre’s Richard III, and White
Chameloen, and numerous other productions.
Kalman has illuminated operatic performances of Turandot, La Bohème,
Madame Butterfly, Nabucco, Eugene Onegin, Salome, Der Rosenkavalier, Orfeo
ed Euridice, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, and Regina, to name a few. Works for
the operatic stage have taken Kalman to Covent Garden, Opera North,
Glyndebourne, Paris, Saito Kinen Festival, the Aix-en-Provence Festival,
Amsterdam Opera, Lyon Opera, and the Scottish Opera.
Kalman won Olivier awards for Best Lighting for Richard III and White
Chameleon (both at the National Theatre) and the 2004 Evening Standard
Award for Best Lighting for Festen (West End).
36
WHEN TO WATCH…
An Average Production Timeline
5-10 years in advance
General manager chooses operas for the season;
designers, singers and conductors are scheduled
for each production.
3-5 years in advance
Stage rehearsal schedule drafted.
2-3 years in advance
Design team submits sketches and/or models
for a new production to the technical director.
1 year in advance
Tech rehearsals begin for a new production.
5-6 weeks in advance
New productions begin rehearsing in practice
rooms.
About 2 weeks in advance
New productions begin rehearsing on the main
stage with piano. During piano rehearsals,
singers wear street clothes and work mainly with
the stage director. The chorus begins to learn
their blocking.
About 1 week in advance
New productions begin rehearsing with the
orchestra. By this time, the lights and sets are
ready, and costumes are usually worn. During
the orchestra rehearsals, the conductor makes
most of the changes, while artistic designers put
the finishing touches on the production.
2 nights before opening
Final dress rehearsal– a full run-through with
full costumes, sets, orchestration, and blocking.
Changes rarely need to be made at this point.
OPENING NIGHT
37
ACTIVITIES
• TO INTRODUCE YOUR STUDENTS TO OPERA
Brainstorm
Peter Brook Opera Game
• TO INTRODUCE YOUR STUDENTS TO Macbeth
The Story
Storytelling
What Drives the Characters?
The Music
Saturation Music
What the Music Tells Us
Themes and Music
Context
Create an In-house Study Guide
The World of the Opera
Cast Your Own Opera!
Themes & Issues
Coffee Talk
Two Thumbs Up!
• TO INTRODUCE YOUR STUDENTS TO THE PRODUCTION
PROCESS
Adaptation
Lingo
Ch-ch-ch-changes
The Price Is Right
Style Points!
• RESEARCH IDEAS
38
ACTIVITIES TO INTRODUCE
YOUR STUDENTS TO OPERA
Objective: Students become familiar with opera as an art form—its
conventions, its history, and its continuing potential to touch lives.
Brainstorm!
Time required: at least 10 minutes
Resources required: 5 or 6 large sheets of paper and
markers
Purpose: To explode opera myths!
If opera is a new experience for your class, brainstorming can be a nice way to
introduce them to it. Split your class into 5 or 6 groups, with a large sheet of
paper per group. In their groups, have them write all the words that they can
think of associated with the word opera for 5 minutes – or as long as the group
needs (i.e. screamy singing, fat ladies, Viking helmets, shattering glass,
grandparents, etc.). When the time is up, have students walk around the room
and look at what other groups have written or select a group representative to
share with the class.
Extensions of this activity:
• If you sing in daily life, when and where do you sing? (While you’re
getting ready in the morning? When you’re happy?)
• Discuss how opera singers’ voices are not amplified and how they must
project.
• Introduce students to opera vocabulary.
39
Peter Brook Opera Game
Time required: 15+ minutes
Resources required: none
Purpose: To discover what it feels like to be an opera singer
English director, Peter Brook, famous for his theatre and opera productions
worldwide, developed this game to help actors and young singers understand the
many tasks opera singers must perform at once.
•
•
•
•
Pick four students: one opera singer and three assistants (A, B and C)
The opera singer and A should face each other. A will make a series of
simple movements, which the opera singer should mimic as closely as
possible, being A’s mirror
B is responsible for asking the opera singer simple mathematical equations.
The opera singer must answer these, while still mirroring A
C is responsible for asking the opera singer a series of personal questions
(what’s your favorite place, favorite color, etc). The opera singer must
answer questions from B and C, whilst being A’s mirror
This game gives students a taste of what it’s like for opera singers to follow
blocking (physical movement), sing music (math) and make artistic and
emotional decisions (personal questions) all at the same time.
Things to watch out for:
• B and C have a tendency to become very polite, alternating questions. Have
them try different ways of asking the questions. They should repeat them if
they are not receiving answers!
• The opera singer will find it easier to follow A if looking directly into A’s eyes,
allowing the movements to be in their peripheral vision.
• A’s movements should be smooth and slow – the aim is to allow the opera
singer to follow, not to make them mess up!
40
ACTIVITIES TO INTRODUCE
YOUR STUDENTS TO
Macbeth
Objectives:
•
•
•
Students immerse themselves in the story and music of the focus opera.
Students put the focus opera in historical context and learn about its social
and/or musicological significance.
Students identify the themes and issues at the heart of the opera.
THE STORY
Storytelling
Resources required: “Meet the Characters” and “The Story of Macbeth” (pages
23/24).
Purpose: To help students identify with the characters and their dilemmas; to
become familiar with story construction.
•
•
•
•
•
Introduce the main characters
Have the students to whom you have assigned characters sit or stand in
accordance with their characters’ relationships; have the students themselves
guess what relationships exist between the characters based on what they
already know.
Ask the class what they think will happen when these characters meet. How
will one character’s wishes affect the fate of another? (This could be a
discussion, or you could ask them to write down what they think will happen
in the story).
Use the students’ ideas to introduce the full synopsis.
Stop at crucial turning points in the plot and ask the students what they think
will happen to the characters next.
41
What drives the characters?
Resources required: none
Purpose: To help the students identify with the characters and their
dilemmas; To develop critical thinking skills through character analysis
Macbeth
Macbeth meets three witches that hail him as Thane of Glamis, Thane of
Cawdor, and the future King of Scotland. Eagerness brings death upon those
who stand in his way. Scandal and murder eventually lead to his demise.
• Do you think Macbeth should have waited for things to take their own
course, rather than murder?
• What precautions should Macbeth have taken to ensure a successful
plan?
• What would have happened if Macbeth had not listened to his wife and
refused to kill the king?
Lady Macbeth
Lady Macbeth is perhaps to most eager for power. She devises the plan to
murder King Duncan upon his arrival to the castle.
• Was Lady Macbeth wise in choosing Duncan as the first victim? Should
it have been someone else?
• Is the plan for power driven by Lady Macbeth, or Macbeth himself?
• Who is the true villain of this opera? Does the villain feel guilt?
Banquo
Banquo is also told by the witches that he will join in the line of royalty.
Without a chance to rise to the throne, his life is cut short by Macbeth’s plan.
• Is Banquo’s character similar to Macbeth’s, or the opposite?
• Why is it that Banquo’s ghost appears to haunt Macbeth, rather than
King Duncan’s?
The Three Witches
The witches announce to Macbeth and Banquo that their future lies in royalty.
Macbeth later returns to the witches to learn of his future, after killing King
Duncan. In questioning them, the witches reply: he should beware of Macduff,
that no man of woman born can harm him, and that he is invincible until the
Forest of Birnam Wood rises against him.
• Do you think the witches are initially announcing Macbeth’s fate, or are
they purposefully instigating a turn of events? If investigating, what
would be their motivation?
• Do you think the witches know Macbeth will commit murder to pursue
the throne?
42
The Music
Saturation Music
Resources required: CD of the opera
Purpose: To familiarize your students with the music
From an activity by Lou Barella, Brooklyn High School for Arts and Music
Some time before you begin preparing your students to see Macbeth, play the
music of the overture as often as you can: in the background while students
are entering the classroom, while they are leaving class, etc. Refuse to answer
questions about the music. Instead, pique the students’ interest by asking
them to guess what the music might be depicting. Later, when you introduce
the music, they will already recognize it.
What the music tells us
Resources required: Blackboard / whiteboard, recording of the opera
Purpose: To help students identify with the characters and their dilemmas by
responding creatively to the opera; To develop critical listening skills
Based on an activity by Mike Minard, A MacArthur Barr Middle School
•
Before introducing the story of the opera to your students, pose this
question on the board,
If this piece of music were a person, what would the person be like?
•
Then play the overture to Macbeth for the class. While your students are
listening to the excerpt, they should write every adjective that comes to
mind that describes the music and personifies the sound. The words are
then offered by the class and written on the board.
•
Use the students’ descriptions to introduce the premise of the opera and
the characters.
43
Extensions of this activity:
•
Play the excerpt for your students again. What do they think is the
setting? What’s the story? Ask them to justify their guesses.
•
Use the students’ guesses to introduce the story of Macbeth. Then, listen
to the music a final time, following along with the translations provided
in the back of the book.
Themes and Music
Resources required: “About the Music” (page 26)
Purpose: To become familiar with story and dramatic construction; To analyze the
music
Macbeth thrives on several themes (ex: ambition, gender roles, prophecy, tyranny)
and Verdi’s choice of music to represent these themes is part of what makes this
opera so outstanding. It might be hard to ascribe a certain sound or style to each
theme, but it is certainly possible to listen to music that coincides with these
themes and describe its power.
•
•
•
•
•
Brainstorm with the class the themes of the opera.
Select a few parts of the story/opera that feature important themes.
Listen to the music used during these moments, and describe how you
think it helps to serve the text. What is happening in the orchestra? Does a
particular instrument serve a special purpose? How is the voice being used?
Compare and contrast the themes in the opera and the music used to
intensify them.
What would happen if the music was altered in this section of the opera?
How could the theme change the dramatic action? What could be done
musically to make the theme stronger/weaker?
44
Context
Create an in-house study guide
Purpose: To understand the story and background of the opera; to develop
research and essay writing skills
Based on an activity by Anthony Marshall, Baldwin Senior High School
Create your own “in-house” study guide for Macbeth as a class.
will write one article on an aspect of the story, characters,
background. Decide as a class what you will need to cover
balanced insight into the opera. When students have completed
collect them in a book and distribute copies to the whole class.
Each student
composer or
to provide a
their articles,
The world of the opera
Resources required: Take a look in the Activities Section for research ideas.
Purpose: To develop research skills and make connections to another
historical era
Have students imagine they live in the locale of the opera at the time of its
occurrence. How would they 1) travel, 2) contact a friend, 3) find out about
daily events, 4) entertain themselves, 5) eat, sleep, and keep warm? etc. This
could be the basis for a classroom discussion or a research project.
45
Cast Your Own Opera!
Resources: “The Making Of” (page 24), “The Music Of” (page 26)
Purpose: To make the opera more immediate; To understand and apply music
vocabulary
Verdi had a lifelong love of Shakespeare, and once said to his publisher Léon
Escudier, “He is a favourite poet of mine, whom I have had in my hands from
earliest youth and whom I read and reread constantly.” Verdi’s three
Shakespearean operas, Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff, have inspired other
settings to these great works. We also know that Verdi was very particular
about choosing who would sing in his productions, and even had these people
in mind as he was writing the music. If you were to score your own version of
Macbeth, who would you want to sing in your production?
•
•
•
•
•
Using the Internet, library, and other sources (magazines, newspapers,
etc.), research a number of different opera singers.
Read the singers’ biographies, and take special note of the roles that they
have sung. Do they specialize in the music of any particular composer
(i.e. Verdi) or style (i.e. bel canto), setting (i.e. Shakespearean), etc.?
If you can, find a recording of this person singing (check LP records,
cassette tapes, CDs, videos, DVDs, or even iTunes).
Based on what you have learned from reading about and/or listening to
the opera singer, decide whether or not you would cast them in your
production. What is attractive about their voice? Do they fit the qualities
you are looking for in your opera production?
Present your findings to the class.
46
THEMES AND ISSUES
Coffee talk
Resources required: None
Purpose: To help students identify with the characters and their dilemmas by
responding creatively to the opera; To develop critical thinking skills; To
develop essay writing skills.
Discuss the themes of the operas and have students write stories based on
their own lives connected to these themes. Have they ever felt the strong
manipulative influence of another? Have they ever made a secret plan to get
something accomplished? How did it feel?
Two thumbs up!
Resources Required: Optional—video camera.
Purpose: To help students think critically about the central themes and issues
of an opera
•
•
•
Divide students into small groups and encourage them to discuss the
central themes of the opera.
Students should then script a distillation of this conflict as a movie
trailer or commercial and rehearse the skit. If possible, make a video.
Groups then present and discuss their interpretations with the class.
47
ACTIVITIES TO INTRODUCE YOUR
STUDENTS TO
THE PRODUCTION PROCESS
Objectives:
• Students learn to recognize and discuss the choices made by
directors, designers, conductors, and singers.
• Students will discuss why choices are made by identifying the
vision at a production’s core and critiquing the effectiveness of its
translation onstage.
• Students discuss how production decisions like schedule, cast
and budget influence artistic choices.
• Students will be able to make and justify their own artistic
choices.
Adaptation
Resources: Movies, books, scripts, CDs, etc…
Purpose: To show students a range of interpretive possibilities.
Show students any set of three interpretations of any one central work. You
could discuss treatments of the same subject in different media:
Text of Death in Venice
Selection from Britten’s Death in Venice
Film version—Love and Death on Long Island; Venice, Venice; Death in Venice
Text of Macbeth
Selection from Verdi’s Macbeth
Film version—Scotland, PA; Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood; Polanski’s Tragedy of Macbeth
The text of Romeo and Juliet
A clip from a film version—Luhrmann or Zeffirelli
A selection from Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette
Text of Hamlet
A clip from The Lion King
A film version of Hamlet—take your pick.
Text of Taming of the Shrew
A selection from Kiss Me, Kate
A clip from Ten Things I Hate About You
48
You could also compare treatments of the same subject in opera:
Gounod’s Faust
Boito’s Mephistopheles
Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust
Monteverdi’s Orpheus
Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice
Peri’s Euridice
Discuss the differences and similarities between the interpretations. Is it
possible to change the form of a work and maintain the central message? Does
the audience approach different media in different ways? Are some more
difficult than others? Do some fit the subject matter better than others? This
could also be a written assignment or the focus of small-group discussions.
Lingo!
Resources: Multiple recordings of the opera. See Resources for suggestions.
Purpose: To recognize artistic choices; To develop critical listening, viewing,
and speaking skills.
As it takes many times listening to a piece of music to fully familiarize oneself,
this activity is best as a written assignment.
•
•
•
Students familiarize themselves with a five-minute (or so) excerpt from
Macbeth, listening to it many times until they have it memorized.
Following a score is preferable, but if not possible, students should
diagram what they perceive to be the form of the selection.
Next, listen to two other recordings. What is different in each of the
recordings? Consider tempo, dynamics, balance, instrumentation,
articulation, etc. What are choices that each group has made? What are
the inflexible aspects of the composition?
Discuss the relative merits of each recording. Which are most in keeping
with the expectations of the period? What works in each interpretation?
What doesn’t work? The focus should be on concise, objective
statements about each group’s interpretation.
Extension of this activity:
If possible, watch a DVD. How have the director and composer interpreted the
libretto and the music? What are they trying to emphasize? What are they
trying to downplay? Does the production’s vision correspond to your
conception of the central themes and images of the work?
49
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Resources: Gallery of previous production images in the Resources section
Purpose: To recognize and critique an artistic vision
Display images from previous productions for your students, or play scenes
from DVDs.
•
•
•
•
Have your students discuss or write down the choices that they think
that designers have made.
Have students characterize the feel of a production using a set of
adjectives. Is the production dark? Symbolic? Exaggerated? Frivolous?
Colorful?
Encourage students to try to figure out why designers may have created
a production with that feel. What might the designers think is at the
core of this work? (e.g. Is the production angular and sparse to show that
it is a story for all ages, not a dated Romantic work? Is it angular and
sparse so that external landscapes are as distorted as the internal
landscapes of the extreme characters?) There are no wrong answers, but
there are educated guesses.
Discuss whether the production is making a bold statement or not. Is
the vision unified, or do some choices still seem random?
50
The price is right!
Resources: None
Purpose: To learn about the complexity of getting an opera onstage
If a production of Macbeth were to be sponsored by a product or company,
what or who would it be and why? Write a proposal to the president of the
company you have chosen explaining why you think it would be a good idea for
them to give funding to a production of Macbeth. Note: students must point
out what the company would gain by sponsoring the opera, not what the
production itself would gain from sponsorship.
Style Points
Time Required: 30 minutes
Resources Required: The story of Macbeth
Purpose: For students to make and justify their own artistic ideas
One of the most exciting aspects of opera directing is putting a new spin on
classic stories. A director’s choices about setting, blocking and design concept
can greatly influence the meaning of a work. Have your students create a
production of Macbeth using their own ideas. Your students should
concentrate on ways they can provide a deeper understanding of the characters
and central themes of the opera through their choices.
•
•
•
•
•
Ask your class to identify central themes in Macbeth (for example: family
feud, battle of the sexes, young vs. old, etc.) As they brainstorm, write
their responses on the board.
Have your class split into small groups. Each group should choose one
theme to concentrate on. Alternatively, students could do this
individually for a more long-term project.
When they have chosen a theme, ask students to brainstorm adjectives
that describe how their theme makes them feel (for example: bold, angry,
forlorn, on edge, daring, adventurous, powerless, etc.)
Have your students create a unified design concept inspired by their
theme-derived adjectives. Consider: shapes, colors, building materials,
angles, locations, abstract vs. realistic, quality of light, large space vs.
small, rake, easy or hard to navigate, etc. For instance, a “bold”
production might feature bright colors, sharp angles and smooth
surfaces. An “angry” production might feature dark colors and worn
furniture.
Ask your students to create set, costume and lighting designs for the
production using their unified design concept and production plan.
(Example setting: modern day Manhattan; skyscrapers, parks, trendy
51
•
clothes, etc.) Each member of the group can be assigned a designing
task, or they can work collaboratively on them. Students may describe
their production verbally, in writing, or draw design sketches.
Optional: Discuss what the acting will be like in this visual world
(stylized, realistic, etc.).
After
•
•
•
seeing the opera:
How did Arian Noble’s Met staging differ from yours?
Were there any similarities between your staging and Adrian Noble’s?
Was there anything Adrian Noble did that you didn’t agree with? What
and why?
• Why do you think he made the choices he did? What was he trying to
emphasize?
52
RESEARCH IDEAS
The following list is a suggestion of topics for further study research. Research
into one or more of these areas could form the basis of a project.
Other Verdi Operas
Un giorno di regno
Nabucco
Luisa Miller
Rigoletto
Il Travatore
La Traviate
Shakespeare in Opera (a suggested list)
Romeo and Juliet (Georg Benda; Daniel Steibelt; Charles-François Gounod;
Frederick Delius)
Hamlet (Franco Faccio; Ambroise Thomas)
Falstaff (Antonio Salieri; Giuseppe Verdi)
Antony and Cleopatra (Samuel Barber)
The Tempest (John Weldon; John C. Eaton; Felice Latuadda)
The Winter’s Tale (John Harbison)
The Taming of the Shrew (Hermann Goetz; Vittorio Giannini; Vissarion
Shebalin)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Benjamin Britten)
Otello (Gioachino Rossini; Giuseppe Verdi)
Politics and Personality
Letters from Verdi to: Salvadore Commarano (librettist), Léon and Marie
Escudier (publishers), Fransesco Maria Piave (librettist)
Viva VERDI!
Risorgimento (c. 1820-1870)
Nationalism/Unification of Italy
Importance of Music in everyday life
Going Further:
• Verdi was mostly a composer of serious opera. Of his two lighter operas,
Falstaff and Un giorno di regno, the latter is the only true melodrama
giocoso (more of a comic opera). Familiarize yourself with these two works
and then compare the style of music to his more serious works.
• In comparing the guilt levels of Macbeth and his Lady, she seems to lack
guilt, while Macbeth is constantly burdened by his actions. Analyze the
versions by Shakespeare and Verdi and compare the perceptions of each
character.
53
RESOURCES
• USING Macbeth TO TEACH THE HUMANITIES
• USING Macbeth TO TEACH MUSIC
• OPERA NEWS ARTICLE: “Open Letters” by Mary
Jane Phillips-Matz, March 5, 1994
• METROPOLITAN OPERA FACTS
• GLOSSARY
54
Using Macbeth to Teach Humanities
by Zeke Hecker
A. SETTING THE STAGE
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
signifying nothing.
(William Shakespeare, from Macbeth)
La vita!
... che importa?
E il racconto d’ un pover idiota,
Vento e suono che null dinota.
(Life!
... what does it matter?
It is the tale of a poor idiot,
wind and sound that means nothing.)
(Francesco Piave and Andrea Maffei, from the libretto to Verdi’s Macbeth)
Little need be said about this libretto, for which ... Verdi was himself mainly
responsible, the industrious Piave only supplying the verses, in two instances
touched up or supplemented by Maffei. It is not Shakspere [sic]. Indeed, if the
conventional view be adopted, that the principal charm of Shakspere is to be
sought in the beauty of his language, it is about as far removed from
Shakspere as possible, because Piave’s imagination was decidedly pedestrian ...
Piave’s translation may be uninspired, but it is not inaccurate. And as a whole
this is true of the libretto all through ... In the process of adapting Macbeth to
operatic purposes much was necessarily, sometimes unnecessarily, sacrificed.
The subsidiary characters such as Malcolm and Macduff become mere
puppets; but the dogged, terrifying persistence of Lady Macbeth is well
preserved and Macbeth himself remains, at any rate, a human being, animated
by intelligible motives.
(Francis Toye)
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Be guided by this: there are three roles in this opera and three roles only: Lady
Macbeth, Macbeth, and the witches.
(Giuseppe Verdi)
The composer said that there are three principal characters in his opera -Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the Witches. Today the music for the Witches
may sound primitive and naive in its effect ...
To us, then, there are only two characters in the opera. But to those critics who
say that this is a weakness of the libretto’s, that Verdi was watering down
Shakespeare by playing down the other characters, a rereading of the play is
recommended. In Shakespeare, also, there are only two three-dimensional
characters. One can endlessly analyze Macbeth and his ‘dearest chuck’, but
what, despite the poetry of many of their lines, can be said about the
characters of Macduff, of Banquo, of Duncan, Malcolm, and the rest?
(Henry W. Simon)
According to bare historical facts, Macbeth was the son of Findlaech, slain by
his own people around 1020. He was succeeded by Malcolm, son of Findlaech’s
brother Malbride ... Unlike Banquo, Malcolm, Duncan, and MacDuff -- all
mentioned by name in Holinshed’s Chronicle, Shakespeare’s source –
Macbeth’s evil wife is not identified there by name. ‘Lady Macbeth’ was the way
she was immortalized in Shakespeare’s play, her ominous stature vastly
enhanced.
Shakespeare and Verdi took the witches, Banquo, and Burnam [sic] Wood from
Holinshed. But the monologues, Banquo’s ghost, and Lady Macbeth’s
Sleepwalking Scene are Shakespeare’s invention. Verdi, who turned these
inventions into the most memorable episodes in his opera Macbeth, regarded
the Shakespeare play as “one of the greatest creations of man”, and, dedicating
his opera to his dearly beloved father-in-law, Antonio Barezzi, called his
Macbeth ‘dearer to me than all of my other operas and which I therefore deem
more worthy of being presented to you.’
(George Jellinek)
I believe that if the public likes this opera, it will give new directions to our
music and open new roads to present and future maestros.
(Francesco Piave)
I will never stop urging you to study the dramatic situation and the words; the
music will come by itself. In a word, I would be happier if you serve the poet
better than the composer.
(Giuseppe Verdi)
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None of Verdi’s operas was more carefully composed or before its premiere
more carefully rehearsed than Macbeth. He exhorted his singers again and
again to concentrate on serving the playwright rather than the composer ...
Verdi said he ‘endeavored to compose music tied to the text.’ In 1875, when he
was in Vienna to conduct the Requiem and a journalist asked him his opinion
of Wagner, he replied tactfully and then added, ‘I, too, have attempted the
fusion of music and drama -- in Macbeth.’
(Andrew Porter)
I believe I told you already that this is a drama that has nothing common with
the others, and we all must make every effort to render it in the most original
way possible. I also believe that it is high time to abandon the usual formulas
and procedures, and I think that by doing so one could make much more of it
...
(Giuseppe Verdi)
All four Shakespeare settings Verdi produced or contemplated force the
composer to break new ground, but perhaps the most important in terms of his
overall artistic growth was Macbeth. This early opera forced him to become a
verismo composer, ‘untimely ripped’ from the highly ornamental aesthetic
prevailing at the time. Where Rossini’s, Bellini’s, and Donizetti’s preoccupation
was to give the singer room to sing, Verdi was becoming anxious to give room
... for the actor to act ... ‘Theater! Theater!’ was his constant cry, and in pursuit
of this he harassed his librettists above all for passion and energy.
Small surprise that Verdi found these qualities in Shakespeare ... Verdi was
the poet’s most successful Italian exploiter mainly because he was ultimately
interested in recreating the sublime sentiments, stupendous situations, and
surpassing grandeur so abundant in Shakespeare ... Verdi fought for an
aesthetic of simplicity and vigor ...
Verdi aligned himself on the side of Shakespeare’s passionate if unrefined art -and this is not in greater evidence than in Macbeth.
(Gary Schmidgall)
Verdi was thirty-three when he approached Macbeth, his first Shakespearean
subject. A conflict other than a love plot attracted him to the tragedy, but from
the beginning he admitted that this would not be an easy opera to write.
Unquestionably much of Shakespeare’s distinction escaped Verdi. He chose the
Shakespeare play because it possessed reality of action, even in its fantastic or
supernatural scenes, and lent itself to theatrical presentation in the grandopera tradition. Thus the murder, the appearance of Banquo’s ghost, and the
atmospheric night scenes generate the proper excitement and terror, while
Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene is completely convincing and moving. The
characterizations tend to become more drastic and simplified. The witches
assume greater importance and increase in number so that they can be
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employed in effective choruses. Lady Macbeth is transformed into a real
demon, the unsexed woman she aspires to be in Shakespeare’s drama;
similarly there remains in Macbeth none of the original’s early nobility.
Absolved of his conscience through Verdi, he turns into a weakling and
becomes a tool of his wife’s self-centered ambitions. Verdi’s Lady Macbeth
seeks her own gain rather than her husband’s.
(Ruth Berges)
Tadolini has a beautiful and benign face, and I want Lady Macbeth to be ugly
and evil. Tadolini sings to perfection, and I want a Lady Macbeth who doesn’t
sing. Tadolini has a marvelous voice, clear limpid, and strong, and I want the
Lady’s voice to be harsh, stifled, and hollow. Tadolini’s voice has an angelic
quality; I want the Lady’s voice to have a demonic quality.
(Giuseppe Verdi)
Verdi’s Macbeth is a somewhat simpler man than Shakespeare’s: he has not
the same haunting conscience, has a less well developed imagination, less
poetry in him. (Yet his passions seem even stronger: that is the way with
music.) He does not partially win our sympathy by describing ... the merits of
his intended victim; and his soldierly courage at the end is a formalized thing.
He has no time, in a musical score swiftly drawing to a close, to hesitate
fighting Macduff because he feels he has done him enough injury. The libretto
has to simplify.
But if Macbeth himself is a somewhat less sympathetic, less completely drawn
figure in the libretto than in the play, Lady Macbeth is correspondingly more
commanding ...
(Henry W. Simon)
Critics have called Macbeth Verdi’s opera ‘senza amore’ [without love], and this
too is in keeping with the original -- where the oases of humor, beauty, and
love are painfully brief. The world of the play and the opera is coarse, brutal,
essentially masculine, and martial. Verdi has also remained faithful ... to the
basic dichotomy of the play: the first half finds Lady Macbeth in control, while
in the second Macbeth -- increasingly courageous in his desperation -- takes
command of the action. Verdi’s reading of Macbeth uncannily focuses upon the
lines prominent in most basic studies of the play, and this unerring sense of
precisely where theatrical interest resides is perhaps the best indication of
Verdi’s excellence as a musical dramatist.
... More so than in Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth dominates the action of Verdi’s
opera. She has two brilliant scenes in Act I, commands the banquet with her
drinking song (brindisi), and has the great sleepwalking scene.
(Gary Schmidgall)
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Tell them that the most important numbers of the opera are the duet between
Lady Macbeth and her husband and the sleepwalking scene. These two
numbers absolutely must not be sung: They must be acted, and declaimed in a
dark, veiled voice: without which they can have no effect.
(Giuseppe Verdi)
The sleepwalking episode is, of course, one of the very greatest of scenes in
both dramatic and operatic literature. The murmurous dialogue of the Doctor
and the Gentlewoman have always set off marvelously the agonizing
wanderings of Lady Macbeth’s mind. Set to music, the projection becomes all
the more powerful; for the insistent, obstinate little chromatic ascending figure
in the accompaniment drills into the listener the suggestion of a sick obsession
...
(Henry W. Simon)
... paradoxically, the more Macbeth struggles to grasp control over destiny, the
more diminished in stature he becomes. Shakespeare’s Macbeth alone
dominates the planned assassination of Banquo, probing his friend’s pliability,
weighing the implications of the witches’ prophecy, skillfully manipulating the
murderers, and pointedly excluding Lady Macbeth from involvement in his plot
: ‘Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,/Till thou applaud the deed.’
Verdi’s compression of these scenes into a single brief recitative elevates Lady
Macbeth to the status of full partner in the crime. It is she who dominates the
scene through her great aria, ‘La luce langue,’ the text of which is ironically
drawn from lines spoken by Shakespeare’s Macbeth ... She seems to drain
away Macbeth’s very essence, leaving her husband a hollow shell, reducing him
to a supporting player in his latest moment of self-affirmation.
(Geoffrey Edwards and Ryan Edwards)
This brief scene is a marvel in its distillation of form, for within a tight musical
space are condensed the basic ingredients of recitative, cavatina, and cabaletta,
all in an entirely personal manner. That ‘La luce langue’ should exist side by
side with the more conventional ‘Vieni! t’affretta!’ [Lady Macbeth s Act I aria]
defines more accurately than words Verdi’s need to bend form to a unique
theatrical vision.
(John Ardoin)
The characters of Shakespearean tragedy -- generally too preoccupied with
introspective worries to care for such joviality -- are acclimatized to opera by
being given drinking songs, which declare the new Dionysian faith in
inebriation. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, drunkenness is strictly functional,
emboldening Lady Macbeth for her share of the murders. In Verdi’s operatic
setting, though, she sings a brindisi to distract the guests during Macbeth’s
delirium, and its lurching ungainly coloratura and dizzy trills suggest a new
characterization of her. She sounds like a maenad, a colleague for the witches
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whose brew Nietzsche used as an image of Dionysia, delighting in violence with
winy glee.
(Peter Conrad)
Another penetrating example of his individuality comes in the final scene of Act
II, Lady Macbeth’s ‘Drinking Song.’ The use Verdi makes of a forthright, martial
tune foreshadows the striking use to which he will put a similar idea forty
years later in the ‘Brindisi’ of Otello. The Macbeth ‘Brindisi’ is presented first in
sharp design ... However, during Macbeth’s asides with Banquo’s assassin, it
becomes an accompanying figure, thin in texture and progressively more
ambiguous in harmony.
(John Ardoin)
Make the choristers realize that they should not represent a meaningless mass
of people but should each of them portray an individual character and, as
such, act and move each on his or her own account, following his or her own
sentiments, maintaining with the others only a certain unity of action devised
to insure more accurate musical execution.
(Giuseppe Verdi)
Verdi makes himself the dramatist of national
place a vain trust in action; the community
Verdi’s finest choruses – ‘Va pensiero’ from
Macbeth ... make of its passivity a force
forbearance.
self-consciousness ... Individuals
patiently waits and suffers, and
Nabucco, ‘Patria oppressa’ from
of moral conviction and wise
(Peter Conrad)
... Verdi’s treatment of Macbeth must be considered here, if only because of the
striking way in which the composer enhanced the work’s political dimension.
Of course Macbeth is not in any case a plain tale of crime and punishment, of
wrongdoers who are finally destroyed, morally and psychologically as well as
physically, by their crimes and their guilt. The horror of their crimes is that
they are political crimes to which they are driven by the logic of their ruthless
pursuit of power; their effect is inevitably felt not only by individuals, but by a
whole society. This is why the chorus, although not so central to the drama as
in Nabucco or I lombardi, is nevertheless vital to the story, which cannot, or
should not, be presented as an essentially private or domestic tragedy.
At the end of both Act One and Two the chorus is there to express its anxiety
and horror at what is happening to the country ... it is the function of the
chorus to express the sense of moral outrage among ordinary people at political
events ...
It is not until the opening of Act Four that we are made fully aware of the plight
of the people under Macbeth’s rule in the great chorus of exiles, ‘Patria
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oppressa.’ It is worth noting that the version that we know now was the
product of Verdi’s extensive revision of the score for the Paris production of
1865. The words received a quite different and far more pedestrian setting in
the 1847 version. Verdi’s feeling for national and popular oppression, far from
being only an aspect of his nationalist feelings in the Risorgimentale 1840s,
actually deepened and intensified as part of his growth in maturity and
subtlety as a composer ...
‘Patria oppressa’ is the opera’s darkest moment, but it is the darkest moment
before the dawn. Once the tyrant’s opponents have been rallied, he is doomed
... Quite apart from its wonderful portrayal of the terrible, tortured pair of
evildoers, the popularity of Macbeth in Italy and eslewhere owed something to
its clear political message: tyrants do not last for ever. They can be overthrown.
(Anthony Arblaster)
The high baritone is the political voice par excellence. The bearer of such an
instrument in a Verdi opera is more often than not an authority figure,
sometimes a figure associated with political aspirations ... In the early operas
high baritones are almost invariably politicians. Among the most notable of
them [is] Macbeth, King of Scotland -- the best known of the early baritone
roles. Verdi combines an extended upper register with fierce rhythmic intensity
to render these figures categorically more potent than any of their baritone
forebears ...
Verdi’s other power voice, the dramatic mezzo, is a more ambiguous entity than
her baritone counterpart. In creating this vocal type, Verdi exploits that region
of the mezzo-soprano voice that produces the most masculine sounds -namely, its lowest register, where notes are sung not in the normal head tone
but from the chest. The unique quality of the female chest voice is immediately
recognizable even to untutored ears. Its sound is altogether unladylike. Indeed,
it has an almost baritonal fierceness. One might expect, therefore, that a mezzo
singing in the chest register would be a likely candidate for undertaking
masculine things, such as politics.
... The two characters that most clearly suggest the political possibilities of this
voice are Abigaille in Nabucco (1842) and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth (1847).
Technically, these are both soprano roles, and, indeed, they must sing higher
than do any of the mezzo figures of the middle years ... Lady Macbeth must
even reach a D flat. Nonetheless, virtually all commentators have recognized
these roles as vocal precursors of the famous Verdi mezzos, precisely because
in them he draws upon the female chest register in ways unknown to his
predecessors ...
Vocally, then Abigaille and Lady Macbeth are closely related to the classic Verdi
mezzos of the later operas. Their single most distinctive feature is their
aggressiveness, even violence, especially in the lower register ... Lady Macbeth - in Verdi no less than in Shakespeare -- is virtually consumed by politics; she
is, after all, the chief inspiration of her husband’s murderous ambition.
(Paul Robinson)
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There can be no reasonable doubt, then, that the second version of Macbeth is
superior to the first, and one would not willingly lose the admirable music it
called forth. Verdi, however, would have been better advised to rewrite the
opera entirely, making use of some of his original material ... As an opera,
therefore, Macbeth might justly have been reckoned a splendid and
uncommonly interesting failure but for the fact that revivals of it in recent
years have proved unexpectedly successful.
(Francis Toye)
Only during the present Verdi craze could his Macbeth be seriously set beside
its tremendous original. What can we make of a Macbeth who pursues his fatal
vision through a musical desert of the old fustian recitative, or a Lady Macbeth
whose prayer to be unsexed is a barn-storming martial cabaletta?
(Deryck Cooke)
Taking everything into consideration, Macbeth is a fiasco. Amen. But I confess
that I did not expect it. I thought I had done pretty well, but it seems I was
wrong.
I may not have handled Macbeth well, but to say that I do not know, do not feel
Shaspeare [sic], no, by heaven, no! He is one of my very special poets. I have
had him in my hands from early youth, and I read and reread him continually.
(Giuseppe Verdi)
Let us begin by calling this opera what it most certainly is -- an absorbing,
faithful, and masterly transmutation of a great Elizabethan play into a
nineteenth-century Italian opera. In the process, changes inevitably had to be
made, but they were made with boldness, with conscience, and with a deep
respect for the original values.
... This, admittedly, is not the fashionable view to take of Verdi’s Macbeth ...
Francis Toye called it ‘an interesting failure’ ... Unfortunately, later critics have
continued to echo Mr. Toye’s condescension. They call Macbeth ‘interesting’
because Verdi attempted things never before attempted on the Italian operatic
stage, and a ‘failure’ because the public and critics did not take to it, or
because the the attempted novelties did not come off successfully, or because
the libretto is a bad one and not faithful to Shakespeare.
No one can quarrel with the word ‘interesting’ as applied to Macbeth excepting
insofar as it is too pallid a workd with which to dismiss its power and beauty.
But one may well quarrel with the word ‘failure’ ... the reasons ascribed for the
supposed failure are largely invalid.
(Henry W. Simon)
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B. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND WRITING
1. Many of the commentators in Part A address the question of the opera’s
fidelity to Shakespeare’s play, in both letter and spirit. How faithful is it to the
play? What was gained, and what lost, in turning the play into an opera?
2. Does the opera alter the relationship between, and relative dramatic
importance of, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth? If so, how? Specifically, who is the
protagonist in the play: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, or both? How about in the
opera?
3. Verdi considered the witches very important, but most critics find it hard to
praise his treatment of them. Their music has been called trivial and
inappropriately cheerful. What do you think?
4. Most operas have a leading tenor who is usually the leading soprano’s lover.
Verdi chose Macbeth as a subject partly because it dispenses with love interest,
and he relegates his tenors to secondary roles. Does this make the opera
unsatisfying?
5. Paul Robinson discusses the implications of vocal range for gender roles: the
high baritone of Macbeth suggests political power and dominance, and the
frequent use of the low mezzo register in Lady Macbeth’s part is ‘masculine.’ Do
you agree? Certainly one of the issues in the play, and the opera as well, is the
relation between gender and power. Does the opera differ from the play in its
treatment of this issue?
6. Henry Simon says that Verdi’s relative neglect of the secondary characters is
justified, because in Shakespeare they are equally two-dimensional. Do you
agree? Are, say, Banquo and Macduff uninteresting characters in the play?
7. In Shakespeare’s play, the sufferings of the Scottish people under Macbeth’s
tyranny are reported in several scenes (notably by Kent when he travels to
England to rally Malcolm and Macduff) and shown directly in the horrific
slaughter of Lady Macduff and her children. Instead of these, Verdi conveys the
information through his chorus of exiles (‘Patria oppressa’) discussed above by
Peter Conrad and Anthony Arblaster. Is this a satisfactory substitute for
Shakespeare’s methods?
8. Conrad, Arblaster, and Robinson all emphasize that Macbeth is more than a
private tragedy; they see it as a political play. Do you agree? Does this view
apply to the opera as well?
9. Drinking songs are a convention of Italian opera. The banquet scene in the
play has none. Was Verdi justified in including one here? Does it suit the
drama?
10. The sleepwalking scene is generally considered the opera’s finest moment;
it is certainly one of the highlights of the play. Does Verdi’s musical setting
work? If so, why?
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11. Verdi’s Macbeth has had a checkered performance history: great success at
its premiere and immediately thereafter, failure at its Paris revival (in the
revised version), neglect for nearly a century, and increasing success since the
mid-twentieth century. But it still hasn’t achieved the repertory status of many
other Verdi operas. Verdi clearly had his own doubts. Is Macbeth a good opera
as an adaptation of Shakespeare? On its own terms? As both, or neither?
C. PROJECTS AND FURTHER RESEARCH
1. Macbeth is the earliest opera in Verdi’s Shakespeare trilogy. The other two,
Otello and Falstaff (the latter based largely on The Merry Wives of Windsor) are
his two final works, and considered among his greatest. They represent a
considerable advance over Macbeth, musically and dramatically, but it is
interesting to compare them to the earlier work. Both are in the Met’s
repertory; you’ll find study guides at this site.
2. Nearly contemporary with Macbeth are two other early Verdi operas in the
Met repertory, Nabucco and Ernani. Listen to them, and see the study guides.
3. The number of operas based on Shakespeare plays is large; the number of
undisputed masterpieces hovers in the single digits. Among noted opera
composers who have tackled Shakespearean texts are Gounod (Romeo and
Juliet), Berlioz (Beatrice and Benedict, based on Much Ado About Nothing),
Wagner (an early, seldom performed work based on Measure for Measure),
Britten (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and Barber (Antony and Cleopatra). The
Gounod and Britten are in the Met’s repertory. The Barber was commissioned
by the Met to open its current opera house in 1966. Check out these and other
Shakespeare operas you can locate. (Cross-reference the study guides for other
Shakespeare operas at this site, and you’ll find a lot more information.)
4. Twentieth century Swiss composer Ernest Bloch’s version of Macbeth, in
French, is a rarity, but there have been two fine recent recordings. The opera’s
atmospheric, impressionistic idiom contrasts with Verdi’s more vigorous
approach, and is equally valid. Investigate it.
5. Several video and film versions of Verdi’s Macbeth are available. Noteworthy
films of Shakespeare’s play include the claustrophobic, black-and-white Orson
Welles version and the garishly violent Roman Polanski one. An irreverent
send-up of the play is Scotland, PA, which sets the action in a fast food
hamburger ‘castle.’
6. Most productions of Verdi’s Macbeth rely mainly on the revised 1865 version,
but sometimes incorporate elements of the first 1847 version. There are many
differences. For example, in the first version Macbeth has a major aria to sing
as he dies, whereas in the revision he dies with the one-word exclamation
‘Cielo!’ The available recordings and videos of the opera mix the two editions in
various ways. Using them, the librettos and scores, and available critical
literature, consider the virtues and flaws of each version.
7. Verdi’s opera is difficult to stage. Previous Met productions haven’t enjoyed
much success. Considering its special circumstances (three choruses of
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witches, large ensemble numbers, vestigial secondary characters), design your
own production of the opera including sets, costumes, and staging.
8. Shakespeare’s verse is a challenge to composers, especially native English
speakers attempting to set the original text (Verdi, working with a new Italian
libretto, may have had an easier time of it). Take up the challenge yourself. Set
to music a passage from Macbeth (for example, the ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow’
speech), considering such factors as intelligibility, accurate prosody,
singability, dramatic appropriateness, and overall musical quality. Good luck!
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Using Macbeth to Teach Music
by Jonathan Dzik
Verdi and Shakespeare
Macbeth was the first of three Shakespearean plays that Verdi set to music.
(The other two are Otello and Falstaff.) To adapt a play into an opera, the
composer must first condense and simplify the play. There are two reasons for
this: It takes more time to sing a line than to say it, and it sometimes takes
several repetitions of a musical passage to reinforce its emotional content.
Although Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s relatively short plays, the opera was
able to include fewer than half the words of the spoken text. Therefore, some
scenes and even some characters had to be omitted. King Duncan appears very
briefly in Act I, in a processional across the stage shortly before he is
murdered. He has no lines at all to sing. Minor characters such as Ross,
Lennox, and Donalbain disappear completely in the operatic version. The role
of Malcolm is almost nonexistent. Macduff has little more than a fourth act
aria. The role of Banquo is about the same length as in the play, but his
character is murdered halfway through Act II. Consequently, Verdi
concentrates almost entirely on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The role next in
importance is that of the Witches. But instead of three Witches as in the play,
Verdi writes for three choruses of Witches. He has written some hauntingly
eerie music for them and the effect is duly macabre.
Like Shakespeare, Verdi opens with a meeting of the Witches amid thunder
and lightning on a wild heath. After a short orchestral introduction featuring
rapid 32nd notes and shuddering tremolos (Ex. #1a), the Witches sing over
sinister orchestral trills (Ex. #1b).
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Verdi instructed the women who portray the Witches to sing in a “hushed and
cackly voice” (Ex. #1c).
Macbeth enters to one of Shakespeare’s famous lines, “So foul and fair a day I
have not seen” (Ex. #2).
The Witches address Macbeth as “Thane of Glamis,” “Thane of Cawdor” and
“King hereafter” (Ex. #3). Note how each of the three voice parts is sung at
increasingly higher intervals of a third (starting on F, A and C respectively). No
sooner have the Witches made this oblique prophecy do messengers arrive from
King Duncan hailing Macbeth as “Thane of Cawdor.” Macbeth is puzzled
because he knows the Thane to be alive. But the messengers inform him that
the Thane has recently been put to death. Macbeth can scarcely believe that
the first part of the prophecy has come true so quickly.
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As in the play, Macbeth and his fellow general, Banquo, have simultaneous
asides in which they reflect on the sudden turn of events. “Two truths are told”
is the version in the play and “Due vaticini compiuti or sono” (“Two prophecies
are thus fulfilled”), sung aside softly as if Macbeth and Banquo are terrified
(Ex. #4).
The Witches conclude this scene with a wild song and dance, based on the
opening lines of the play, “When shall we three meet again, in thunder,
lightning or in rain?” They sing in a rollicking 6/8 meter, mostly in unison.
They repeat the word “fuggiam” (“let us flee”), as they take to fulfilling the
prophecies (Ex. #5).
The centerpiece of Scene II is the murder of King Duncan. In the opera,
Duncan appears wordlessly in a banal march just to cross the stage with his
retinue. Macbeth hallucinates as he recites his famous soliloquy, “Is this a
dagger which I see before me?” Tremolo strings and rapid scale-wise ascents to
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the interval of a diminished fourth (known as “the devil’s interval” in music)
lead to his opening line, sung a cappella but punctuated with diminished
chords in the orchestra (Ex. #6a).
As Macbeth sings, “You go before me down the tangled path,” his melodic line
rises chromatically in this oft-used device to depict a sinister character (Ex.
#6b). He goes into Duncan’s chamber and commits the murder offstage, just as
in the play. Disheveled, he emerges, brandishing the bloody dagger as he and
Lady Macbeth plan their next move.
Their ensuing duet follows Shakespeare’s words almost exactly. Verdi
instructed the two singers playing the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to
sing sotto voce—in half voice, with a dark, stifled tone (Ex. #7a). Only a few
measures are sung in voco spiegata—in full voice, such as when Macbeth
notices his blood-stained hands. For the original performance of this opera in
1847, Verdi insisted that the two singers rehearse this duet 150 times and yet
one more time just before opening night, to ensure that it had the nuances he
wanted.
During this duet, loud knocks on the castle gate, as in the play, portend evil
(Ex. #7b). The murder is soon discovered by Macduff, and an alarm is sounded.
(This will be discussed in the next segment.)
In Act II, to counteract the Witches’ prophecy that Banquo’s progeny will
overthrow him, Macbeth sends assassins to murder Banquo and his son,
Fleance. This is a very short but crucial scene in the play. For the opera, Verdi
provides a four-part male chorus of murderers. And in order to give the bass
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singer who plays Banquo an opportunity to sing an aria, Verdi expands
Shakespeare’s single line “It will rain tonight” to a full-blown lyrical aria of
great beauty, “Come dal ciel precipita” (“See how the shades of night descend”)
(Ex. #8). At the end of this aria, Banquo and Fleance are set upon by the band
of assassins. Banquo is murdered, but Fleance escapes.
The scene changes to a festive banquet hall in the castle. Lady Macbeth toasts
her guests in a brilliant drinking song in 2/4 meter, unlike the famous and
more familiar “Brindisi” in 3/4 meter in La Traviata. After a “false start” of the
main melody in the orchestra, typical of Verdi’s style until late in his output,
Lady Macbeth sings the melody (Ex. #9). It is a jaunty tune with wide leaps,
accented notes, and short phrases with rests in between. The accompaniment
is brass-band oom-pah style. The chorus echoes the main melody after each of
the two verses.
The key suddenly changes from the bright F major of the festivities to the
darker F minor; the tempo abruptly shifts from “allegro brillante” to “allegro
agitato.” The ghost of Banquo has appeared, visible only to Macbeth. Loud
fortissimo tremolo chords, first minor then diminished, underscore Macbeth’s
hallucination (Ex. #10). Lady Macbeth valiantly tries to restore order by
resuming her drinking song, but soon the apparition appears again. The guests
are horrified by Macbeth’s demeanor. A massive finale ensues (to be discussed
in the next section).
The Witches’ cauldron dominates the beginning of Act III. As the act opens,
Verdi follows Shakespeare almost to the word as the three groups of Witches
sing in ascending thirds (Ex. #11a, b and c). In Shakespeare’s words—“Thrice
the brinded cat hath mew’d”—“Thrice and once the hedge-pie whined”—
“Harpier cries: ‘tis time, ‘tis time.” The music sung here was used earlier in the
Prelude to the opera.
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The Witches boil up a stew of viper tongue, bat skin, ape blood and cur tooth.
In the play they intone, “Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire, burn; and
cauldron bubble” (Ex. #12). In the opera they all sing and dance to a macabre
6/8 meter in three-part harmony.
The Witches are soon visited by Macbeth. Three apparitions appear with
prophecies that seem mysterious:
1. “O Macbeth…Beware of Macduff” (Ex. #13a).
2. “O Macbeth…no one born of woman can harm you” (Ex. #13b).
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3. “…unconquerable shall you be until the wood of Birnam…uproot itself and
come towards you” (Ex. #13c).
What follows is a procession of eight kings. Here Verdi calls for “subterranean”
bagpipes, a unique scoring for two oboes, six clarinets, two bassoons and
contra-bassoon. Slow repetitive fanfares accompany this procession (Ex. #14).
As the kings pass by one by one, the last is Banquo, holding a mirror that
reflects the other kings. Macbeth lunges unsuccessfully at this apparition as a
sinister rhythm throbs in the orchestra (Ex. #15). Lady Macbeth appears, and
Macbeth tells her of these prophecies. Act III ends with the two of them vowing
vengeance on their enemies.
In Act IV scene i, Macduff reacts to the news that his wife and children have
been murdered. He sings a very poignant aria, “Ah la paterna mano” (“Ah this
father’s hand”) (Ex. #16). It is a lyrical outpouring of grief, and it gives Macduff
his only solo moment in the opera. At its conclusion, Macduff, together with
Malcolm, son of the slain King Duncan, vows to take up arms and bring down
Macbeth, the villain and usurper to the throne.
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Lady Macbeth’s famous “sleepwalking scene” occurs next. After a lengthy
orchestral introduction, much of which was heard in the opera’s Prelude, Lady
Macbeth appears carrying a candle and making gestures of washing her hands.
The famous line, “Out damned spot! Out, I say!” is the opening line of her aria
(Ex. #17a). Repetitious figures in the string accompaniment allude to the
rubbing out of the blood spot. A rising chromatic scale, used earlier in
Macbeth’s “Is this a dagger?” monologue, reflects the sinister nature of Lady
Macbeth’s character. There is a descending half-step played by the melancholy
English horn, reminiscent of the owl’s lament during Duncan’s murder.
Finally, Verdi calls for a fil di voce (remnant of a voice), as Lady Macbeth soars
quietly to a high D flat on the penultimate note (Ex. #17b). This entire episode
is set in a trancelike slow motion—the orchestra creating a veiled atmosphere
while most of the vocal line is a hushed legato. Lady Macbeth expires at the
scene’s conclusion.
Three Choral Finales:
Verdi ended Acts I, II and IV with massive choral finales. In each case, they
come on the heels of exciting action. While dramatically static, these finales
have powerful musical utterances, bringing each of these acts to a rousing
conclusion. The drama freezes, and everyone—principals and chorus—reacts
musically to the recent turn of events.
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In Act I, after Duncan’s murder is discovered and announced by Banquo, there
is a sudden shock as the timpani and bass drum give out with a powerful roll
which crescendos into a full vocal harmony marked tutta forza (full force) in fff
dynamics. Everyone, even the instigators of the murder, beseeches: “Jaws of
Hell, open wide and swallow…” (Ex. #18a).
After this opening outcry, there is suddenly a contrasting section marked ppp,
sung a cappella by the principals (Ex. # 18b), and echoed in the chorus as they
invoke the aid of the God who knows all thoughts and through whom they seek
guidance.
In the third part of this finale, the ensemble coalesces into an elegant legato
melody in unison (Ex. #18c). The supporting orchestral accompaniment has a
sextuplet rhythm and a subdivided swinging triplet feel within the context of
4/4 meter, marked grandioso in the score. There are two rounds of this
infectious melody. Just before the conclusion there is a stretto (speeding up)
section with many repeated words and then a sudden brief respite of quiet in
which Lady Macbeth, her Lady-in-waiting, Macbeth and Macduff twice cry out
“Gran Dio” (“Great God”), only to be answered by a thunderous choral outburst
to conclude Act I.
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The finale to Act II begins after Banquo’s ghost, seen only by Macbeth, makes
an appearance at the banquet hall. Thoroughly shaken, Macbeth starts this
finale sotto voce (in an undertone) as he muses on what he has just seen:
“Sangue a me quell’ombra chiede” (“That spirit wants blood from me”) (Ex.
#19a).
An accented, halting rhythmic accompaniment underscores Macbeth’s
mutterings. The other soloists and guests, disturbed by Macbeth’s
hallucination, sing about “guilty secrets” and how their country has become a
“den of criminals” (Ex. #19b). Lady Macbeth has solo lines in a short dotted
rhythm between the choral phrases as she tries to rouse Macbeth’s courage
(Ex. #19c). The ensemble is similar in style to that of Act I, with its sextuplet
accompaniment and a swinging triple feel within each beat of the 4/4 meter.
The momentum of its rhythm and the strength of its climactic cadences bring
Act II to a powerful close.
The finale of Act IV, after Macbeth’s death in battle at the hand of Macduff,
leads to a chorus of rejoicing. The Witches’ three prophecies have been fulfilled:
that Macbeth would die at the hands of Macduff; that he would die by a man
not born of woman (meaning that Macduff was “untimely ripped” from his
mother’s womb) and that this would occur when Birnam Wood comes to
Dunsinane. (Macduff’s men had used tree branches from Birnam Wood as
camouflage while they advanced upon Macbeth and his men). The crowd hails
Malcolm, son of Duncan, as their new sovereign. The finale begins with a
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martial-like accompaniment of eight steady, widely-spaced A minor chords,
with a piccolo prominent along with woodwinds and pizzicato strings. An
ensemble of men, representing the peasants of Scotland, begins with a doubly
dotted rhythm in harmonic thirds (Ex. #20a). Soldiers immediately continue
this melody in the relative key of C major before the peasants bring it back to
the original A minor.
The women then sing a legato melody in A major in a hymn-like chorus of
prayer (Ex. #20b). Malcolm and Macduff sing the same tune as in Ex. #20a, but
in the remote key of C sharp major. Finally, the two main themes—Ex. #20 for
the men in A minor and Ex. #20b for the women in A major—vie for
prominence. In the final bars, the key of A major wins out as all join in praising
the new Scottish king.
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Open Letters
by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz
With his librettist Francesco Maria Piave, Verdi was freer and more relaxed than
with any other friend.
Giuseppe Verdi, fresh from the stunning triumph of his Nabucco at La Scala in
Milan, was ready to leave for Vienna in the spring of 1842 when he received an
offer from the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, which wanted a new opera. Juggling
his recently won celebrity and the obligations it entailed, he replied that he
could not accept at once but was willing to discuss the matter later. Thus was
born one of the longest and most fruitful collaborations of his life, with the
theater that commissioned Ernani, Attila, Rigoletto, La Traviata and Simon
Boccanegra and in due time produced virtually all his other operas as well.
It says a great deal for the directors of the Gran Teatro La Fenice that they so
quickly opened the door to opera's latest composer idol. To them too was owed
Verdi's introduction to Francesco Maria Piave, who wrote ten librettos for him
between 1843 and 1862 and became one of the few people Verdi trusted.
"Fidarsi è bene, ma non fidarsi è meglio," he said -- "To trust is good, but not to
trust is better." Ever wary and reserved, he raised walls against all intruders on
his much valued privacy, even against family and friends, and marked his
emotional and physical property lines. All too rarely did he "lift the curtain that
hides the mysteries hidden in these four walls," to use his own words.
With Piave, though, the composer was freer and more relaxed than with any
other friend. The correspondence between the two men reached from 1843
until 1867, when Piave was immobilized by a stroke that left him almost
without speech or movement for his last nine years. Their long correspondence
documents an extraordinary, shared confidence and shows us a loose, funny
Verdi behind the formidable persona we know all too well.
The first suggestion that Piave might become Verdi's librettist is found in the
archives of the Teatro La Fenice in a letter of June 1843 from the secretary of
the theater to the head of its governing board: "Verdi accepted the contract ...
[and] I believe that Piave is willing to take up the challenge and that he will
make Verdi an offer." Challenge it was, for Piave then had almost no experience
in libretto writing, having collaborated only once with another poet in a work
for La Fenice. "I don't know Sig. Piave," Verdi wrote in July, "but if Your
Excellency assures me he is a good poet, aware of theatrical effect[s] and of
musical forms, I ask you to give him this enclosed letter." With this, Verdi and
Piave's collaboration began.
Although he was no librettist then, Piave was a fairly well-known writer. Born
in Murano in 1810, the eldest son of an old Venetian family of glass-factory
owners, he was three years older than Verdi. After a stint in the seminary, he
gave up the idea of becoming a priest but kept contact with the prelates he had
met, including the future Pope Gregory XVI. When the family fell on hard times,
Piave moved to Pesaro and later to Rome with his father. Like Verdi, Piave had
a strict classical education. He translated and published Psalms and wrote
poetry, short articles and novellas for prestigious periodicals. As a member of
literary clubs, he met the most important writers of that time, among them the
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Roman librettist Jacopo Ferretti, whom he later introduced to Verdi. When his
father died, Piave returned to Venice as head of his family. By the late 1830s,
he and his brother Andrea were working as proofreaders for the printer and
bookseller Giuseppe Antonelli. Poetry was not forgotten, though, and it was
Piave's Venetian-dialect verse that caught the attention of Count Alvise
Francesco Mocenigo, head of the governing board of the Teatro La Fenice.
With his unruly mop of reddish hair, bushy beard, raucous voice and ready
good humor, Piave easily won friends, Verdi first among them. Piave and his
family held certifiable honors as Venetian patriots. He hated the Austrian
occupiers of the city and, during the Revolution of 1848, became a common
foot soldier for the rebel Venetian government, slogging through the marshes of
the lagoon in defense of his city. Later, Piave's brother Luigi was arrested as a
pro-Italian spy and tried for treason by the Austrians. All of this won Verdi's
trust.
The first VerdiPiave collaboration was Ernani, given at the Teatro La Fenice on
March 9, 1844. After their initial exchange of letters, the two men met on
December 3, 1843, when Verdi, arriving in Venice for the first time in his life,
made his way through the dark canals and alleys at six in the morning and
found his lodgings in Casa Bollani at the Ponte delle Ostreghe, a three-minute
walk from the stage door of La Fenice. Piave, already a familiar face in the
theater, piloted Verdi through this frightening venture outside of La Scala and
away from Milan. The utter failure of Verdi's I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata at
La Fenice on December 26, 1843, with the composer present and onstage,
plunged him into a deep depression, which he described in a letter to a friend:
"Tears in my eyes.... I stay in the house a lot, that is, I stay in bed.... Night, my
desperation, is coming." If his "poor" Ernani were to fail, he said, he would
"smash" his head. But it did not fail, and a large part of its success must be
attributed to Piave's support. Bands accompanied Verdi from the theater back
to his lodgings; he was guest of honor at a banquet. In his own words, "The
public was shouting 'Viva!' at the top of its lungs" as he was carried through
the streets.
In those weeks, Verdi and Piave became inseparable friends. Few of Verdi's
letters to others match the openness of those to Piave, beginning in March
1844, as he was on his way back to Busseto, his hometown. With typical
pessimism, he wrote: "I am trembling as I get near home!!.... What a terrible
fate is mine!! Never a single joy without pain!! I have no strength ... [and] feel as
if I have been drained of all my blood." This letter, and more than 100 others
that followed it, ring with the authentic sound of Verdi's voice.
Piave became a frequent visitor in Verdi's house, first in Palazzo Cavalli in
Busseto, where the two men worked on Rigoletto in 185051. By then, Piave
already had written other works for Verdi -- I Due Foscari (1844), Macbeth
(1847), Il Corsaro (1848) and Stiffelio (1850). He had served as stage director or
overseer for the preparation of settings and costumes for all but Macbeth and
was regularly helping Verdi in a thousand other ways as well. He had
shepherded Attila (libretto by Temistocle Solera, revised and finished by Piave)
through its premiere at La Fenice in the 184546 season and had been Verdi's
contact at the Teatro Gallo (Teatro San Benedetto) in Venice, a house every bit
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as loyal to Verdi as the big theaters were, adding many foundation stones to
the structure of his fifty-year career.
Problems connected with these many productions of Verdi's operas were all
aired in the VerdiPiave correspondence, but the letters are equally important
for their burden of human communication. In them Verdi and Piave exchanged
gossip and personal confidences; without restraint, they let fly all those
epithets and obscenities that could not be a part of "proper" discourse. Piave
became like a brother to Verdi, especially after 1851, when the composer
moved to his farm at Sant'Agata and cut himself off from almost all the people
he had known. Piave was the first person invited to the villa at Sant'Agata,
where he slept in the little guest room even before it was properly furnished
and ready for a visitor. Welcome anytime, even when Verdi was not there, Piave
could simply let the maid know he was coming and ask for a warm supper and
a bed with fresh linen. We can count on the fingers of one hand the number of
people Verdi trusted to this extent.
Piave proved particularly helpful as the two men worked on Stiffelio and
Rigoletto, two operas savaged by the political and religious censors of Trieste
and Venice. In 1848, Piave, then in the national guard of the rebel Venetian
government, had earned his ribbons as a patriot, trying, as Verdi said, to forge
an Italy that would become "the foremost nation of the world." The librettist,
having survived the Austrian occupation of Venice, was armed with a more
sophisticated and serious outlook on life and therefore able to navigate more
skillfully through the swamps of censorship. He never left Verdi's side during
the harrowing weeks in Trieste in 1850 when the Catholic censors were
hacking away at Stiffelio. When it seemed that Rigoletto might never pass the
guardians of public order in Venice, Piave's persistence saved the day.
These experiences sealed the bond between the two men, whose
correspondence was by then rich with nicknames, jokes and allusions to
mysterious women friends. "Dear Poet-Tomcat-Clown," Verdi would write,
"Dear Lion- Tomcat," "Dear Rat," "Crocodile," "fat as a toad." And Piave to Verdi:
"Adorable Bear." With no other friend did Verdi conduct a discourse at this
level -- nor at a level far below, where both men peppered their letters with
sexually explicit language of a sort found nowhere else in Verdi's
correspondence.
In 1854, as Piave found the suffocating presence of the Austrian occupation
unbearable, he asked for advice about moving to Milan and seeking work at La
Scala. "The work is a lot harder than in Venice," Verdi warned -- ten months a
year, "nailed to the stage, dealing with all the [expletive deleted]." But Verdi did
help Piave get the post he sought at La Scala, where in 1859 he was made
stage director, bringing fifteen years' experience at La Fenice.
From his vantage point backstage, Piave sent Verdi a steady stream of news
about the goings-on in Milan, together with his merciless and pointed mockery
of all the stars of the social firmament. In his letters, the noblemen and various
countesses, duchesses and lesser lights are preserved in amber, with their
hangers-on, their silly mannerisms, snobbery and posing. Particular venom
was reserved for aesthetes and for professors of the city's conservatory, which
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had rejected Piave's application for a teaching post. Verdi also had good reason
to hate that institution: he had been refused entrance there in 1832 and never
let anyone forget it.
One letter from Piave in 1865 (published by Evan Baker in Studi Verdiani, pp.
1656) describes a rehearsal at La Scala, during which the impresario and a
composer shout at each other, the composer weeps and stamps his feet, the
baritone protests and curses at everyone, the impresario strikes the singer on
the cheek with the back of his hand, the injured baritone leaps upon the
impresario, and a conductor falls to the floor beside the prompter's box. As the
men's chorus and the overseer rush into the fray, the bass, trying to haul the
baritone away from the riot, is struck "in the area of his reproductive organs,"
and ten minutes of sheer chaos follow.
Piave and Verdi's collaboration never bore fruit with a premiere at La Scala.
Resumed in 185253 with La Traviata and continued with Simon Boccanegra
(1857) and Aroldo (the revision of Stiffelio completed in August of that year for
the inauguration of the new opera house in Rimini), it concluded with La Forza
del Destino in 1862. Piave wrote for many other composers as well, about
seventy librettos in all, right through 1865. One of his works was introduced
even after the stroke that ended his career in 1867. When Piave lay, almost
mute and hopelessly crippled, Verdi helped his household, giving cash to the
family and organizing subscriptions for further aid. He also established a trust
fund for Piave's daughter's education.
Verdi once addressed a letter to "Respected Signor Francesco Maria Piave,
Melodramatic poet, Venice." Piave did indeed sum up all the values of romantic
melodrama, investing his librettos with his own great understanding of the
ways of the soul and the heart. How else to explain the impact of these
emotionally wrenching operas? He gave Verdi what was needed, and it is the
richness of Piave's spirit that Verdi clothed with music. Often in the past it has
been fashionable to make fun of Piave's librettos, to write him off as a spineless
lackey who accommodated Verdi at every turn. Now a wholesale revision of this
view is needed, as we consider this poet who gave us some of the most
unforgettable characters in the repertory.
MS. PHILLIPS-MATZ, a former OPERA NEWS staff member and frequent
contributor, is the author of Verdi: a Biography, recently published by Oxford
University Press.
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SOME FACTS ABOUT
THE METROPOLITAN OPERA
Wallace K. Harrison, architect
Cyril Harris, acoustical consultant
This opera house is the 2nd home of the Metropolitan Opera. The 1st was
located at Broadway and 39th St.
The Met’s new home at Lincoln Center cost $49 million to build and
construction took 4 years.
The Met is the 2nd-deepest building in Manhattan. It consists of 10 floors:
stage level, six floors above and three below, cushioned with anti-vibration
pads for sound-proofing.
The opera season generally runs from September to April, during which time
the opera company puts on 7 performances a week (two on Saturdays) from a
repertoire of 21-25 different operas.
The auditorium can seat 3,800 people on five tiers, and there is standing room
space for 253 people on various levels.
There are no 90° angles anywhere in the auditorium, and the boxes have
irregular, shell-patterned decorations. This design distributes sound evenly
throughout the auditorium and prevents it from being “swallowed.”
A single African rosewood tree was used to panel the walls. The tree, brought
from London, was almost 100 ft. long and about 6 feet in diameter.
The ceiling rises 72 feet above the orchestra floor and is covered with over 1
million 2-½-inch-square sheets of nearly transparent 23-carat gold leaf. Not
only does the gold add to the glamour of the interior, but it is supposed to
eliminate the need for maintenance and repainting.
You’ll notice that the ceiling in the outer lobbies has a greenish color. These
ceilings are covered with a Dutch alloy which contains copper and turns green
when it tarnishes.
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There are two house curtains in the auditorium:
•
Guillotine curtain - Made of gold velour, this curtain rises and descends
vertically.
•
Wagner curtain - This design was conceived by Richard Wagner and first used in
1886 in Bayreuth, Germany. It is a motorized tableau drape with adjustable
speed. The existing curtain, woven of 1,150 yards of gold-patterned Scalamandre
silk, was installed at the Met in 1990 and is the biggest Wagner curtain in the
world.
The chandeliers are a gift from the Austrian government. The one central
chandelier is 17ft. in diameter and is surrounded by 8 starbursts of varying
sizes. The 12 satellite clusters can be raised to avoid blocking the stage.
Altogether, the chandeliers contain over 3,000 light bulbs.
Does your seat feel a little tighter than last time? Not all the chairs at the Met
are the same size; they vary in width from 19 to 23 inches. This staggered
seating arrangement provides the best possible sight lines.
The conductor’s podium is motorized so that it can be adjusted to any height.
It is equipped with cue lights that indicate when the curtain is ready to rise
and a telephone line that connects to the stage manager’s post and the
prompter’s box.
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GLOSSARY
Musical Terms and Definitions
adagio
Indication that the music is to be performed at a slow, relaxed
pace. A movement for a piece of music with this marking.
allegro
Indicates a fairly fast tempo.
aria
A song for solo voice in an opera, with a clear, formal
structure.
arioso
An operatic passage for solo voice, melodic but with no clearly
defined form.
baritone
Man’s voice, with a range between that of bass and tenor.
bel canto
Refers to the style cultivated in the 18th and 19th centuries in
Italian opera. This demanded precise intonation, clarity of
tone and enunciation, and a virtuoso mastery of the most flori
passages.
cabaletta
The final short, fast section of a type of aria in 19th-century
Italian opera.
cadenza
A passage in which the solo instrument or voice performs
without the orchestra, usually of an improvisatory nature.
chorus
A body of singers who sing and act as a group, either in
unison or in harmony; any musical number written for such a
group.
coloratura
An elaborate and highly ornamented part for soprano voice,
usually written for the upper notes of the voice. The term is
also applied to those singers who specialize in the demanding
technique required for such parts.
conductor
The director of a musical performance for any sizable body of
performers.
contralto
Low-pitched woman’s voice.
crescendo
Means “growing”, used as a musical direction to indicate that
the music is to get gradually louder.
ensemble
From the French word for “together”, this term is used when
discussing the degree of effective teamwork among a body of
performers; in opera, a set piece for a group of soloists.
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finale
The final number of an act, when sung by an ensemble
fortissimo (ff) Very loud.
forte (f)
Italian for “strong” or “loud”. An indication to perform at a
loud
volume.
harmony
A simultaneous sounding of notes that usually serves to
support a melody.
intermezzo
A piece of music played between the acts of an opera.
intermission
A break between the acts of an opera. The lights go on and
the audience is free to move around.
legato
A direction for smooth performance without detached notes.
leitmotif
Melodic element used by Richard Wagner in his operas to
musically represent characters, events, ideas, or emotions in
the plot.
libretto
The text of an opera.
maestro
Literally ‘master’; used as a courtesy title for the conductor,
whether a man or woman.
melody
A succession of musical tones (i.e., notes not sounded at the
same time); the horizontal quality of music, often prominent
and singable.
mezzo-soprano Female voice with a range between that of soprano and
contralto
opera buffa
An Italian form in which the spoken word is also used, usually
on a comedy theme. The French term “opera bouffe” describes
a similar type, although it may have an explicitly satirical
intent.
opera seria
Italian for “serious opera”. Used to signify Italian opera on a
heroic or dramatic theme during the 18th and early 19th
centuries.
operetta
A light opera, whether full-length or not, often using spoken
dialogue. The plots are romantic and improbable, even
farcical, and the music tuneful and undemanding.
overture
A piece of music preceding an opera.
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pentatonic scale Typical of Japanese, Chinese, and other Far Eastern music,
the pentatonic scale divides the octave into five tones and
may be played on the piano by striking only the black keys.
pianissimo (pp) Very softly.
piano (p)
Meaning “flat”, or “low”. Softly, or quietly.
pitch
The location of a musical sound in the tonal scale; the quality
that makes “A” different from “D”.
prima donna
The leading woman singer in an operatic cast or company.
prelude
A piece of music that precedes another.
recitative
A style of sung declamation used in opera. It may be either
accompanied or unaccompanied except for punctuating
chords from the harpsichord.
reprise
A direct repetition of an earlier section in a piece of music, or
the repeat of a song.
score
The written or printed book containing all the parts of a piece
of music.
serenade
A song by a lover at the window of his mistress.
solo
A part for unaccompanied instrument or for an instrument or
voice with the dominant role in a work.
soprano
The high female voice; the high, often highest, member of a
family of instruments.
tempo
The pace of a piece of music; how fast or how slow it is played.
tenor
A high male voice.
theme
The main idea of a piece of music; analogous to the topic of a
written paper, subject to exploration and changes.
trill
Musical ornament consisting of the rapid alternation between
the note and the note above it.
trio
A sustained musical passage for three voices.
verismo
A type of “realism” in Italian opera during the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, in which the plot was on a contemporary,
often violent, theme.
volume
A description of how loud or soft a sound is.
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Met School Membership Standards
The Met School Membership program requires that all students who attend
rehearsals at The Met:
1. Are familiar with the opera’s story, and can relate its themes and
situations to their own lives;
2. Are familiar with the opera’s music or musical style;
3. Have a basic understanding of what opera is and how it is produced;
4. Are aware of Opera House etiquette and understand how to be good
audience members.
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