Word: macbeths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...been elevated for a rehearsal that afternoon and the hydraulic lift had stuck. While the audience-including Vice President and Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller and Mrs. Giovanni Leone, the wife of Italy's President-waited, stagehands lowered the pit by hand cranks. The prelude to Verdi's Macbeth began 54 minutes late...
...Scala opened with Macbeth, considered one of its best new productions. Typically, the company offered a cast of Italian and non-Italian singers, notably Italy's Piero Cappuccilli as Macbeth, the U.S.'s Shirley Verrett as Lady Macbeth and Bulgaria's Nicolai Ghiaurov as Banquo. On the podium was Claudio Abbado, the company's former music director who, at 43, is a conductor of international stature. The production was conceived and staged by Italy's Giorgio Strehler (see box). For Strehler, it was one of three moments in the spotlight. His staging of Figaro...
Fiendlike Queen. Strehler's Macbeth turned out to be carefully thought out but disappointing. The play is one of Shakespeare's most vivid, bloody and craftily psychological works. So was Verdi's operatic treatment when he finally finished revising it 18 years after its 1847 premiėre. Strehler's stylized production is bloodless and static; lethal emotion is indicated by second-rate symbols. Once they seize the throne, Macbeth and his lady trail around in long, heavy robes apparently intended to represent both royalty and their guilty burden. But the onlooker simply worries about whether...
Were Verrett the Lady Macbeth many had anticipated, perhaps Strehler's mannered direction would have been less bothersome. Both visually and vocally, Verrett conveyed little of Shakespeare's "fiendlike queen." Verdi wanted Lady Macbeth to be "twisted and ugly" and to sing with a "raw, choked, hollow voice." That may be asking too much. But Verrett's bland, unchanging facial expression and her constant concern-except in the sleepwalking scene, her best musical moment-with polished tone did not begin to get inside a character that is more important to the opera than Macbeth...
...alone. One takes heart in the present, when a work of such bite and compassion can be done as well as it was on the Paris Opéra's first night in New York. Among the many talents at work was the same essential Strehler as in Macbeth-but what a difference! It was as if he had taken his lead from the Figaro overture, that barely perceptible rustle of strings and woodwinds that swells to incandescence. All was succinct and imbued with restrained passion...