1/ There’s a vogue now for hating on Netrebko, but I won’t. She started out in “the -ina roles” - pipey soubrettes in Mozart and Bel Canto - & has grown into heavy roles in Bel Canto (as here) & Verismo (Turandot). I also claim that Željko Lučić is the Serbian MacNeil - ref back
https://twitter.com/MetOpera/status/1334634697662590976
2/ to the late Cornell MacNeil, another Verdi baritone w a broad face & a broad voice. Lučić looks sort of like a cross betw him and Hal Holbrook. I think this production debuted w Hampson & Guleghina; it’s close but I’ll take the two we have tonight.
3/ The production is by Adrian Noble, who has also directed the Shakespeare play. Verdi was still working in Bel Canto mode in his MACBETH, and as it happens, Shakespeare’s entrance scene for Lady M (I v) is structured exactly, but I mean exactly, like the traditional entrance
4/ scene of the heroine in I ii of a Bel canto opera: opening recitative (“They met me on the day of success”/“Nel dì della vittoria io le incontrai”), aria (“Hie thee hither”/“Vieni t’affretta”), interruption by maid or (as here) messenger, and cabaletta (“Come you spirits that
5/ tend on mortal thoughts”/“Or tutti sorgetti, ministri infernale”).
Apart from Lady M’s entrance scene, where the fit betw Bard text and Bel Canto convention is just uncanny, does the style and “prima la musica” ethic of Bel Canto fit a swift-as-blood story like “Macbeth”?
Apart from Lady M’s entrance scene, where the fit betw Bard text and Bel Canto convention is just uncanny, does the style and “prima la musica” ethic of Bel Canto fit a swift-as-blood story like “Macbeth”?
6/ In Verdi’s hands, yes. While we may sigh over what he wd have done w “Macbeth” if he had set it adjacent to his titanic OTELLO, he himself showed no impulse to re-write. “It’s an older code, sir, but it cihecks out.”
Noble’s production sets it in multiple times (inspiration
Noble’s production sets it in multiple times (inspiration
7/ perhaps from Taymor’s “Titus”?), with some old Scotland but w the Banquet Scene in tuxes and gowns, and a Jeep in the Refugees Scene (where MacDuff, tenor, sings his lament for his family). While it was Verdi’s decision to swap out 3 individual witches for choruses, it was
8/ Mr. Noble’s to add kids to those choruses.
After Verdi’s masterful Sleepwalking Scene (“Una macchia è qui tutt’ora”), he struggled to get the last scene right. Macbeth rightly has an aria of disillusionment b4 getting the news of Lady M’s death, then an outburst, bc it’s not
After Verdi’s masterful Sleepwalking Scene (“Una macchia è qui tutt’ora”), he struggled to get the last scene right. Macbeth rightly has an aria of disillusionment b4 getting the news of Lady M’s death, then an outburst, bc it’s not
9/ on the Bel Canto palette to set “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” adequately. (The Verdi of OTELLO cd have done it, witness how “Had it pleased heaven to try me with affliction” becomes “Dio mi potevi scagliar”.) But then shd Macbeth have a death aria? Verdi wrote one:
10/ it’s sometimes included and sometimes not. On balance I’d vote not...? - bc the dramaturgy of Verdi’s last scene has “fast” written all over it and the death aria “really slows the ol’ show down,” as Bullwinkle wd put it. I’ve forgotten how that’s resolved in this production
11/ so we’ll just see, right?
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