Shakespeare Might Have To Change A Few Words Of Macbeth If He Was Writing It Today-- Just A Few

Allen Weisselberg is supposed to know everything there is to know about Trump's business dealings, which are-- and you know it-- the very definition of a swamp. He seems to have abandoned his liege last week, although Trump hasn't tweeted anything about him being a rat yet. The way he has answered questions from New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood seems to demonstrate that he's not trying-- not even a little-- to protect Trump at all. Last week, writing for The Atlantic, Eliot Cohen, compared Trump to Macbeth who became king of Scotland after killing King Duncan. It's worth mentioning that Shakespeare's play about the historical figure is classically paranoid, disabled by fear and a perfect example of how seeking power illegitimately will bring on intense suffering, in this case one driven into the arms of tyranny. Cohen's point, though is that sooner or later all tyrants are abandoned by their followers, a fate probably awaiting Trump, now that the rats are deserting the sinking ship.

"To really get the feel for the Trump administration’s end," wrote Cohen, "we must turn to the finest political psychologist of them all, William Shakespeare. The text is in the final act of what superstitious actors only refer to as the 'Scottish play.' One of the nobles who has turned on their murderous usurper king describes Macbeth’s predicament:

Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.

Cohen asks us to imagine this as Trump's fate, although he acknowledges-- with some glee-- that Trump was in some ways very different from Macbeth. He explained that "Macbeth is an utterly absorbing, troubling, tragic, and compelling figure. Unlike America’s germaphobic president, who copped five draft deferments and has yet to visit the thousands of American soldiers on the front lines in Afghanistan or Iraq, he is physically brave. In fact, the first thing we hear about him is that in the heat of battle with a rebel against King Duncan (whom he later murders) Macbeth 'unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops.' He is apparently faithful to his wife, has a conscience (that he overcomes), knows guilt and remorse, and has self-knowledge. He also has a pretty good command of the English language. In all these respects he is as unlike Trump as one can be."

But in the moment of losing power, the two will be alike. A tyrant is unloved, and although the laws and institutions of the United States have proven a brake on Trump, his spirit remains tyrannical-- that is, utterly self-absorbed and self-concerned, indifferent to the suffering of others, knowing no moral restraint. He expects fealty and gives none. Such people can exert power for a long time, by playing on the fear and cupidity, the gullibility and the hatreds of those around them. Ideological fervor can substitute for personal affection and attachment for a time, and so too can blind terror and sheer stupidity, but in the end, these fall away as well.

And thus their courtiers abandon even monumental tyrants like Mussolini-- who at least had his mistress, Claretta Petacci, with him at his ignominious end. (Melania’s affections are considerably less certain.) The normal course of events is sudden, epic desertion, in which an all-powerful political figure who loomed over everything is suddenly left shrunken and pitiful, a wretched little figure in gaudy robes absurdly too big for him, a figure of ridicule as much as, and even more than, hatred.

This is going to happen to Trump at some point. Of the Republicans in Congress it may be said of most of them: Those he commands move only in command, nothing in love. For now, admittedly, there are those who still court his favor-- Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, once the trusty vassal of Senator John McCain, the bravest of warriors and noblest of dukes, seems to have switched his allegiance from his dying lord to the swaggering upstart aged prince. But that is about ambition, not affection.

For the moment, the Republicans will not turn on Trump. They fear a peasant revolt, many of them; they still crave favors; they may think his castle impregnable, although less so if they believe what the polls tell them about some of its tottering walls. But if they suffer a medieval-style slaughter on Election Day, the remnants of the knights of the GOP will know a greater fear than that of being primaried. And at the moment when they no longer fear being swept away in 2020, when the economy may be in recession and Robert Mueller’s probe is complete with revelations whose ghastliness would delight the three witches of the Scottish play, they will suddenly turn on Trump. Act V of this play will also have a nonlinear finish.

And what of Trump himself? In this respect he will be like Macbeth. Where Nixon, who was a statesman, saw the inevitable and resigned, this president is more likely to go down spitting defiance. As for the rest of us, Macduff says to the cornered king just before their final death grapple:

Live to be the show and gaze o’ th’ time.
We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted upon a pole, and underwrit
“Here may you see the tyrant”

And so it will likely be, as Americans gaze back and wonder how on earth this rare monster, now deposed, ended up as their president.

Let's just hope he brings the GOP down with him-- and not the rest of us, not America.

Urgent! Important! Please read!

DILBERT     by Scott Adams
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Wednesday: Biggest Obstacle


Thursday: Dashboard For The Boss


Today: Dashboard Never Changes


by Ken

It's a good thing there's nothing happening in the world, 'cause I'm suddenly in a condition of computer snafuitude, which I'll explain in a moment for the record. Meanwhile, this gives me an opportunity to raise a question I've been meaning to throw out for some time, with regard to stuff like that I've put in the post title as it turns up in e-mail subject lines. And the question is this: Does anyone actually read e-mails that come with such declarations of self-importance? Can it be possible that I'm the only one who, just on principle, more or less automatically deletes them?

"Urgent," eh? "Please read," you say? No, I don't think so!

And confidential to whichever Democratic Party functionaries who are sending out those end-of-the-world-is-nigh fund-raising e-mails with all-caps subject lines about how the sky is falling: Just quit it, huh? I'm certainly not going to read those.


NOW, AS TO MY CURRENT COMPUTER MALAISE --

Last night when I got home from seeing my friend Gil in the Classical Theatre of Harlem's adaptation of Macbeth (absolutely free, great reviews in both Time Out New York and the NYT, though I take the latter's theater writing a lot less seriously) with three performances left -- in the excellent Richard Rodgers Amphitheater of Northern Manhattan's Marcus Garvey Park, tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday at 8pm), I went to the computer and discovered that my keyboard appears to be majorly fucked up, and I don't have time to go keyboard shopping today.

This isn't entirely unusual, since I am known to spill stuff on the keyboard which I know I should never have anywhere near it. Which is why some time ago I instituted a policy of always having a spare keyboard on hand, replacing what had been the spare as soon as it's pressed into service as the new keyboard. The thing is (and this is a funny story; you'll laugh and laugh) I took my last spare into the office so that I would have a working keyboard there, feeling queasy about reporting the situation to the office manager, seeing as how it was my own fault that I didn't have a working keyboard. Ironically, when I had occasion to mention to Christine, the office manager, that I had done this, she didn't see why I hadn't just told her!

And then, that Friday in January, we came into the office and found out that we didn't have an office anymore, and I was afraid that if I took my keyboard home, I would be accused of stealing "their" keyboard. Ha ha ha! Pretty funny, right? (Note to self: I really should try to get in touch with Christine, maybe see if I can find her on Facebook. She's good people, and I haven't had contact since That Day in January. Of course I should also be finding, you know, a job, but that doesn't seem to be happening either.)

The odd thing about my current keyboard predicament (assuming that that's all it is -- the keyboard) is that normally I know all about it when I demolish a keyboard, because I've just watched myself do it. This time, is a puzzlement.

So on the regular computer I can still do anything that can be done by mouse, plus things that can be done using still-working keys. From which I got the idea that I could maybe do some of the heavier post-related lifting on it, then dump that stuff in a blog file, and then edit that file on a MacBook that I bought refurbished some time back, hoping it would help me back when I was still blogging every day (and twice on some days). And after a fashion it has worked! (If you want to see something really funny, you should see me with the two computers running side by side, the MacBook perched precariously alongside the desktop, and me furiously working the mouse from the desktop computer and cursing the MacBook for not responding -- or occasionally vice versa, when the trackpad of the MacBook fails to produce results on the desktop.)

I knew going in that the machine just missed the cutoff for being system-upgradable beyond OS 10.6, a perfectly lovely OS that Apple has chosen to abandon, rendering it. But I thought I could at least upgrade the memory to make it work better and faster.

Only by the time I was ready to actually attempt the feat,  after successfully performing a memory upgrade on the desktopo computer which enabled me to upgrade that also-aging machine all the way to El Capitan, and even ordered the new memory, when I went to open the battery compartment to perform the installation, I discovered that I couldn't open the battery compartment. I figured this was just my incompetence, and eventually I took the computer and the memory upgrade to the crackerjack Mac folks at Tekserve, assuming they would deftly open the thing and then for a reasonable fee install the new memory.

Instead what happened was that they gathered their savviest tech hands to gaze in wonder at something none of them had ever seen: a battery compartment that had somehow gotten internally locked, leaving no option that any of the assembled wizards could think of except to break into the thing, after which they couldn't of course guarantee its continued functioning. Maybe I should have let them give it a shot, but at least as is the thing was working, within its limits.

My bad, obviously, for not having thought to try to open the battery compartment while I might still have gotten redress from the company that sold it to me. And by this time, I discovered, the company existed except in name, a name that had been sold to another company, which informed me with a nice tinge of regret that sorry, there was nothing they could do for me. On the plus side, the company from which I had bought the memory that I successfully installed on the desktop computer and then the memory I was unable to install on the MacBook allowed me to return the latter.

Which today include enabling me to get this post done. And the nice thing is that I can whine to my heart's content, confident that my subject line has triply warded off any potential readers.

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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.


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

The updated list is here.

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