My Spooky Season Shakespeare Series continues with a look at Opera Orlando's October production of Verdi's Macbeth, the show that triggered my month long deep dive into the Bard. (See my pieces on Four Film Versions of "Macbeth," Akira Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood," Orlando Shakes' 2024 theater production of "Macbeth", Baz Lurhmann's 1996 Film "Romeo + Juliet," and Orlando Ballet's "Romeo and Juliet.")
I really enjoyed this show and I think that both the opera in general and this production in specific made good and interesting adaptational choices. My two sentence summary: The singing, the acting, the music, the sets and blocking, all of it was great. I give it 7 mandolins (remember, 7.8 is the highest score on the mandolin scale.)
Unusually for me, I'm going to spend a good bit of time talking about the production design choices and how they support the themes of the show and then get into my thoughts on Verdi's opera as an adaptation.
Background
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) was an Italian composer and one of the legends of opera. A good indicator of the man's status is that Opera Orlando had an entire season subtitled "Viva Verdi!"
(Also, that slogan is a neat reference because "Viva Verdi!" in the 1840s was a common graffito during the growing Italian nationalist movement. Italy had not been unified yet and large parts of the peninsula were controlled by foreign powers, mostly Austria. Verdi's opera Nabuco, about the Israelites exiled by the foreign power Babylon, struck a chord and the composer became an important symbolic figure, with the "Verdi" of "Viva Verdi" also being the acronym "Vittorio Emanuele Re d'Italia," i.e. Victor Emanuel, king of Italy.)
Verdi had an extremely long career with his first opera, Oberto, premiering in 1839 and his final opera, Falstaff, premiering in 1893. Macbeth is early Verdi, premiering in 1847, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. Verdi wrote 28 operas, with his Big 3 being Rigoletto (1851), Il Trovatore (1853), and La Traviata (1853). You could say that creating those three operas right in a row is, you know, a "pretty good run." Robert Greenberg, in his Teaching Company lectures How to Listen to an Understand Great Music, says of Verdi "For all intents and purposes the career of Giuseppe Verdi is the history of Italian opera for the 50 years from 1850-1900." (I'm relying pretty heavily on those lectures for this section, btw.)
Verdi endured a lot of tragedy in his life and he was a private person who didn't care much about what people thought. To quote him: "I don't mean to blame the public but I accept their criticisms and jeers only on the condition that I don't have to be grateful for their applause." (He also did a pretty savage smack down on a particularly entitled troll in 1871 that I previously wrote a thing on.)
Verdi frequently adapted literary works, writing multiple operas based on Victor Hugo, Lord Byron, and, of course, William Shakespeare. Per Opera Orlando's artistic director Grant Preisser "Verdi loved, loved, loved Shakespeare."
As for Macbeth (the play) ... well since I'm a lazy hack I'm just going to repeat the description I used in my (over?)long dive into the play and four of its film adaptations:
Macbeth, considered one of Shakespeare's "great tragedies," was first performed in 1606. Shakespeare, as he frequently did, used Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland as his source. The real Macbeth was an 11th century King of Scotland but his life apparently wasn't very much like that of the Macbeth that had passed into historical legend by Shakespeare's time.
I might not need to do this, but a quick summary of the plot:
Generals Macbeth and Banquo have put down a rebellion against King Duncan. After the battle, they meet three witches on a heath who prophesy that Macbeth will be king and that Banquo's descendants will be kings, though he himself will never rule. (Banquo's descendants are later shown to be the Stuart family, which includes James I, the sitting king of England when Shakespeare wrote the play). Later, Macbeth, encouraged by his wife, murders King Duncan and is himself crowned. Facing his own paranoid nihilism, he has more people murdered. He goes to see the witches again, who tell him "none of woman born shall harm Macbeth" and that he shall triumph until Birnham Wood marches on Dunsinane. Emboldened by this he murders the family of Macduff, the Thane of Fife. A group of rebel thanes (ie.lords) led by Duncan's son Malcolm, raise an army and attack him. To hide their numbers, they cut down trees from Birnham Wood and carry them along. During the battle Macbeth is killed in single combat by Macduff, a man born via Caesarian section, and the crown passes to Malcolm. The end.
That's a synopsis of the play, but those broad strokes are identical in the opera.
The Opera Orlando Production
This production was directed by Matt Haney and starred Norman Garrett (Macbeth), Mary-Hollis Hundley (Lady Macbeth), Ben Wager (Banquo), and Ganson Salmon (Macduff) as principles. The ensemble got quite the workout in this as well. Mark Sforzini conducted the orchestra, provided by the Orlando Philharmonic.
Both Haney and Grant Preisser, who was the scenic designer, count Macbeth among their favorite Shakespeare plays (allegedly there's at least one tattoo involved) and that affection and their knowledge of the play was really obvious in the production's attention to detail.
(Note: I found a libretto online but I can tell some of the verbiage is a little different than the production I saw, mostly on the order of "Opera Orlando's supertitles said 'brambles' and the libretto I found said 'thorns.'" So anything I quote from the libretto may not be the exact wording of this production, but on a cursory spot check it's very close.)
Sets, Lights, Costumes
There were a lot of set changes in this. As Preisser said during the pre-show talk: "The way that Verdi structured the piece there are actually a lot of locations and a lot of scenes which is atypical of operas. A lot of times you sit in a scene for 45 minutes, and then you get the intermission and then you sit in a scene for 45 minutes. This one has a lot of locations."
The most conspicuous set element were the two bridges on each side of the stage that spanned the orchestra pit, connecting the stage with the house. Characters, particularly the witches, frequently entered scenes over the bridges from the audience.
These bridges were a really interesting element especially given they were placed over the blackened pit. If I were to be melodramatic I'd say they visually evoked the idea that people in this opera are walking a very narrow path over darkness. They also heightened the sense of danger when Banquo is standing on the stage left bridge surrounded by the gang of murderers; he's in a dire and precarious position with absolutely no way to escape. After they stab him, he careens backwards of the bridge into the darkness. (I met Ben Wager briefly at an event the week before. He's a cool guy so I was extra happy to see him come back for the ghost scene as it meant he didn't break his neck dead-falling off the bridge.)
The Macbeth castle set was very stark, almost cold, and managed to feel confining even though it was pretty open. To quote Preisser again:
"[Director] Matt [Haney] really wanted a very sort of Brutalist aesthetic, this idea between very rigid ritualistic architecture and nature, nature being represented by the witches and all the architecture being really about power and dominance.... Verdi said that there are 3 characters in this opera, there's MacB[eth], Lady MacB[eth], and the witches so the idea of "3" constantly comes back around and around so triangles became the shape...everything is angled, so even the main decking is a triangle, the banquet table is a triangle, the arcades are triangles so it's all very rigid structure and then with minimalism just kind of paring it down to really beautiful materials and letting the materials tell the story more than adding ornamentation and embellishment"
I liked how in Macbeth's great hall the three tall arcades on each side of the stage looked like the pointed arches that line a cathedral nave, and formed the sides of a triangle that pointed to the lone arcade in the back where the altar would be. All the severe architecture and angles pull your eyes to this altar, the place where the throne will be placed, just as Macbeth lets himself be pulled to it.
Having Macbeth and Lady Macbeth plan the murder in this "cathedral" is a really striking contrast, amplified by the rear wall behind the altar turning green afterwards. What is normally a natural color out in the world becomes deeply unnatural in this Brutalist set and green becomes a sort of visual shorthand for bad deeds. When Banquo's ghost arrives at the great hall, the stage lighting turns green until he stalks away. When Macbeth vows to kill Macduff's family, the lighting again turns green. After his coronation, Macbeth and his wife each have a swath of green on their costumes, like they are garbed in their crimes.
The Macbeths' green accents are contrasted with the red accents of the witch chorus, and the production uses these red accents to create a really interesting implication about the witches that I'll get to later.
Preisser said this regarding the costuming:
The big idea for this is we kind of put it in medieval futurism so if we were still in the medieval period what would medievalism look like in the year 3000. It's kind of just a nod to the universality of Shakespeare. In MacB[eth] there's the plotting, there's the story, and there's the history there but really what we love about it is the psychology of it. So we wanted to put it in this fantastical world and the costumes take that cue as well so it's a very strict limited pallet with a lot of rich fabrics and a lot of accent colors. So green is the accent color for MacB[eth], red is the accent color for the witches and as we get to the end for Malcolm we end in this beautiful gold world and you see those colors repeated over and over again.
Preisser also gave a shout out to the make-up, which I was too far away to really see, but looked really cool in the production photos I saw.
Hat's off to the entire production team (image taken from the program):
The Witches
Rather than the 3 witches of the play, Verdi's Macbeth has a chorus of witches and a thing that jumped out at me in this production was how present they were throughout. As I mentioned, they had red accents on their clothing so they were very easy to spot. They were onstage pretty much every time there was a crowd of onlookers and they sang in all the choruses, even the ones that the libretto doesn't say are the witches. They are in Macbeth's castle mourning Duncan and call revenge on the "unknown" murderer, they are at Macbeth's coronation, and are part of the chorus of Scottish refugees lamenting their oppressed homeland. They were also frequently added as silent witnesses like in Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene.
This production also had a Hecate, the goddess of magic who is cut from most productions of Shakespeare's play. I haven't been able to suss out how often Hecate is explicitly included in opera productions. She's not referenced in the libretto but she would be easy to put in as sort of a featured chorus member provided she was visually distinct, either in the costume or blocking. She was definitely distinct here, as her actress was a head taller than the rest, wore what i think was a crown made of sticks, and the other witches moved deferentially around her. I hadn't noticed that she was credited in the program, but within about 4 seconds of the first witch scene I thought "That has to be Hecate."
Interestingly, the witches were also used during scene transitions, coming in from offstage to move set pieces around, and Hecate even performed pseudo-diegetic* plot functions. After the second witch chorus scene, during the set transition to Macbeth's castle Hecate walked back and handed Lady Macbeth the letter from her husband that starts her musings on ambition and murder. The dagger of the mind that leads Macbeth to kill Duncan is brought to him by Hecate. These kind of things can only happen in live theater and I like how the meta-ness of having an actual character perform a staging function uses theater's fuzzy diegesis to strengthen the subtextual feeling that these witches seem more like they are actively causing the events of the story.
(*Diegesis, per vocabulary.com: "In films, diegesis includes everything inside the world of the story as the characters experience it: music they can hear is part of the movie's diegesis, but a song playing during the end credits is not.")
In Shakespeare, the status of the witches is a bit ambiguous. In my look at the play text of Macbeth, I quoted University of Virginia Professor Clare Kinney as saying: "Are [the witches] instruments of a dispassionate disinterested fate, or are they indeed the actively malicious instruments of darkness running their own intervention in human lives?" (Quoted from Kinney's Teaching Company course Shakespeare's Tragedies.) The four films I looked at had wildly different answers to this question.
To me, the witches in the Opera Orlando production were firmly on the interventionist side which made the scenes where they stood onstage and bore witness to what they'd set in motion kind of chilling.
A Weird (Sisters) Thought Experiment
I also think the production's choices added a different kind of ambiguity to the witches, one not covered by Professor Kinney's "disinterested fate - malevolent interventionist" spectrum. I found myself wondering afterwards: even if these witches were causing the events, were they necessarily malevolent?
They are explicitly meant to represent Nature, here, and a Nature that shelters and assists Malcolm and Macduff in overthrowing Macbeth. Hecate is even the one who puts the crown on Malcolm at the end. And in the Macbeth castle set after the refugee chorus, there are tree branches hanging from the ceiling as if Nature is already inside the castle, the vanguard of Birnham Wood marching on Dunsinane.
The opera lacks the emphasis on the unending cycle of Scottish violence that is often present in the play, We don't see or hear about the brutality of Macbeth and Banquo putting down Cawdor's failed revolution at the beginning, and both the refugee chorus and the unambivalently triumphant tone of the finale made it feel like the evil afoot in Scotland is meant to be seen as a horrific but brief interlude, rather than the natural state. This makes the witches helping Malcolm put the world to rights noble rather than cynical.
The witches are present and singing in the choruses that mourn Duncan and lament Scotland, both of which invoke divine retribution.
Mourning Chorus (Excerpt) Open your mouth, helland swallow all creation in your womb. Heaven, let your flames fallon the unknown, detestable murderer. God, you can look into our hearts, aid us, we trust in you alone. | Refugee Chorus (Excerpt) Our betrayed homeland calls us, in tears. Brothers! Let us runto rescue the oppressed! The wrath of God will destroy the villain. God has grown tired of his awful crimes.
|
So could they be agents of divine justice and natural order?
At the end they sing:
My thanks rise to you, great God of vengeance.
Let us sing hymns of glory to our liberator.
Are they intervening to bring about the horrible events that they know Macbeth will choose to do, reminiscent of a Calvinist view that God is in total control of every event in the universe, has absolute foreknowledge of what everyone will do, and only presents the paths He knows we will take?
Or is Banquo right when he sings "But often the wicked spirit of hell tells us truths and betrays us, and, cursed, we are abandoned above that pit dug out for us?"
I mean, he probably is. The witches do, after all, start the opera off talking about drowning a sailor because his wife "chased me to the devil" which is, charitably, "disproportionate." (These lines are directly paraphrased from the play.) This would make their lamentations and appeals to divine justice an exercise in smug mockery.
Whatever the "truth" of it, I like that staging choices can open up this interesting thought experiment without changing a word of the libretto.
Some Quick Blocking Things
In an opera where the title character often feels unsure and passive and Lady Macbeth seems to be calling more of the shots, this production made some neat subtle choices to reinforce that power dynamic. Norman Garrett (Macbeth) is a pretty big guy and definitely could be imposing but this production found ways to tamp down on that quite a bit. One standout moment was in the aftermath of Duncan's murder, where the Macbeths disingenuously join the lamentation of the crowd. There were a lot of people on stage and I almost had a bit of a hard time finding Macbeth but Lady Macbeth was positioned more prominently in front of everyone else. Macbeth is made king right after and it's telling that he does not take the crown himself. Lady Macbeth moves to center stage, picks it up and places it on his head.
Another example is at the end of the scene where Banquo's ghost appears. After freaking out, Macbeth ends up at Banquo's empty chair at the bottom right of the banquet table with people all around him. It's not exactly a power position; he's displaced to the front of stage right and the triangular table draws the eye to the throne isolated at back where Lady Macbeth is actually sitting. And the uneasy banquet attendees look at her, not him.
I don't know if this was intentional in the casting, but Mary-Hollis Hundley (Lady Macbeth) is also rather tall which means Garrett didn't tower over her and this instantly put her, visually, on equal footing with him. Also Hecate being at least tall as he was kind of repeated this effect in the witch scenes.
Macbeth's whole vibe shifted before the final battle, though. He was alone onstage, an occurrence that was surprisingly rare in an opera named after him, and it just felt like he was bigger and had a more commanding and intimidating aura about him. This shift was a really great choice for the character, given where Macbeth is at this point in the drama, and it was good to see Garrett be able to project his presence a bit.
There was a hint of this command in the first scene, in a really great moment between Macbeth and Banquo. After Macbeth has been hailed Thane of Cawdor the prophecy proved true, Banquo, standing on the left pit bridge, walks toward the stage just as Macbeth crosses in front of him to exit the scene. Macbeth doesn't slow down or really even look at him but Banquo stops abruptly, draws back slightly, and then lowers his head in deference. I really like this detail as just this small staging decision very neatly shows that, though both men entered at the same time and were ostensibly peers, Macbeth is absolutely the boss. Also, the way Wager stiffened slightly made it also seem like a tense moment between the two, like Banquo is uneasy about what Macbeth will do with the rest of the prophecy, and this moment builds on Banquo's earlier line "Oh, how the hope of a kingdom fills him with pride!"
A Libretto Note
I mentioned above how the libretto I found is pretty close to what i remember from the supertitles but there was one spot at the very beginning where a small change created a subtle character revelation.
After the first part of the prophecy is proven true, the libretto I found has Macbeth's line as this:
Two prophecies are now fulfilled.The third promises me a crown.But why do I feel my hair standing on end?
Where has this thought of blood come from?
Fate offers me a crown which I will not stretch out my hand to snatch. (emphasis mine)
In the Opera Orlando production I'm pretty sure in this line he referred to the crown as "the crown I've longed for." I noted it because I always pay attention to how any production portrays Macbeth's musing on being king. The crown line is a small detail but an interesting one as it establishes that the witches did not put the idea of getting the crown into his head. He had been longing for it before the opera even began.
(I don't know if the original Italian also has that sense of longing for the crown and it's a translation emphasis thing or the Italian line as sung was a little different there.)
An Insultingly Short Take on the Performances
Like I did in my piece on Orlando Ballet's Romeo and Juliet, I'm burying the lede a bit here but I really appreciated the performances in this, both in terms of acting and singing. This applies to the choruses, too.
This probably makes me pretty basic but the standouts to me were Lady Macbeth's toast / drinking song "Si colmi il calice" at the finale of Act 1, Macbeth's final aria "Pieta, Rispetto, Amore," and Banquo's "Come dal ciel precipita" just before he is murdered. The melodies are great and the singers absolutely crushed it. I still get baffled as to how an unamplified singer can be louder than an orchestra pit but that's how opera goes.
Also, this performance of Lady Macbeth's drinking song highlighted something cool about having a live orchestra and a thoughtful production. At the pre-show talk conductor Mark Sforzini said:
"When we first hear that drinking song music it's one spritely tempo and then after the news is brought to the crowd that Banquo is dead ... [Lady Macbeth]'s nervous and she's trying to cover her nerves so we start that music just a little slower and then we pick the tempo up.
It's just a great example of how in a good production all of the elements, staging, acting, music, etc. are used to tell the story.
I don't have any particularly hot takes about any of this, but as I'm still a lazy hack I'll paraphrase what I said about Judi Dench's performance in Macbeth (1979):
"I feel kind of bad that I don't have more to say about [Opera Orlando's] performance, but that may be an expectations thing. [I] was expecting [it] to be excellent and, well, [it] was."
The Opera as Adaptation
Setting aside any of the specifics of Opera Orlando's production that I've already spent [redacted] words talking about, I had some thoughts about the opera as an adaptation in general.
The "Dialog" - No Fear Shakespeare
It's pretty cool how straight up the adaptation is. Of course there's a lot of dialog excisions and a lot fewer named roles but I was surprised how many of the striking lines from the play survived into the libretto. Some, like this one, are lifted directly from the play:
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell
Others are paraphrased either for brevity or to account for how different Italian is from English. Shakespeare wrote mostly in blank verse which is a good choice for a rhyme poor language like English but would be quite the trick in Italian where rhyming is easy because every word ends in a vowel.
The lines that are paraphrased still manage to retain the sense of the play text:
Lady Macbeth (play) And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, | Lady Macbeth (opera) Arise, all the agents of hell That rouse mortals to bloody acts! Night, wrap usIn motionless darkness. Do not let the knife see The breast which it strikes. |
Or the crown line I mentioned above, which in addition to capturing the spirit of the play's line, is a pretty poetic line in its own right:
Macbeth (play) If chance will have me king, Why, chance may crown me Without my stir | Macbeth (opera) Fate offers me a crown Which I will not stretch out my hand to snatch. |
(I know, I know, I split the play line across the pentameter boundary. Blame the table size, not me)
It's cool that even when the libretto isn't directly interpolating play text it still reads pretty well. The Banquo aria "Come dal ciel precipita" that I mentioned earlier doesn't really have an analog in the play and I really like it:
Hurry, my son, let us escape from these shadows.
I can feel an unknown sensation rising in my heart,
filled with sad foreboding and suspicion.
How the gloom falls more and more darkly from heaven!
It was on a night like this that they stabbed my lord Duncan.
A thousand feverish images foretell misfortune to me
and cloud my thoughts with phantoms and fears.
It's a good addition and feels true to the drama. It wouldn't feel out of place in Shakespeare's text.
Macbeth
The Macbeth of Verdi's opera feels a lot less active and independent than his play counterpart. I think some of this is because most of his internal agonizing over his deeds have been cut out which means, for example, that when Lady Macbeth says "You should kill Duncan" he just kind of does it which makes it feel like he has less agency and is doing what he's told.
This is a persistent thread and Macbeth feels less singularly responsible for his crimes. He confides to Lady Macbeth that he needs to kill Banquo and his son and she tries to steel his resolve; in the play during the equivalent scene he intentionally does not tell her he's going to kill them and in fact has already ordered the murders completely on his own in a previous scene that she was not present for.
She's also aware of and encourages the plan to murder Macduff's family, another thing she does not know about in the play. Even the line stating the plan to smear Duncan's sleeping servants with his blood to frame them has been shifted from Macbeth to Lady Macbeth.
Opera Macbeth also faints after his second encounter with the witches, singing "I am lost!" before he passes out, another thing that doesn't happen to play Macbeth.
This all combines to make him a more passive character whose inner world is far more elusive than his play counterpart's and he feels more like he's being blown around by fate and external actors.
Lady Macbeth
As you probably noticed, Lady Macbeth is way more involved and complicit in Macbeth's crimes in the opera; she's the "murdering minister" whispering in his ear.
After Macbeth's second visit to the witches, when he talks about his vision of Banquo's line of kings, she responds with "Lies! Death and destruction to that wicked brood!... Let Banquo's son be found and put to death!" And when he says he's going to murder Macduff's family and spill the blood of all of their enemies, she says "Now I see your old courage again."
Yikes.
She's also kind of meaner to him than she is in the play. In both versions Macbeth says immediately following Duncan's murder that he thought he heard a voice cry "Sleep no more, Macbeth does murdered sleep." In the play she seems uneasy about this, saying "What do you mean?" and after he repeats it her response is:
Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy thane,
You do unbend your noble strength to think
So brainsickly of things.
-Act 2, scene ii
In the opera she immediately responds with the much less conciliatory:
But tell me, did you not seem to hear another voice?
You are bold, Macbeth, but have no daring.
You hesitate halfway, Glamis, and stop.
Cawdor, you are a conceited child.
So, essentially "Aw, you heard a voice? Didn't you hear that other one that called you a total wuss?"
She doesn't call him a coward just a manipulation tactic, either. When Macbeth says, as he does in the play, "I shall hear Duncan's holy virtues thunder vengeance at me like angels of wrath," opera Lady Macbeth says to herself "His spirit is trembling, struggling and raving. Who would ever call him the unconquered man he was?" (She's not present for this line in the play.) She then follows up that aside by telling him to take the knife and smear the blood on the servants.
Lady Macbeth lacks a lot of the doubt and ambivalence she has in the play. When Macbeth first returns from the murder and is talking about how the servants were praying in their sleep, opera Lady doesn't try to sooth Macbeth (and herself) with:
These deed must not be thought
After these ways, so; it will make us mad.
- Act 2, scene 2
She just says "Madness!" In the play she's clearly uncomfortable hearing talk of God's blessings and prayer from people they are about to frame for murder and wants Macbeth to stop talking about it for the sake of both of their sanities. In the opera she just calls him crazy. The talk of prayers don't affect her at all and she doesn't share her husband's moral panic.
She's more present in the opera than in the play and having her literally standing by his side and encouraging him while all of the story's crimes are being planned makes her the persistent devil on his shoulder.
It was a nice touch in Opera Orlando's production that when Macbeth faints following the second witch visit, after the witches say "Spirits of the air, bring the unconscious King back to his senses," Lady Macbeth appears on stage and he awakens. (In the libretto he wakes up before she arrives with a herald, who isn't present in Opera Orlando's production.) This is a visual encapsulation of what she's been doing and will continue to do: reviving Macbeth's resolve when his will to do evil falters.
Lady Macbeth's extra viciousness, especially after the second witch encounter, does create a little bit of whiplash during her broken-by-guilt sleepwalking. The aria she sings in the scene is beautiful (and taken very directly from the play text) but it's a little harder to buy when the last time we saw her about twenty minutes earlier she was gleefully singing "Let Banquo's son be found and put to death!"
Macduff and Malcolm
Malcolm and Macduff, the third and fourth biggest part by line in Shakespeare's play, are drastically reduced in the opera. Macduff is present for the group scenes in Macbeth's castle in the first half, but only has a few lines when he finds Duncan's body and after Macbeth's ghost related freakout at the banquet. There's not a lot to indicate he's going to be all that important, especially as his body discovery scene is split with Banquo.
It makes dramatic sense to have Banquo with Macduff when the body is discovered, as the minor character Lennox who is with him in the play isn't in the opera, but it shifts the focal point of the moment from Macduff to Banquo, as we already know Banquo is important and we've heard a decent amount from him.
(Admittedly, Macduff in the play also just kind of shows up 1/3 of the way through but Banquo is not as emphasized as he is in the opera. The play has a much bigger cast whereas in the opera he's 1 of only 3 named characters we've met thus far and accounts for a larger percentage of the dialog than his play counterpart.)
After the refugee chorus late in the opera, Macduff has a lament for his children's death, an event we don't see on stage, but he doesn't say whole lot otherwise. I think it's a little strange that the opera speeds past the Macduff family tragedy considering how important it is, but this does have an interesting effect. To me, this general reduction of Macduff (and, for that matter, Malcolm, who is also barely in this) reinforces the fate angle of it all. Who are Macduff and Malcolm? Doesn't matter, they are the instruments of destiny. Why do they overthrow Macbeth? Because they are fated to. Macbeth's fall is inevitable and the motivations of the people who cause it don't really matter.
Verdi wasn't kidding when he said "there are 3 characters in this opera." (Though I would argue that Banquo is a close fourth; to me he felt like a bigger part than he does in the play.)
The Music
Unsurprisingly, I really liked Verdi's score. Verdi isn't the giant he is (and this opera isn't still around) by accident. Conductor Mark Sforizini said this in the pre show talk:
With Verdi you always get amazing finales at the end of the acts. So the end of act 1 finale and the end of act 2 finale are gigantic numbers where the orchestra plays full steam and everybody's on stage, all the principles and all the chorus are singing together. You get this huge dynamic range with Verdi because you have these big moments but you also notice how he scored a lot of the softer moments and some of that orchestration is some of the most beautiful and striking in the piece.
There were a couple of moments where, like in Lucia di Lammermoor, there was a little bit of a disconnect between what the music was doing and what the characters were singing about. Like, someone's was singing something really dark and heavy and the music was bouncier than I'd have expected. It wasn't at all pervasive and happened way less than in Lucia, where so many of Enrico's fiery words were underscored by a playful waltz that I almost wondered if Donizetti was making a joke. In Macbeth I only picked up on it maybe three times.
Gallimaufry
Wow those murderers suck at murdering. In the opera rather than three murderers there is a big group of murderers. Opera Orlando's production had about 16 on stage and Fleance still escaped rather easily. I ran into Ben Wager after the show and he told me that the original idea was to have the murderers converge on Fleance in a big scrum and have him sneak out from under their legs and escape, but during rehearsals they realized that it read as a comic Keystone Cops kind of thing and broke the mood of a pretty intense scene. (Side note: Does the opera have a gang of murderers so they didn't need to get three opera soloist to handle the back and forth between them and could have the ensemble do it?)
I liked that in this production Macbeth's "dagger of the mind" was the very literal dagger brought by Hecate. A lot of productions of the play make it something only Macbeth can see but having it be real and visible creates a good contrast with his line "Only my bloody imagination gives it shape." No it doesn't, my dude, this is as real as it gets. I couldn't tell if it was the same dagger he had in his hand when he returned from the murder, but I kind of hope it was.
The libretto I found has Macbeth's opening line as "I have never seen a day so fine and fierce!" I very much like that Opera Orlando translated the line as "I have never seen a day so foul and fair as this" which is much closer to Macbeth's famous and thematically important first line in the play "So foul and fair a day I have not seen." The mixture of "fair" and "foul" comes up several times in the play and it's nice that this production retained the wording.
Two other small things regarding the reduced Macduff in the libretto. In her sleepwalking scene, Lady Macbeth has the line "The Thane of Fife was he not recently a husband and father? What happened?" This is how Lady Macbeth refers to him in this scene in the play, but nowhere in the opera is Macduff referred to as the Thane of Fife. It can obviously be inferred but I wouldn't fault someone for having some confusion here. Also, this wording biases towards Macduff, where in the play Lady Macbeth frames it around Lady Macduff: "The Thane of Fife had a wife, where is she now?" This change kind of makes sense dramatically as we haven't seen Lady Macduff but I still thought it a bit odd. We haven't seen that much of Macduff, either.
I found an opera role I could have played! King Duncan! He walks across the stage one time and does not sing. I look for this every time I see the ballet, but I think I'm going to start doing it for the opera. I suspect they're mostly going to be "dead body #1" type roles.
Conclusion
This was another really good one by Opera Orlando and it's not even the only Shakespeare adaptation this season. In April they're putting on Berlioz's one act Beatrice and Benedict based on Much Ado About Nothing. It's going to be combined with the tragic one act Cavalleria Rusticana, with the conceit that both stories are happening on the same day in the same town square. I'm really looking forward to it.
Thanks for sticking with me this long. (Unless you read that sentence after just scrolling to the bottom without reading the rest in which case you are...scum and I hope you're happy. :p )
Cheers
-m
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