The last rulers of dynasties often suffer from a very bad posthumous
press. As far back as the days of the Roman Empire the successors of Nero,
Domitian and Commodus entered with great glee into the business of
rubbishing their predecessors, aided and abetted by contemporary historians.
In later ages Richard III and Boris Godunov have similarly found themselves
charged with all sorts of crimes by playwrights and historians alike. The
successors of Macbeth on the throne of Scotland, the long-running line of
Malcolm Canmore, entered eagerly into the same orgy of defamation. Whereas
modern historians have sought with varying degrees of success to
rehabilitate Richard, Boris and company, the degree of fiction that
Shakespeare applied to the story of Macbeth left very little for later
revisionists to fasten upon, other than to observe mildly that Macbeth ruled
Scotland for seventeen years and was generally regarded as a successful
king.
Modern producers who seek to present Richard III and Macbeth on stage and
screen frequently seek to make the plots more relevant by updating them to
modern times. While this can pay dividends in many cases, their efforts here
fall somewhat wide of the mark. Dynastic wars of succession have been more
or less extinct for over two hundred years now - the last spasms being the
comparatively civilised contest between Bourbons and Bonapartes in
nineteenth century France - and dynasties fall not because of rival
claimants but because of more fundamental reasons such as defeats in war or
revolutions from below. Under these conditions the last rulers of the old
dynasty are more often condemned for ineptitude or weakness than because of
any wickedness, real or feigned, that can be laid at their door. The problem
is that Richard III and Macbeth are altogether a different sort of tyrant
from the modern dictator, and that attempts to draw parallels between the
mediaeval period and the present day ring essentially false. Not that this
stops producers trying.
This production of Macbeth, for example, sets the action firmly in the
twentieth century: in fact, during the First World War, on the grounds - as
the producer Dario Argenta explains in a brief bonus item - that it was the
bloodiest period of war in history. Well, one might contest that claim; but
in any event the First World War, a perverted contest of misguided and
muddled idealism, has absolutely no parallel at all with the period or the
plot of Macbeth. We see the production straining to produce some relevance
before the music even starts, with a group of soldiers carrying Macbeth off
the stage to shouts of "Vittoria!" which then lead very strangely into the
opening bars of the prelude and which have nothing to do with battle or
victory at all. Nor is it at all clear what three naked witches - a number
which derives from Shakespeare and has nothing to do with Verdi's choral
treatment of them - are doing on a battlefield, let alone the presence there
of Lady Macbeth. The producer explains in his introduction that he wanted to
"do something new" - but what he does should at least have some reference to
the music. Verdi was always concerned to find the right tone for his scores
- the word 'tinta' describes his intention - and here this is totally
betrayed.
Other productorial sillinesses abound. The three witches are dancers,
writhing somewhat unconvincingly and lacking real menace. In the meantime
their words, with their genuinely sinister import, are sung by a collection
of anxious-looking peasant women who surround them. Surely the scene would
have been more involving if the latter had not been so obviously present
on-stage. Both Shakespeare and Verdi realised that the scene of the murder
of Duncan would be more effective when it takes place off-stage,
concentrating the attention of the audience on the nocturnal hallucinations
of Macbeth and his wife. Here the killing is seen through a window, which
not only flies in the face of Verdi's ultra-still music at this point but is
simply less gripping in dramatic terms. The whole of this scene, by the way,
takes place on the corpse-strewn battlefield with which the opera opened,
which says very little for the standard of the royal hospitality chez
Macbeth.
In Act Two Lady Macbeth sings La luce langue, clearly an interior
soliloquy, straddling the prone Macbeth on the floor. The appearance of
Banquo's ghost at the feast is handled ineptly - he simply strolls on to the
stage, and then strolls off again, with not the slightest hint of anything
supernatural about him. Nor is there anything very supernatural about the
second scene with the witches. The apparitions are tamely realised, and the
'line of kings' is noticeable by their total invisibility, only Banquo
appearing to reflect a non-existent line of descendants. Throughout,
Argenta, a film director undertaking his first opera, shows remarkably
little sign of willingness to engage the performers dramatically. The First
Act finale is even preceded by a quite unmotivated movement across the stage
by Banquo to complete a line-up of the soloists across the proscenium in the
long-discredited old-fashioned 'stand and deliver' manner. When the chorus
are singing, he treats them as an undifferentiated lump without any real
interaction with what is going on around them. In the final scene, the
Battle of Dunsinane seems to take place in Macbeth's drawing room. He is
done to death while seated in his armchair, and Macduff's part of the
proceedings is confined to hacking off his head after he is already dead -
which makes comprehensive nonsense of the witches' prophecies. What on earth
is the point of this sort of alteration?
Nor is the singing such as to entice the listener. Giuseppe Altomare as
Macbeth seems to have difficulty sustaining a smooth legato, and his sotto
voce singing is breathy and unsupported - a major drawback in a role where
so much of the part is directed to be sung in a suffocated tone. His high
notes are effortful and strained. Verdi admittedly stated that his Lady
Macbeth should have "the voice of a she-devil", but he surely cannot have
had in mind a performer like Dimitra Theodossiou. Her delivery is gusty,
ridden with vibrato, far from accurate in her more agile passages, and
showing a distressing tendency to sit on the flat side of more stratospheric
notes. She reminded me very much of Elena Suliotis on an old (and rightly
long-deleted) Decca LP set, and the comparison is not intended to be
complimentary. At the end of her sleepwalking scene she delivers her final
line - mercilessly marked by Verdi to die away on a high D - in a stentorian
fortissimo. Giorgio Giuseppini is a sonorous Banquo, although he too shows
an unwillingness to sing quietly. Dario di Vietri is more nuanced as
Macduff, his unsteadiness on the last note of his aria unfortunate, but
otherwise a voice to be reckoned with. Ernesto Petti as Malcolm matches him
well in their duet; the other roles are taken adequately, no more.
The orchestra sounds under-manned in the string department, and the
offstage banda which accompanies Duncan's royal entry sounds decidedly
unregal. Although the booklet praises the conducting of Giuseppe Sabbatini,
he is efficient rather than engaged and the delivery of some passages sounds
very mechanical. The score employed is that of Verdi's Paris revision, with
the ballet removed, but in this performance it sounds like early Verdi
rather than the more solid tone one expects in a score of the composer's
middle period.
Insofar as alternative versions of Macbeth are available on DVD, those who
would look for some respect for Verdi's intentions and Shakespeare's period
setting are probably best served by the
old Glyndebourne production featuring some major stars
in the making: the young Josephine Barstow as the Lady, and James Morris as
Banquo, for example. The television sound is pretty dismal, but the
performances are electrifying. A more modern 'take' on the score - also, as
it happens, by an Italian film producer - may be seen in Claude d'Anna's
production to a soundtrack conducted by Riccardo Chailly and featuring Leo
Nucci and Shirley Verrett. Both of these DVDs are considerably better sung
than the offering here, and also do much less violence to the 'tinta' of
Verdi's opera. Only those in search of novelty at all costs should feel the
need to investigate this video and even then there is not much here that is
really innovative.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
