Word: macbeths
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...life and death of Leon Trotsky, a kind of Marxist Macbeth, have been made into a novel by U.S. Author Bernard (The Late Risers, In Deep) Wolfe, who was one of Trotsky's aides in the years before the inevitable assassin caught up with him in his Mexico hideaway...
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...
...Verdi first wrote Macbeth when he was 33, but 18 years later (1865) revised it, adding some of its best music...