Word: macbeth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Giuseppe Verdi called the opera his "best beloved child," but audiences have consistently agreed with George Bernard Shaw, who sneered that Verdi tried to turn Shakespeare's tragedy into another Trovatore. Last week, when Manhattan's Metropolitan staged Macbeth for the first time in its 76-year history, the opera kept moving from the sublime toward the ridiculous. The score contains much hauntingly beautiful music,* prefiguring the emotional insights of Otello, but it is also marred by trivia, such as a kind of witches' cancan in the first scene. The libretto (by Verdi, put into verse...
...part of Lady Macbeth, which was to have been sung by Maria Callas before Rudolf Bing fired her (TIME, Nov. 17), went to radiant Viennese Soprano Leonie Rysanek, who in her Met debut showed off an unusually pure and beautifully rounded voice and considerable acting talent. Her only fault was that she scarcely fitted Verdi's bill ("I would have Lady Macbeth ugly and wicked ... her voice should be that of a devil"). For the most part, Soprano Rysanek seemed more like an ambitious Org Man's tender helpmate than a driven woman goading her weak husband...
...British Critic Francis Toye wrote of Macbeth, it is "a splendid and uncommonly interesting failure"-very much worth reviving and seeing...
...Cambridge Drama Festival has announced that one of its productions this summer will be Macbeth, with Siobhan McKenna as Lady Macbeth. Jose Quintero will direct and Jason Robards, Jr. may play the title role. Miss McKenna and Quintero planted a mountain laurel yesterday, for the benefit of photographers, on the site of the Metropolitan Boston Arts Center, where the Festival will present its season...
Miss McKenna will appear in at least one other play at the Center besides Macbeth. At a press conference following the tree-planting she said that she hoped the season would open with a comedy, adding that As You Like It and Aristophanes' Lysistrata have received consideration...