Sunday Classics: Verdi looks evil square in the face

Josephine Barstow is Lady Macbeth at Glyndebourne in 1972, with Rae Woodland as the Gentlewoman (quite fine, by the way) and Brian Donlan as the Doctor, directed by Michael Hadjimischev, conducted by John Pritchard.

not included in the clip
DOCTOR: We've waited two nights in vain.
GENTLEWOMAN: Tonight she will appear.
DOCTOR: What has she spoken of in her sleep?
GENTLEWOMAN: I don't dare repeat it to a living soul . . .
Here she is!
[Lady Macbeth enters slowly, walking in her sleep. She carries a candle.]
DOCTOR: She carries a light in her hand?
GENTLEWOMAN: The lamp she always has by her bed.
clip begins
DOCTOR: Oh, how her eyes sparkle!
GENTLEWOMAN: Yet she doesn't see.
[Lady Macbeth puts the candle down and rubs her hands, making the gesture of washing them.]
DOCTOR: Why does she rub her hands?
GENTLEWOMAN: She thinks she's washing them.
[0:50] LADY MACBETH: A spot, and here this other . . .
Go, I tell you, o accursed one!
One . . . two . . . this is the hour!
You tremble? . . . You don't dare go in?
[1:45] A warrior, so cowardly?
Oh, shame! Come now, hurry.
Who could have imagined
in that old man so much blood?
Who could have imagined so much blood?
[2:49] DOCTOR: What is she saying?
[2:54] LADY MACBETH: The Thane of Fife,
now wasn't he a husband and father?
What happened to him?
GENTLEWOMAN, DOCTOR: Oh, terror!
[3:18] LADY MACBETH: And will I never be able
to clean these hands?
No, I will never be able to clean them.
[3:46] GENTLEWOMAN, DOCTOR: Oh, terror!
[3:50] LADY MACBETH: Of human blood
it still smells here . . . All of Arabia
with its perfumes
can't sweeten this little hand. Alas!
[4:54] DOCTOR: She's sighing?
[4:58] LADY MACBETH: Put on your night clothes.
Now go wash yourself.
Banquo is dead, and from the grave
one who has died cannot rise again.
[5:45] DOCTOR: This again?
[5:52] LADY MACBETH: To bed, to bed.
[Barstow instead anticipates the line "Somone's knocking"]
What's done can't be undone.
Someone's knocking . . . Let's go, Macbeth!
Don't let your pallor accuse you!
[6:33] GENTLEWOMAN, DOCTOR: Oh, terror!
[6:34] LADY MACBETH: Someone's knocking . . . Let's go, Macbeth!
Don't let your pallor accuse you!
[7:09] Let's go, Macbeth! [repeated several times] Let's go!

"Open, Hell, thy mouth, and swallow
all creation in thy womb."

-- the rousted inhabitants of Macbeth's castle, responding to news of the murder of the king, near the end of Act I of Verdi's Macbeth

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!"

-- Edmund (alone), in King Lear, Act I, Scene 2

by Ken

When people learn that the first version of Verdi's Macbeth -- the first of his eventual three Shakespeare operas -- was unsuccessful, and that the composer subsequently revised it, they tend to think that the opera's strengths trace back to the revision. In fact, while the composer did make some improvements, most of the opera as we know it traces back to the original version. I would have to guess that audiences weren't ready for it.

There was nothing new about operatic adaptations of Shakespeare. But the notion of a Shakespeare-based opera that could stand alongside its source material -- that was an idea that wasn't taken seriously, except perhaps by Verdi. And so I suspect what was noticed primarily in the operatic Macbeth was the tried-and-true conventions of Italian opera, with fixings like choruses of witches and jolly murderers.

Verdi was prepared to believe that he had failed with Macbeth, but the one criticism that he wouldn't accept was that he didn't "understand" Shakespeare. All his life he had the complete works at his fingertips. They were a part of him, and it's clear that they both mirrored and shaped the way he looked at the world.

Lady Macbeth's Sleepwalking Scene was brilliantly and shockingly imagined by Shakespeare, starting with that image implanted in Lady M's deranged mind that (a) she has these spots on her hands, and (b) she can somehow order them away. ("Out, damned spot!") This is surely a case, though, where even Shakespeare would have acknowledged that the material benefits from, almost requires the resources of an operatic master. The mad scene as realized by Verdi is unquestionably one of the supreme set pieces in the theatrical literature.


IN WHICH I FLEE FROM KING LEAR

I don't need an excuse for thinking about or listening to or watching Verdi's Macbeth, but this time I got to it by an unexpected path.

I've had the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear -- directed by Trevor Nunn, with Sir Ian McKellan as Lear -- on my DVR for ages now, waiting for some hypothetical time when I could summon both the concentration and the nerve to look at it. Assuming the thing didn't just get wiped from the hard drive over time, as so often happens with really serious TV stuff I record because I know I really ought to look at it, the best-case scenario for me here was that it would turn out to be crummy, as so many of these latter-day British Shakespeare productions do. Then I could just erase it and get on with life, and not have to deal with a play that just plain gives me the willies. The view of human nature it presents is way too persuasively bleak for convenient swallowing.

Maybe it was the heat, but yesterday, having whittled the backlog on the DVR down to manageable size, and polished off the stuff I really wanted to see, I looked at some of the Lear, and unfortunately it's not crap. And fairly quickly, by the time we got to the newly ascendant royal daughters Goneril and Regan plotting against their father on the ground that what was just so capriciously given could be just as capriciously taken away, the play was having its usual effect on me: making me want to flee.

Not, let me stress, because of defects or lack of believability in the play itself. Quite the contrary: It's way too brilliantly and believably written. By this point, of course, the illegitimate Edmund has not only laid (and sprung) but explained the trap he has set for his hapless half-brother Edgar, and the remarkable speech I've quoted above could sail straight into the 21st century -- he could be talking to Rachel Maddow about the activities of the Family.


VERDI'S STRUGGLES WITH KING LEAR

As it happens, as everyone with a cursory knowledge of the life and work of Verdi knows, there is a link between the composer and King Lear. The play was so close to his heart that he struggled for decades to make an opera of it, having commissioned first Salvatore Cammarano (the librettist of Il Trovatore) and then, when Cammarano died without completing the task, Antonio Somma (the librettist of A Masked Ball, and the most "literary" of his pre-Boito librettists) to produce a Lear libretto, eventually extracting two versions from Somma.

While some of the music composed for Lear wound up in other operas, we actually get some prefiguring of what he would have done with the material way back in his first successful opera, Nabucco, where both Lear's problematic relationships with his daughters and Gloucester's relationships with his two sons, one illegitmate and one legitimate, are shadowed in King Nebuchadnezzar's relationships with his two daughters, and of course in his descent into and emergence from madness.

In the end, I suspect King Lear itself defeated Verdi. For one thing, it would have required a far savvier adaptation than what he could expect from Somma. But even when, late in life -- at a time when he considered himself finally retired from composing for the stage -- Verdi happened upon his greatest librettist, Arrigo Boito, and allowed himself to be talked into undertaking a Shakespeare collaboration, it wasn't Lear he turned to but the much more manageable Othello. It's been suggested that Shakespeare's Othello was already an Italian opera, whereas Lear . . . well, there are things in it I'm sure he knew he could render operatically, but others I think he came to understand he couldn't.

WHAT VERDI SAID TO MASCAGNI ABOUT LEAR

Wikipedia, in a brief entry on Re Lear, passes on this anecdote provided by the composer of Cavalleria rusticana:

The Re Lear project kept haunting Verdi to the end of his life. In 1896, he offered his Lear material to Pietro Mascagni, who asked, "Maestro, why didn't you put it into music?" According to Mascagni, "Softly and slowly he replied, 'The scene in which King Lear finds himself on the heath scared me.'"

I'm prepared to believe that Verdi said this, but I also don't believe it for a second. I think Lear on the heath would have been second-nature for him. It's a scene that's inherently operatic to begin with, and the kind of challenge to which he rose with distinction his whole career, again starting with Nabucco's madness. I don't know if Verdi was kidding Mascagni or himself, but I don't think this is at all the sort of problem in the Lear material that stumped him.

One thing about the Lear material that I can't imagine would have daunted Verdi is the bleak view of human nature, and in particular the problem of human evil. This was so close to his heart that it had been appearing in his operas back to, well, Nabucco. It was surely one of his points of closest identification with the plays of Shakespeare.


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Just as with Shakespeare, the general ascendancy of evil wasn't Verdi's entire outlook on human nature. Perhaps the composer's most remarkable artistic achievement is that as he approached the age of 80, in his second Shakespeare collaboration with Boito, Falstaff, he was able to imagine the aspects of human nature he cherished triumphing over the darkness. Who would have imagined that he had that much hopefulness to pour into the children, Nannetta and Fenton, for whom he showed such affection in Falstaff?

No creative artist valued decency and virtue more than Verdi, and yet in most of his operas they take a terrible beating. Perhaps because he so valued the goodness that can be embedded in the human soul, it must have caused him particular pain to see as clearly as he did how much horror lies there, and how unequal the battle between them is.

All of which made the Macbeths, well, Verdi's kind of people. I wonder whether I'm the only one who, on first encounter with the play, at a young and relative innocent age, thought that Macbeth himself wasn't so bad, except for being easily manipulated, and that the real villain was the ambitious Lady Macbeth. Of course that isn't the case at all. You don't have to look very closely to see that he wants all those good things prophesied by the witches just as badly as she does. It isn't even the case that he's unwilling to do the things that she is to get them. The principal difference -- and boy, is this 21st-century -- is that she sees no difference between wanting those things and being entitled to those things, even if it means some incidental messiness along the way, whereas he keeps being held back by silly moral compunctions.


Pay no attention to the production (Met, 2008), which is a travesty. (I assume the guilty parties are already safely executed.) Macduff (Dimitris Pittas), under orders from the king, has come to wake him. Banquo (John Relyea) meanwhile reflects on the ominousness of the night. Macduff returns so shaken he is literally unable to say what he has seen. While Banquo goes inside, Macduff summons the sleeping inhabitants of the castle, crying "crime" and "treason." Banquo returns, declaring [2:13], "Oh, we lost ones," and is barely able to report [2:24]:

"E morto . . . assassinato . . . il re Duncano."
("He's dead . . . murdered . . . King Duncan.")

A seemingly endless, crescendo-ing timpani roll [2:34] finally erupts [2:39] in a thundering ensemble:

"Open, Hell, thy mouth, and swallow
all creation in thy womb."

If this moment is even adequately performed, it is for me as horrible, unprocessable a moment as can happen on a stage. For each of those castle inhabitants -- or anyway all but two of them -- something literally unimaginable has been announced. The king has been murdered in his bed in the safety of the castle of his most loyal nobleman.

The closest analogy I can think of was hearing the news that President Kennedy had been shot, but even that doesn't match this, first because my first assumption, in the absence of any better information, was that he was shot but would surely recover, and second because after all, he was traveling in a motorcade out in the open, and thus within range of any deranged person. (Many of the most obvious instances of tidings that exceed our imaginative powers, like catastrophic hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis, aren't analogous either, precisely because they're natural rather than man-made disasters.)

Or I think of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, but again, the first news I heard was that a plane had flown into one of the towers, and naturally my mind processed that into something "manageable" -- a small private plane that I imagined was going to do some serious damage to the part of the building it hit, not to mention the damage from falling debris. And then, because we had only a couple of barely accessible windows in our office that faced south toward the Twin Towers, I didn't see either of them collapse. I did, however, see the faces of people who had just seen the second tower collapse, and that was pretty mind-blowing.

The Macbeth folks, however, have to absorb in one fell swoop the news that the king has been murdered in a bed where he should have been as safe as anyplace on earth.


A BACKWARDS "FORWARD PROGRESSION"

I'm trying to suggest that there are things so horrible our minds are literally incapable of processing them raw, and that Verdi has here given us a blood-curdling dramatization of one. But note that it takes a beat -- the awful seconds while the only sound is that horrible timpani cresecendo -- before the assembled inhabitants can give voice to their horror, and while the "Schiudi, inferno" chorus is close to unfiltered horror, it is in fact already filtered, and these people, totally understandably, have done what our minds always do in such situations: deflect, rationalize, reduce the horror to some kind of manageable form.

In fact, the closest we have to unfiltered responses are Macduff's initial inability even to say what he has seen, and then Banquo's "O noi perduti ("Oh, we lost ones"). At that point it's all over, we're done for, in hell with the jaws closing behind us. Contrary to what they say, life does not go on. But of course life does go on. And the sane mind knows how to protect its sanity.

What Verdi has done through the rest of this scene fills me with awe, and horror. We have what appears to be a progression of ensemble building. From the "Schiudi, inferno" ouburst, the crowd organizes itself into a basically unaccompanied ensemble [3:36} in which a quartet made up of Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, the Gentlewoman, and Macduff beseeches God, and each of its phrases is immediately echoed by the others. This finally builds [5:11] to a climax, at which point the orchestra enters [5:26], and the scene continues to "build" to its conclusion.

Now certainly there is a clear progression in articulateness and musical sophistication as this whole scene unfolds. But in emotional terms, it's not a "buildup"; it's the exact opposite, a shutdown, a sealing shut of unprocessable reality and emotional havoc.


THE MURDER OF BANQUO

Now, the Macbeths still have one more loose end to deal with, and the scene of the murder of Banquo, including the great bass aria "Come dal ciel precipita," with a stark contrast between the chorus of those jolly murderers I mentioned early and Banquo's own premonition, traveling alone with his small son, knowing that they are both likely targets of his once-trusted comrade-in-arms, that the oppressive night reminds of that other horrible night:

"On a night like this they stabbed
Duncan, my lord."

I wish we could spend time on this scene, and wish I could offer you a performance worthy of it, but here at least is a decently sung one by Paul Plishka, from San Francisco's Opera in the Park, 1984, conducted by Kurt Herbert Adler.


QUICK HITS: SHAKESPEARE'S LEAR AND
VERDI'S MACBETH ON HOME AUDIO-VIDEO

The McKellan-Nunn-RSC King Lear is available on DVD from PBS Home Video. Since I still haven't gotten through Act I, and have the distinct feeling that the production isn't going to add up to that much, I'm not recommending, just noting.

As for Verdi's Macbeth, it would be impossible to talk about recordings without mentioning Maria Callas, even though she never actually recorded Lady Macbeth. We do, however, have the broadcast recording of her 1952 La Scala performance(with Enzo Mascherini as Macbeth, Victor de Sabata conducting), and good stereo studio recordings of three excerpts including the Sleepwalking Scene (unfortunately the stripped-down version, starting at Una macchia and omitting the commentaries of the Gentlewoman and Doctor).

(Amazon, by the way, offers a 99-cent MP3 downloadof the 1952 La Scala Sleepwalking Scene, and in the interest of reporting to you, I blew the 99 cents on it. This "song" also starts at "Una macchia," though you'd think one of the virtues of having the scene from a performance of the complete opera should be having the whole scene, starting with the orchestral introduction and including the preceding dialogue of the Gentlewoman and Doctor; while you can download the complete opera, it doesn't appear that you can download this "song" in addition to the Sleepwalking Scene. More important, I had forgotten how fast the Scala Sleepwalking Scene is. Whew! I'm afraid you'll still need the 1958 studio excerpts. I can't imagine how many other CDs they may be on, but I have them on an EMI CD called Verdi Arias, Vol. I, which seems to be out of print but also seems readily and inexpensively findable.)

Callas should have been the Lady Macbeth of the first commercial recording of Macbeth, made as late as 1959 in conjunction with, shockingly, the Met's first-ever production of the opera. But something went very wrong between Callas and Met GM Rudolf Bing in the advance preparations (there's endless he-said, she-said reporting and speculation, but as far as I know, we still don't really know what went wrong), and she was fired, or maybe quit. RCA went ahead with the recording, with Leonard Warren and Callas's replacement, Leonie Rysanek, Erich Leinsdorf conducting.

For all its faults, the RCA recordingwould still be my co-first pick in combination with the second Macbeth recording, the first of Decca's three, with Giuseppe Taddei and Birgit Nilsson, Thomas Schippers conducting (currently unavailable, but worth watching for, though not at the $31.99 being asked on Amazon.com). Put the two together and add in the Callas material, and I think you've got a decent start on this difficult opera.

At the risk of further complicating the Macbeth situation, there's a widely circulated 1970 Vienna State Opera performance beautifully conducted by Karl Böhm (a distinguished Verdian; it's often forgotten that he conducted the premiere of the Zeffirelli Otelllo production at the Met, and very beautifully) in which Christa Ludwig sings a gleaming Lady Macbeth. I'm less crazy Sherrill Milnes's Macbeth, but Karl Ridderbusch, though not especially Italianate in sound, is an outstanding Banquo. (I have the Foyer CD edition, which is in excellent stereo sound. I don't know this one, but I would definitely avoid the Opera d'Oro editions; all the operatic recordings of theirs I've heard are sonically inferior. There is now an apparently "official" editionon Orfeo -- awfully expensive, though.)

Okay, put a gun to my head for a more readily available version, and I guess I could recommend the EMI recordingdecently conducted by Riccardo Muti, with an outstanding Lady Macbeth by Fiorenza Cossotto.

Among the video Macbeths, the 1972 Glyndebourne production with Josephine Barstow and Kostas Paskalis seems to me the clear choice, perhaps the only possible choice despite what appears to be a fairly crowded field.


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