Program

Saturday, September 28, 2013, at 7:00Tuesday, October 1, 2013, at 7:00

Friday, October 4, 2013, at 7:00Sunday, October 6, 2013, at 3:00

MacbethMusic by Giuseppe VerdiLibretto by Francesco Maria Piave and Andrea Maffei, after Shakespeare’s Macbeth

riccardo muti ConductorMacbeth, general of King Duncan’s army ............................................. Luca Salsi baritoneLady Macbeth, Macbeth’s wife ........................................................Tatiana Serjan sopranoBanquo, general of King Duncan’s army ................................. Dmitry Belosselskiy bassMacduff, nobleman of Scotland, Thane of Fife ...............................Francesco meli tenorMalcolm, Duncan’s son ........................................................................ antonello Ceron tenorLady-in-Waiting ............................................................................. Simge Büyükedes sopranoAssassin/Doctor ......................................................................................gianluca Buratto bassServant/Herald ..................................................................................................Daniel Eifert bassThree Apparitions ................................................................................... David govertsen bass Katelyn Casey treble Lily Shorney trebleWitches, king’s messengers, Scottish noblemen and exiles, assassins, English soldiers, aerial spirits

Chicago Symphony ChorusDuain Wolfe Chorus Director

Act 1InTErmISSIon

Act 2InTErmISSIon

Act 3

Act 4The setting is in Scotland, primarily in Macbeth’s castle. Act 4 opens on the border between Scotland and England, then returns to Macbeth’s castle.First Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances

English supertitles © 2013 by Sonya Friedman

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This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Comments by Phillip Huscher

giuseppe VerdiBorn October 10, 1813, Roncole, near Busseto, Italy.Died January 27, 1901, Milan, Italy.

Macbeth

M acbeth always held a special place in Verdi’s affec-tions. Shortly after

the successful premiere of the opera in Florence in 1847, Verdi sent a dedication copy of the score to Antonio Barezzi, his father-in-law, saying, “Here now is this Macbeth, which I love above all my other operas.” That was still early in Verdi’s long career—Macbeth, the tenth of his more than two dozen operas and composed when he was just thirty-three, follows the huge successes of Nabucco and Attila, but comes before many of the works we know today as prime Verdi. Yet he continued to think of Macbeth with special pride even after writing operas that secured his place as the greatest Italian composer of his century, including Rigoletto, La traviata, Il trovatore, Un ballo in maschera, and La forza del destino. When he was asked to provide new ballet music for a production of Macbeth in Paris in 1865, he jumped at the chance to revisit the whole score, convinced that now, more than fifteen years later, he could make it even finer.

Macbeth is the earliest product of Verdi’s great love for Shakespeare. In 1865, when a French critic, reviewing the revised Paris version of Macbeth, suggested that Verdi did not know his Shakespeare, the composer was irate: “It may be that I have not done justice to Macbeth; but to say that I do not know, understand, and feel Shakespeare—no, by God, no! He is one of my favorite poets. I have had him in my hands from my earliest youth, and I read and reread him continually.” Verdi had taken unusual care with the text for his Macbeth from the start. “This tragedy is one of the greatest creations of man,”

he wrote to Francesco Maria Piave,

when he first sent the poet his own detailed prose scenario of the play,

broken into acts, scenes, and even musical numbers, to get Piave charged up to begin their new libretto. (They had worked together once before, on Ernani.) Verdi knew precisely what he wanted before he even composed a note, and

he warned Piave: “I’ve got the general character and the color of

the opera into my head just as if the libretto were already written.”

The choice of Macbeth as an opera subject was bold and unexpected in 1847—the play had not yet even been staged in Italy. (It would be soon, but only after Verdi’s success with the opera.) And although Shakespeare was not an unusual source for opera—Rossini’s Otello, for one, had enjoyed great success following its premiere in Naples in 1816—Verdi’s reverence for Shakespeare and his fidelity to the plot and spirit of the play were exceptional at the time. No opera in the nineteenth century would be more truly Shakespearean in stature than Macbeth—until Verdi’s own Otello, completed four decades after he began Macbeth.

As soon as he started to receive portions of the text, Verdi turned on Piave—there were too many lines, the tone wasn’t lofty enough, the meter of certain stanzas sounded off, phrases were commonplace or clichéd. “Not one use-less word: everything must say something,” he chastised him. A few places, such as the opening of the second act—one of the spots where the scenario departs most radically from Shakespeare—continued to trouble Verdi: should it be a soliloquy for Lady Macbeth or a dialogue with her husband? Should she read aloud a letter from Macbeth? “Oh, I beg you,” he wrote to Piave, “take great care with this Macbeth of mine. . . . Brevity and sublimity.”Above: Verdi in 1870

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Eventually Verdi lost his patience and asked his friend, the writer Andrea Maffei, to step in and rewrite the libretto, “since to be frank,” he told Piave, “I couldn’t have set your verses to music.” It’s difficult today to tell precisely how much of Piave’s original libretto remains, but we do know that Maffei scrapped the act 3 witches’ chorus and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene completely and started over. Maffei was given a gold watch for his rescue operation. Piave was paid off in full, but his name was left off the title page: “I wouldn’t have your injury for all the gold in the world,” Verdi said finally.

Although it was normally

the librettist’s job to negotiate staging details with theater management, Verdi intervened, dictating the number of witches he wanted; rejecting the costume designs (the use of velvet and silk was anachronistic, he pointed out); argu-ing that the singer playing Banquo should also appear as Banquo’s ghost; lecturing on English and Scottish history; and, in general, urging the theater to spare no expense. British experts were consulted; a magic lantern for special effects was ordered from Milan.

Even before he began composing the music, Verdi contacted Felice Varesi, a celebrated high baritone—he would later create the role of Rigoletto—to make sure he was available to sing Macbeth. During the composition process, he began writing to Varesi, telling him how to sing the music as he sent it to him, piece by piece. His letters read like a rigorous coaching session, with advice about dramatic motivation, admonitions to obey the dynamic markings carefully—Verdi had never before been so meticulous in his attention to fine shadings (in the final score, the music shrinks at one point to a virtually inaudible pppppp)—and thoughts about the unusual vocal colors he had in mind. Throughout, there is one overriding idea:

ComPoSED1847, revised 1865

FIrST PErFormanCESMarch 14, 1847; Teatro della Pergola, Florence, italy

April 19, 1865; Théâtre-Lyrique, Paris, France (revised version)

FIrST CSo PErFormanCESJuly 21, 1977, ravinia Festival. Marisa Galvany and Cornell Macneil as soloists; James Levine conducting (arias and duets)

June 26, 1981, ravinia Festival. renata Scotto, Sherrill Milnes, Giuliano Ciannella, John Cheek, Timothy Jenkins, Gene Marie Callahan, Michelle Harman-Gulick, Sharon Graham, Duane Clenton Carter, rush Tully, and Terry Cook as soloists; Chicago Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis, director; James Winfield, associate director); James Levine conducting (complete opera)

november 2, 3 & 4, 1989, Orchestra Hall. Chicago Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis, director; Terry Edwards, guest chorus master), Sir Georg Solti (november 2 & 3) and Kenneth Jean (november 4) conducting (“Tre volte miagola” and “Patria oppressa!”)

moST rECEnT CSo PErFormanCESSeptember 19, 2013, Orchestra Hall. riccardo Muti conducting (bal-let music)

September 21, 2013, Orchestra Hall. Chicago Symphony Chorus (Duain Wolfe, director), riccardo Muti conducting (ballet music and “Patria oppressa!”)

These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances of Verdi’s Macbeth.

CSo rECorDIngS1981. renata Scotto, Gene Marie Callahan, and Terry Cook as soloists; James Levine conducting. CSO (From the Archives, vol. 18: A Tribute to James Levine) (“una macchia è qui tuttora”)

1989. Chicago Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis, director; Terry Edwards, guest chorus master), Sir Georg Solti conducting. London (“Tre volte miagola” and “Patria oppressa!”)

InSTrumEnTaTIonflute and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and cimbasso, timpani, percussion, harp, strings, offstage banda

aPProxImaTE PErFormanCE TImEAct 1: 48 minutesAct 2: 31 minutesActs 3 & 4: 71 minutes

Andrea Maffei

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“I shall never stop telling you to study the words and the dramatic situation; then the music will come on its own.” Marianna Barbieri-Nini, the first Lady Macbeth, got the same mes-sage: “I wish the perform-ers to serve

the poet better than they serve the composer.” Throughout the rehearsal period in Florence, Verdi was ever-present, bossy, and sometimes unreasonable. Right up to the hour before the premiere, when Verdi called his two principals into his dressing room for one last master class, he did not give up his quest for making the music serve the drama.

Macbeth was a huge success with the Florentine public—among the most discriminating in all of Europe—when it opened on March 14, 1847, at the Teatro della Pergola. In the course of the evening, Verdi was called onstage twenty-seven times. After the second performance, a large crowd of fans, “who yelled like the damned,” according to Varesi, followed him through the streets back to his hotel. Over the next few years, Verdi paid close attention to the opera’s reception as it made the rounds of other important opera theaters and even supervised stagings in Rome and Bologna himself. (Macbeth was premiered in New York and Boston as early as 1850, a sure sign of its popularity and importance, and moved on to San Francisco and Philadelphia within the decade.) When he heard that the impresario at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples wanted to cast Eugenia Tadolini, a highly accomplished soprano, as Lady Macbeth, Verdi put his foot down, insisting that she was the wrong kind of singer for this dramatic role: “Tadolini has a marvelous voice, clear, limpid, and strong; and I would rather that Lady’s voice were rough, hollow, stifled. Tadolini’s voice has something angelic in it. Lady’s should have something

devilish.” Even long distance, Verdi continued to coach. He insisted that the two keys to the opera were the sleepwalking scene and the duet for the Macbeths, and that “they must be acted and declaimed in a voice that is hollow and veiled: without this the whole effect is lost.” The duet is the music Verdi had rehearsed again and again before the first performance and it is the piece that was most often encored over the years—in the early days, sometimes even three or four times an evening. In city after city, the novelties in Verdi’s score—the fantastical scene of the apparitions, with its supernatural sounds and subterranean wind music, or Lady Macbeth’s haunted sleepwalking scene, with its eerie, mesmerizing accompaniment—never failed to make their effect.

The idea of presenting Macbeth in Paris came up before Verdi even finished the score, but despite various proposals over

the following years, both from the Paris Opéra and the Théâtre-Italien, talks came to noth-ing. Then, in 1864, he was approached by Leon Carvalho, the head of the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris, who wanted to revive Macbeth with a new ballet, to satisfy French tradition, and a final chorus to replace Macbeth’s solo death scene. Verdi agreed. But when he paged through the full score, he knew at once that he had more work to do—he wanted the chance to rethink the entire opera. He told Carvalho he needed more time and set to work.

For revisions to the libretto, he turned to Piave, who was now back in favor, although their collaboration was once again labored and conten-tious. Rewriting the music took him all winter. Verdi found it painful to “take up a thread which had been broken so many years ago,” he said, realizing how far he had traveled as a composer in little more than fifteen years—from the raw, volcanic energy of Attila to the rich, subtly colored canvases of Un ballo in maschera and La forza del destino. “I’ll be able to manage it soon enough,” he said, “but I detest mosaics in music.”

Once he began, however, he regained his old passion for the opera, and he discovered a master editor’s instinct for identifying what could stay, what needed a simple touch-up, what demanded a radical makeover, and what must be completely scrapped and replaced. He left most of act 1

Francesco Maria Piave

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alone, fine-tuning only the popular duet. He gave Lady Macbeth a magnificent new aria, “La luce langue,” one of the opera’s most power-ful numbers, to open act 2. Most of act 3 was significantly reworked; the new ballet music was added near the top of the act; and, for the finale, Macbeth’s aria was replaced by a thrilling new duet for Macbeth and his wife, “Ora di morte.” For the chorus that begins act 4, Verdi kept the text, but set it to entirely new music—bold, mag-nificent, and unorthodox—it is an early foretaste of the Requiem, still nearly a decade away. (Verdi always thought of this as an important number; even in 1847, before he had written a note of music, he told Piave to pay particular attention to the text for a chorus of Scottish exiles, “the one moment of real pathos in the opera.”) And, as he promised Carvalho, the ending of the opera is new: instead of Macbeth’s onstage death scene, there is now a grand victory chorus in honor of Malcolm, the new king, after Macbeth has been slain offstage.

Although Verdi reconsidered every measure in his score, sometimes making only the slight-est change or adjusting the instrumentation, he did not touch Lady Macbeth’s celebrated sleepwalking scene in act 4. It had been one of his greatest inspirations in 1847, and he had worked hard to achieve a kind of music—spare, exposed, and dramatically driven—that was new to Italian opera at the time. “The notes are simple and are created with the action in mind,” he wrote to Barbieri-Nini, his first Lady Macbeth. “Remember that every word has a meaning, and that it is absolutely essential to express that meaning both with the voice and in the acting.” (With Verdi’s encouragement, Barbieri-Nini consulted an actual sleepwalker.)

Revisiting Macbeth clarified Verdi’s concept of the drama. “The main roles of this opera are, and can only be, three,” he wrote to his French pub-lisher, Leon Escudier, “Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the chorus of witches.” The musical promi-nence of the witches had been one of Verdi’s masterstrokes from the start (the opera, like the play, starts with them). “The witches dominate the drama,” he now said. “Everything stems from them—rude and gossipy in act 1, exalted and prophetic in act 3. They make up a real character, and one of the greatest importance.” Verdi even said he wanted the spirit of the witches—and the

otherworldly color of their music—to linger over the whole opera. From the start—it is mentioned in his earliest surviving letter on the opera—Verdi intended the score to be in the genere fantastico—a work in which the supernatural and the diabolical play a decisive role.

The new ballet, in particular, gave Verdi headaches. In order to satisfy French conventions and dramatic logic, it would have to come at the beginning of act 3, when the only characters onstage were the witches, and to have them dance for some ten or more minutes would, as Verdi rightly observed, “make a pretty frantic divertissement.” Eventually, Verdi decided to make the ballet a mixture of dance and mime, and to introduce Hecate as a nondancing charac-ter. Verdi wanted the new ballet to fit as seam-lessly as possible into the drama, and he lavished the same degree of care on it that had character-ized his work on the opera itself.

Verdi was puzzled, and plainly angered, when Macbeth failed to satisfy the sophisticated Parisian public. Attendance

was poor for the entire run and the box office take was meager. “I thought I had not done too badly,” he wrote to Escudier, “but it seems I was mistaken.” Escudier blamed the empty seats on a heat wave sweeping across Paris. He did not mention competition from the eagerly anticipated premiere of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine at the Opéra. The Paris critics, long irritated by Verdi’s unparalleled string of hits in his homeland, came down hard on Macbeth; they complained about the uneasy mix of early and later styles, and lamented the lack of a romantic interest: “No love, no tenderness, no charm,” wrote the reviewer for Le ménestrel, who, unlike Verdi, apparently did not know his Shakespeare.

It took some time for the depth of Verdi’s achievement to be understood. The new Macbeth entered the repertoire slowly. Few productions were staged in Italy in Verdi’s lifetime, and many theaters continued to perform the original score, even though Verdi considered the later version definitive. The modern reappraisal of the revised Macbeth came only after the First World War. Today, Macbeth is recognized as one of Verdi’s finest and most richly satisfying works, and the revised score is now the edition of choice. (At these performances, Riccardo Muti conducts

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the complete 1865 version, including the often-omitted ballet music, in the recent critical edition jointly published by the University of Chicago Press and Ricordi.)

Macbeth is unique in Verdi’s output. The later revision of Simon Boccanegra would take longer to get from its original to its final version, and the subsequent reworkings of La forza del destino and Don Carlos would produce some extraordinary music, but no other opera would bridge so great a gulf stylistically as that between the early and the mature Verdi of the two Macbeths. The final work is, as Verdi himself predicted, something of a “mosaic,”—the seams occasionally show and the juxtaposition of music composed nearly two decades apart is sometimes jarring. But in the context of Verdi’s fifty-four year career, Macbeth is a work of unparalleled ambition and striving. More than any other, it is the opera in

which Verdi’s respect for his material continu-ally drove him to new heights of invention and novelty, all within the conventional framework of nineteenth-century operatic tradition. What had been the most thoughtfully composed of his early operas now became one of the most satisfy-ing of all his works—an opera in which keen psychological insight is ideally matched to music of exceptional emotional nuance. A decade after the Paris premiere, when a journalist asked Verdi for his opinion of the significance of Richard Wagner, his exact contemporary, Verdi offered a few well-chosen words of praise for the German master and then added, “I, too, have attempted the fusion of music and drama—in Macbeth.”

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Frontispiece of the first edition of the opera Macbeth, 1847

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SYnoPSIS oF Macbeth

Libretto by Francesco maria Piave and andrea maffei, based on the play by William Shakespeare

act 1Scotland. Macbeth and Banquo, leaders of the Scottish army, meet a group of witches who prophesy the future. They address Macbeth as thane of Cawdor and king of Scotland, and tell Banquo that he will be the father of kings. The two men try to learn more, but the witches van-ish. Messengers arrive with news that Duncan, the current king of Scotland, has made Macbeth thane of Cawdor. The first part of the witches’ prediction has come true.

In Macbeth’s castle, Lady Macbeth reads a letter from her husband telling her of the events that have just transpired. She resolves to follow her ambitions. A servant announces that Duncan will soon arrive at the castle, and when Macbeth enters, she tells him that they must kill the king. Duncan arrives. Macbeth has a vision of a dagger, then leaves to com-mit the murder. On his return, he tells his wife how the act has frightened him, and she tells him that he needs more courage. They both leave as Banquo enters with Macduff, a noble-man, who discovers the murder. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth pretend to be horrified and join the others in condemning the murder.

act 2Macbeth has become king. Duncan’s son, Malcolm, is suspected of having killed his father and has fled to England. Worried about the prophecy that Banquo’s children will rule, Macbeth and his wife now plan to kill him and his son, Fleance, as well. As Macbeth leaves to prepare the double murder, Lady Macbeth hopes that it will finally make the throne secure.

Outside the castle, assassins wait for Banquo, who appears with his son, warn-ing him of strange forebodings. Banquo is killed, but Fleance escapes.

Lady Macbeth welcomes the court to the banquet hall and sings a drinking song, while Macbeth receives news that Banquo is dead and his son has escaped. About to take Banquo’s seat at the table, Macbeth has a terrifying vision of the dead man accusing him. His

wife is unable to calm her unsettled husband, and the courtiers wonder about the king’s strange behavior. Macduff vows to leave the country, which is now ruled by criminals.

act 3The witches gather again, and Macbeth visits them, demanding more prophecies. Apparitions warn him to beware of Macduff and assure him that “no man of woman born” can harm him, and that he will be invincible until Birnam Wood marches on his castle. In another vision, he sees a procession of future kings, followed by Banquo. Horrified, Macbeth collapses. The witches disap-pear and his wife finds him. They resolve to kill Macduff and his family.

act 4On the Scottish border, Macduff has joined the refugees. His wife and children have been killed. Malcolm appears with British troops and leads them to invade Scotland.

Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking, haunted by the horror of what she and her husband have done.

In another room in the castle, Macbeth awaits the arrival of his enemies. He realizes that he will never live to a peaceful old age. Messengers bring news that Lady Macbeth has died, and that Birnam Wood appears to be moving. English soldiers appear, camouflaged with its branches. Macduff confronts Macbeth and tells him that he was not born naturally, but had a Caesarean birth. He kills Macbeth and proclaims Malcolm king of Scotland.

© Metropolitan Opera. Reprinted with permission.

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