Program
One Hundred Twenty-Third Season
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Saturday, September 28, 2013, at 7:00
Tuesday, October 1, 2013, at 7:00
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Friday, October 4, 2013, at 7:00
Sunday, October 6, 2013, at 3:00
Macbeth
Music by Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave and Andrea Maffei, after Shakespeare’s Macbeth
Riccardo Muti Conductor
Macbeth, general of King Duncan’s army.............................................. Luca Salsi baritone
Lady Macbeth, Macbeth’s wife.........................................................Tatiana Serjan soprano
Banquo, general of King Duncan’s army.................................. Dmitry Belosselskiy bass
Macduff, nobleman of Scotland, Thane of Fife................................Francesco Meli tenor
Malcolm, Duncan’s son......................................................................... Antonello Ceron tenor
Lady-in-Waiting.............................................................................. Simge Büyükedes soprano
Assassin/Doctor.......................................................................................Gianluca Buratto bass
Servant/Herald...................................................................................................Daniel Eifert bass
Three Apparitions.................................................................................... David Govertsen bass
.
Katelyn Casey treble
.
Lily Shorney treble
Witches, king’s messengers, Scottish noblemen and exiles, assassins, English soldiers, aerial spirits
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Duain Wolfe Chorus Director
Act 1
Intermission
Act 2
Intermission
Act 3
Act 4
The setting is in Scotland, primarily in Macbeth’s castle. Act 4 opens on the border between
Scotland and England, then returns to Macbeth’s castle.
First Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances
English supertitles © 2013 by Sonya Friedman
Sponsorship of the music director and related programs is provided in part by a generous gift from the Zell
Family Foundation.
CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.
This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Comments by Phillip Huscher
Giuseppe Verdi
Born October 10, 1813, Roncole, near Busseto, Italy.
Died January 27, 1901, Milan, Italy.
Macbeth
M acbeth always held a special
place in Verdi’s affections. Shortly after
the successful premiere of the
opera in Florence in 1847, Verdi
sent a dedication copy of the
score to Antonio Barezzi, his
father-in-law, saying, “Here
now is this Macbeth, which I
love above all my other operas.”
That was still early in Verdi’s
long career—Macbeth, the tenth
of his more than two dozen operas
and composed when he was just
thirty-three, follows the huge successes
of Nabucco and Attila, but comes before many of
the works we know today as prime Verdi. Yet
he continued to think of Macbeth with special
pride even after writing operas that secured
his place as the greatest Italian composer of
his century, including Rigoletto, La traviata,
Il trovatore, Un ballo in maschera, and La forza
del destino. When he was asked to provide new
ballet music for a production of Macbeth in Paris
in 1865, he jumped at the chance to revisit the
whole score, convinced that now, more than
fifteen years later, he could make it even finer.
Macbeth is the earliest product of Verdi’s great
love for Shakespeare. In 1865, when a French
critic, reviewing the revised Paris version of
Macbeth, suggested that Verdi did not know his
Shakespeare, the composer was irate: “It may
be that I have not done justice to Macbeth; but
to say that I do not know, understand, and feel
Shakespeare—no, by God, no! He is one of my
favorite poets. I have had him in my hands from
my earliest youth, and I read and reread him
continually.” Verdi had taken unusual care with
the text for his Macbeth from the start. “This
tragedy is one of the greatest creations of man,”
he wrote to
Francesco
Maria Piave,
Above: Verdi in 1870
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when he first sent the poet his own
detailed prose scenario of the play,
broken into acts, scenes, and even
musical numbers, to get Piave
charged up to begin their new
libretto. (They had worked
together once before, on
Ernani.) Verdi knew precisely
what he wanted before he
even composed a note, and
he warned Piave: “I’ve got the
general character and the color of
the opera into my head just as if the
libretto were already written.”
The choice of Macbeth as an opera
subject was bold and unexpected in 1847—the
play had not yet even been staged in Italy. (It
would be soon, but only after Verdi’s success with
the opera.) And although Shakespeare was not
an unusual source for opera—Rossini’s Otello,
for one, had enjoyed great success following its
premiere in Naples in 1816—Verdi’s reverence for
Shakespeare and his fidelity to the plot and spirit
of the play were exceptional at the time. No opera
in the nineteenth century would be more truly
Shakespearean in stature than Macbeth—until
Verdi’s own Otello, completed four decades after
he began Macbeth.
As soon as he started to receive portions of
the text, Verdi turned on Piave—there were too
many lines, the tone wasn’t lofty enough, the
meter of certain stanzas sounded off, phrases
were commonplace or clichéd. “Not one useless word: everything must say something,”
he chastised him. A few places, such as the
opening of the second act—one of the spots
where the scenario departs most radically from
Shakespeare—continued to trouble Verdi: should
it be a soliloquy for Lady Macbeth or a dialogue
with her husband? Should she read aloud a
letter from Macbeth? “Oh, I beg you,” he wrote
to Piave, “take great care with this Macbeth of
mine. . . . Brevity and sublimity.”
Eventually Verdi lost his patience and asked
his friend, the writer Andrea Maffei, to step in
and rewrite the libretto, “since to be frank,” he
told Piave, “I couldn’t have set your verses to
music.” It’s difficult today to tell precisely how
much of Piave’s original libretto remains, but we
do know that Maffei scrapped the act 3 witches’
chorus and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene
completely and started over. Maffei was given a
gold watch
for his rescue
operation.
Piave was
paid off in
full, but his
name was
left off the
title page: “I
wouldn’t have
your injury
for all the
gold in the
world,” Verdi
said finally.
Although it
Andrea Maffei
was normally
Composed
1847, revised 1865
First performances
March 14, 1847; Teatro della Pergola,
Florence, Italy
April 19, 1865; Théâtre-Lyrique, Paris,
France (revised version)
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
July 21, 1977, Ravinia Festival. Marisa
Galvany and Cornell MacNeil as
soloists; James Levine conducting
(arias and duets)
June 26, 1981, Ravinia Festival. Renata
Scotto, Sherrill Milnes, Giuliano
Ciannella, John Cheek, Timothy
Jenkins, Gene Marie Callahan, Michelle
Harman-Gulick, Sharon Graham,
Duane Clenton Carter, Rush Tully,
and Terry Cook as soloists; Chicago
Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis,
director; James Winfield, associate
director); James Levine conducting
(complete opera)
the librettist’s job to negotiate staging details
with theater management, Verdi intervened,
dictating the number of witches he wanted;
rejecting the costume designs (the use of velvet
and silk was anachronistic, he pointed out); arguing that the singer playing Banquo should also
appear as Banquo’s ghost; lecturing on English
and Scottish history; and, in general, urging the
theater to spare no expense. British experts were
consulted; a magic lantern for special effects was
ordered from Milan.
Even before he began composing the music,
Verdi contacted Felice Varesi, a celebrated high
baritone—he would later create the role of
Rigoletto—to make sure he was available to sing
Macbeth. During the composition process, he
began writing to Varesi, telling him how to sing
the music as he sent it to him, piece by piece. His
letters read like a rigorous coaching session, with
advice about dramatic motivation, admonitions to
obey the dynamic markings carefully—Verdi had
never before been so meticulous in his attention to
fine shadings (in the final score, the music shrinks
at one point to a virtually inaudible pppppp)—and
thoughts about the unusual vocal colors he had in
mind. Throughout, there is one overriding idea:
November 2, 3 & 4, 1989, Orchestra
Hall. Chicago Symphony Chorus
(Margaret Hillis, director; Terry
Edwards, guest chorus master),
Sir Georg Solti (November 2 & 3)
and Kenneth Jean (November 4)
conducting (“Tre volte miagola” and
“Patria oppressa!”)
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
September 19, 2013, Orchestra Hall.
Riccardo Muti conducting (ballet music)
September 21, 2013, Orchestra
Hall. Chicago Symphony Chorus
(Duain Wolfe, director), Riccardo
Muti conducting (ballet music and
“Patria oppressa!”)
These are the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra’s first subscription concert
performances of Verdi’s Macbeth.
CSO RECORDINGS
1981. Renata Scotto, Gene Marie
Callahan, and Terry Cook as soloists;
James Levine conducting. CSO (From
the Archives, vol. 18: A Tribute to James
Levine) (“Una macchia è qui tuttora”)
1989. Chicago Symphony Chorus
(Margaret Hillis, director; Terry
Edwards, guest chorus master), Sir
Georg Solti conducting. London (“Tre
volte miagola” and “Patria oppressa!”)
Instrumentation
flute and piccolo, two oboes and
english horn, two clarinets and bass
clarinet, two bassoons, four horns,
two trumpets, three trombones and
cimbasso, timpani, percussion, harp,
strings, offstage banda
Approximate
performance time
Act 1: 48 minutes
Act 2: 31 minutes
Acts 3 & 4: 71 minutes
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“I shall never
stop telling
you to study
the words and
the dramatic
situation; then
the music
will come
on its own.”
Marianna
Barbieri-Nini,
the first Lady
Macbeth, got
the same message: “I wish
Francesco Maria Piave
the performers to serve
the poet better than they serve the composer.”
Throughout the rehearsal period in Florence,
Verdi was ever-present, bossy, and sometimes
unreasonable. Right up to the hour before the
premiere, when Verdi called his two principals
into his dressing room for one last master class,
he did not give up his quest for making the music
serve the drama.
Macbeth was a huge success with the Florentine
public—among the most discriminating in all
of Europe—when it opened on March 14, 1847,
at the Teatro della Pergola. In the course of the
evening, Verdi was called onstage twenty-seven
times. After the second performance, a large
crowd of fans, “who yelled like the damned,”
according to Varesi, followed him through the
streets back to his hotel. Over the next few years,
Verdi paid close attention to the opera’s reception
as it made the rounds of other important opera
theaters and even supervised stagings in Rome
and Bologna himself. (Macbeth was premiered
in New York and Boston as early as 1850, a sure
sign of its popularity and importance, and moved
on to San Francisco and Philadelphia within
the decade.) When he heard that the impresario
at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples wanted to
cast Eugenia Tadolini, a highly accomplished
soprano, as Lady Macbeth, Verdi put his foot
down, insisting that she was the wrong kind
of singer for this dramatic role: “Tadolini has a
marvelous voice, clear, limpid, and strong; and
I would rather that Lady’s voice were rough,
hollow, stifled. Tadolini’s voice has something
angelic in it. Lady’s should have something
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devilish.” Even long distance, Verdi continued
to coach. He insisted that the two keys to the
opera were the sleepwalking scene and the duet
for the Macbeths, and that “they must be acted
and declaimed in a voice that is hollow and
veiled: without this the whole effect is lost.”
The duet is the music Verdi had rehearsed again
and again before the first performance and it is
the piece that was most often encored over the
years—in the early days, sometimes even three
or four times an evening. In city after city, the
novelties in Verdi’s score—the fantastical scene
of the apparitions, with its supernatural sounds
and subterranean wind music, or Lady Macbeth’s
haunted sleepwalking scene, with its eerie,
mesmerizing accompaniment—never failed to
make their effect.
T
he idea of presenting Macbeth in Paris
came up before Verdi even finished the
score, but despite various proposals over
the following years, both from the Paris Opéra
and the Théâtre-Italien, talks came to nothing. Then, in 1864, he was approached by Leon
Carvalho, the head of the Théâtre-Lyrique in
Paris, who wanted to revive Macbeth with a new
ballet, to satisfy French tradition, and a final
chorus to replace Macbeth’s solo death scene.
Verdi agreed. But when he paged through
the full score, he knew at once that he had
more work to do—he wanted the chance to
rethink the entire opera. He told Carvalho
he needed more time and set to work.
For revisions to the libretto, he turned to
Piave, who was now back in favor, although their
collaboration was once again labored and contentious. Rewriting the music took him all winter.
Verdi found it painful to “take up a thread which
had been broken so many years ago,” he said,
realizing how far he had traveled as a composer
in little more than fifteen years—from the raw,
volcanic energy of Attila to the rich, subtly
colored canvases of Un ballo in maschera and La
forza del destino. “I’ll be able to manage it soon
enough,” he said, “but I detest mosaics in music.”
Once he began, however, he regained his old
passion for the opera, and he discovered a master
editor’s instinct for identifying what could stay,
what needed a simple touch-up, what demanded
a radical makeover, and what must be completely
scrapped and replaced. He left most of act 1
alone, fine-tuning only the popular duet. He
gave Lady Macbeth a magnificent new aria, “La
luce langue,” one of the opera’s most powerful numbers, to open act 2. Most of act 3 was
significantly reworked; the new ballet music was
added near the top of the act; and, for the finale,
Macbeth’s aria was replaced by a thrilling new
duet for Macbeth and his wife, “Ora di morte.”
For the chorus that begins act 4, Verdi kept the
text, but set it to entirely new music—bold, magnificent, and unorthodox—it is an early foretaste
of the Requiem, still nearly a decade away. (Verdi
always thought of this as an important number;
even in 1847, before he had written a note of
music, he told Piave to pay particular attention to
the text for a chorus of Scottish exiles, “the one
moment of real pathos in the opera.”) And, as he
promised Carvalho, the ending of the opera is
new: instead of Macbeth’s onstage death scene,
there is now a grand victory chorus in honor of
Malcolm, the new king, after Macbeth has been
slain offstage.
Although Verdi reconsidered every measure
in his score, sometimes making only the slightest change or adjusting the instrumentation,
he did not touch Lady Macbeth’s celebrated
sleepwalking scene in act 4. It had been one of
his greatest inspirations in 1847, and he had
worked hard to achieve a kind of music—spare,
exposed, and dramatically driven—that was new
to Italian opera at the time. “The notes are simple
and are created with the action in mind,” he
wrote to Barbieri-Nini, his first Lady Macbeth.
“Remember that every word has a meaning,
and that it is absolutely essential to express that
meaning both with the voice and in the acting.”
(With Verdi’s encouragement, Barbieri-Nini
consulted an actual sleepwalker.)
Revisiting Macbeth clarified Verdi’s concept of
the drama. “The main roles of this opera are, and
can only be, three,” he wrote to his French publisher, Leon Escudier, “Macbeth, Lady Macbeth,
and the chorus of witches.” The musical prominence of the witches had been one of Verdi’s
masterstrokes from the start (the opera, like the
play, starts with them). “The witches dominate
the drama,” he now said. “Everything stems from
them—rude and gossipy in act 1, exalted and
prophetic in act 3. They make up a real character,
and one of the greatest importance.” Verdi even
said he wanted the spirit of the witches—and the
otherworldly color of their music—to linger over
the whole opera. From the start—it is mentioned
in his earliest surviving letter on the opera—
Verdi intended the score to be in the genere
fantastico—a work in which the supernatural and
the diabolical play a decisive role.
The new ballet, in particular, gave Verdi
headaches. In order to satisfy French conventions
and dramatic logic, it would have to come at the
beginning of act 3, when the only characters
onstage were the witches, and to have them
dance for some ten or more minutes would, as
Verdi rightly observed, “make a pretty frantic
divertissement.” Eventually, Verdi decided to
make the ballet a mixture of dance and mime,
and to introduce Hecate as a nondancing character. Verdi wanted the new ballet to fit as seamlessly as possible into the drama, and he lavished
the same degree of care on it that had characterized his work on the opera itself.
V
erdi was puzzled, and plainly angered,
when Macbeth failed to satisfy the
sophisticated Parisian public. Attendance
was poor for the entire run and the box office
take was meager. “I thought I had not done
too badly,” he wrote to Escudier, “but it seems
I was mistaken.” Escudier blamed the empty
seats on a heat wave sweeping across Paris. He
did not mention competition from the eagerly
anticipated premiere of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine
at the Opéra. The Paris critics, long irritated
by Verdi’s unparalleled string of hits in his
homeland, came down hard on Macbeth; they
complained about the uneasy mix of early and
later styles, and lamented the lack of a romantic
interest: “No love, no tenderness, no charm,”
wrote the reviewer for Le ménestrel, who, unlike
Verdi, apparently did not know his Shakespeare.
It took some time for the depth of Verdi’s
achievement to be understood. The new Macbeth
entered the repertoire slowly. Few productions
were staged in Italy in Verdi’s lifetime, and many
theaters continued to perform the original score,
even though Verdi considered the later version
definitive. The modern reappraisal of the revised
Macbeth came only after the First World War.
Today, Macbeth is recognized as one of Verdi’s
finest and most richly satisfying works, and the
revised score is now the edition of choice. (At
these performances, Riccardo Muti conducts
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Frontispiece of the first edition of the opera Macbeth, 1847
the complete 1865 version, including the oftenomitted ballet music, in the recent critical edition
jointly published by the University of Chicago
Press and Ricordi.)
Macbeth is unique in Verdi’s output. The later
revision of Simon Boccanegra would take longer to
get from its original to its final version, and the
subsequent reworkings of La forza del destino and
Don Carlos would produce some extraordinary
music, but no other opera would bridge so great
a gulf stylistically as that between the early and
the mature Verdi of the two Macbeths. The final
work is, as Verdi himself predicted, something
of a “mosaic,”—the seams occasionally show
and the juxtaposition of music composed nearly
two decades apart is sometimes jarring. But
in the context of Verdi’s fifty-four year career,
Macbeth is a work of unparalleled ambition and
striving. More than any other, it is the opera in
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which Verdi’s respect for his material continually drove him to new heights of invention and
novelty, all within the conventional framework
of nineteenth-century operatic tradition. What
had been the most thoughtfully composed of his
early operas now became one of the most satisfying of all his works—an opera in which keen
psychological insight is ideally matched to music
of exceptional emotional nuance. A decade after
the Paris premiere, when a journalist asked Verdi
for his opinion of the significance of Richard
Wagner, his exact contemporary, Verdi offered a
few well-chosen words of praise for the German
master and then added, “I, too, have attempted
the fusion of music and drama—in Macbeth.” Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.
Synopsis of Macbeth
Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave and Andrea Maffei, based on the play by William Shakespeare
Act 1
Scotland. Macbeth and Banquo, leaders of the
Scottish army, 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.
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. 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. 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, and she tells
him 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 murder.
Act 2
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.
Outside the castle, assassins wait for
Banquo, who appears with his son, warning him of strange forebodings. Banquo
is killed, but Fleance escapes.
Lady Macbeth welcomes the court to the
banquet hall and sings a drinking song, while
Macbeth receives news that Banquo is dead and
his son has escaped. About to take Banquo’s
seat at the table, Macbeth has a terrifying
vision of the dead man accusing him. His
wife is unable to calm her unsettled husband,
and the courtiers wonder about the king’s
strange behavior. Macduff vows to leave the
country, which is now ruled by criminals.
Act 3
The witches gather again, and Macbeth visits
them, 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 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 and his wife finds him. They resolve to kill
Macduff and his family.
Act 4
On the Scottish border, Macduff has joined the
refugees. His wife and children have been killed.
Malcolm appears with British troops and leads
them to invade Scotland.
Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking, haunted by the
horror of what she and her husband have done.
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.
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. © Metropolitan Opera. Reprinted with permission.
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