Macbeth

Verdi revered Shakespeare—he kept an Italian translation of the complete works by his bedside, and called the playwright “Papa”: the father of all modern dramatists. Macbeth (1847) was the first of three operas in which he attempted to engage with Shakespeare on his own terms, and it might even be the most daring. Assisted by his librettists Maffei and Piave, Verdi rewrote “The Scottish Play” in the language of high-Romantic Italian opera, transforming it into a surging, red-blooded melodrama, filled with ardent vocal melody and vivid orchestral colours, and giving the murderous central couple an injection of 19th-century psychological complexity. The results occasionally startle traditionalists: Shakespeare’s three witches become a full chorus, and in the second version of the opera, created for Paris audiences in 1865, there’s a flamboyant supernatural ballet, as well as a bloodcurdling showpiece aria for Lady Macbeth, “La luce langue”. But what makes the strongest impact is the sonic universe—by turns sombre, tempestuous and eerie—that Verdi conjures out of Shakespeare’s poetry, and the impassioned, appalling, but troublingly believable relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. With Macbeth, Verdi shocked his contemporaries by insisting that dramatic truth was more important than vocal beauty, but when it’s sung (and acted) by a world-class cast it can be one of the most compelling experiences in all Romantic opera.