THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING - Seattle Opera

RECOMMENDED RECORDINGS
RCA, 1959 (Erich Leinsdorf, with Leonard Warren, Leonie Rysanek,
Jerome Hines, and Carlo Bergonzi)
Deutsche Grammophon, 1976 (Claudio Abbado, with Piero Cappuccilli,
Shirley Verrett, Nicolai Ghiaurov, and Plácido Domingo)
2005/06 SEASON SPONSOR: MICROSOFT
MACBETH PRODUCTION SPONSOR: THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT
FOR THE ARTS
For more information about the 2005/06 Season including
music samples, artist bios, program notes, and video
trailers, visit us online at www.seattleopera.org.
Spotlight on Macbeth © 2005 Seattle Opera.
Speight Jenkins, General Director. Written by Jonathan Dean.
Cover illustration by Istvàn Orosz © 2004
Special thanks to for donated images.
2005/06 SEASON
MACBETH
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
MUSIC BY GIUSEPPE VERDI
Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, after the tragedy by William Shakespeare
First Performed Florence, 1847 • Sung in Italian with English captions
Marion Oliver McCaw Hall: Evenings: 7:30 p.m. Matinees: 2:00 p.m.
Estimated Running Time: Approximately 3 hours, with two intermissions
MAY 6, 7M, 10, 13, 14M, 17, 19, AND 20, 2006
SEATTLE OPERA’S EDUCATION AND OUTREACH
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The Wallace Foundation
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Peach Foundation
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The Boeing Company
National Endowments for the Arts
4Culture
Mayor's Office of Arts & Cultural
Affairs, Seattle Opera
PONCHO
98.1 Classical KING FM
Bank of America
Bellevue Arts Commission
The E.K. and Lillian F. Bishop
Foundation
Washington State Arts Commission
U.S. Bank
Quality Business Systems
BRAVO! Club
Fales Foundation Trust
WAMU Cultural Education Teacher
Training Excellence Fund
Bellevue Convention Center Authority
Puget Sound Energy
The Peg and Rick Young Foundation
Kibble & Prentice, Inc.
Wells Fargo Cultural Education
Enhancement Fund
D.V. and Ida McEachern Charitable
Trust
New Belgium Brewing Co., Inc
Christensen O'Connor Johnson
Kindness, PLLC
Sherman Clay
Seattle Opera, 1979
—Chris Bennion photos
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—R.M. Campbell, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

MACBETH
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
LONG STORY SHORT…
The classic tale of Scotland’s most famous royal couple, chronicling their bloody
rise to power and their descent into madness and defeat.
WHO’S WHO?
MACBETH is an ambitious Scottish nobleman,
Thane of Glamis, at the beginning of the opera.
He will become Thane of Cawdor and King of
Scotland—for a little while, at least.
LADY MACBETH, one of literature’s greatest
sleepwalkers, is a very scary
woman.
DUNCAN is King of Scotland at the
beginning of the opera. He does not
sing.
MALCOLM is Duncan’s son.
BANQUO, another Scottish nobleman,
is a friend of Macbeth.
FLEANCE is Banquo’s son.
MACDUFF, the Thane of Fife, is a
loving husband and father. He was
“from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”—that
is, born by Caesarian section.
THE WITCHES make prophecies that always
come true.
WHERE AND WHEN?
Scotland, 1040 A.D. and the years that followed.
“[Life] is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.” —Macbeth, Act Four
WHAT’S GOING ON?
Crossing a blasted heath after a violent battle, Macbeth and Banquo
encounter a group of old hags, who give them some unsolicited information
about their futures: Macbeth, currently Thane of Glamis, will become Thane
of Cawdor and then King of Scotland. As for Banquo, although he will never
be king, his descendants will. The witches disappear, and a messenger
immediately announces that King Duncan has just promoted Macbeth to
Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth immediately begins wondering about the other
part of the prophecy.
Shortly afterwards, Duncan and his court are staying the night at
Macbeth’s castle. Egged on by Lady Macbeth, whom he has told about the
witches, Macbeth murders Duncan. Duncan’s son Malcolm, fearing for his
own life, flees to England, and Macbeth becomes King of Scotland.
The Macbeths have no children, and Macbeth is tormented by the thought
that Banquo’s descendants will someday rule Scotland. So he dispatches
murderers to kill Banquo and Fleance; yet Fleance escapes, and at a feast that
evening Macbeth is terrified by Banquo’s ghost, which only he can see. Although
Lady Macbeth does her best to cover for her husband’s bizarre
behavior, many of the guests grow suspicious.
Increasingly tormented by growing insecurity, Macbeth
again visits the witches, hoping for more information. They
make three new prophecies: he is to fear Macduff; no man
born of woman can harm him; and he need have no
fear until the forest of Birnam
comes to Dunsinane castle. When
Macbeth asks about Banquo’s heirs,
they show him a vision of Banquo’s
descendants—each wearing a crown, their
line stretching on “to the crack of doom.”
Macbeth immediately takes steps to have
Macduff killed; his soldiers butcher the Thane
of Fife’s wife and children, but Macduff himself
(along with many others) has already joined
Malcolm in England. Their army will lay siege to
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“Shakespeare is one of
my very special poets,
and I have had him in
my hands from my earliest
youth, and I read and reread
him continually.”
—Giuseppe Verdi From Verdi: A Biography,
Mary Jane Phillips-Matz;
Oxford University Press, 1993
SHAKESPEARE’S “SCOTTISH PLAY”
Macbeth at Dunsinane castle, which they
approach from the direction of Birnam
Wood, concealing themselves behind tall
branches. Lady Macbeth, whose guilt has
driven her to sleepwalking and nightmares,
dies, and Macduff—who reveals
that he was not born of woman—kills
Macbeth. Malcolm is crowned king.
Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s briefest, bloodiest, and most popular plays. The Bard
wrote other plays starring murderous usurpers, but Macbeth is unique in the way it
incriminates the audience in the crime. When the story begins, Macbeth seems like such
a nice, normal guy. He’s strong, brave, and ambitious; his poetry is eloquent and beautiful,
yet clear and sensible; and he and his wife have one of the best marriages in all
Shakespeare (truth to be told, there’s not much competition). Shakespeare is careful to
make all the other characters nondescript, or annoying, so that our sympathies rest entirely
with this “butcher and his fiend-like queen.”
It’s a play about the evil lying dormant in each of us, and about ambition—and also
about fear. Macbeth may be brave, but much of the time he is reacting to crippling
fears—fear of the witches, fear of his wife, fear of his enemies, and, most of all, fear of
himself and the foul deeds he is capable of committing. Lady Macbeth, who is chiding
her husband for his timidity when she first
appears, will unravel completely into a neurotic
mess of fear and guilt. Perhaps
because of its all-pervading black magic
and sense of fear, Macbeth has given rise
to various superstitions. The play is said to
be cursed, and it is considered bad luck to
say the name of this play inside a theater.
(For that reason, it’s often called “the
Scottish play.”)
Leonie Rysanek, who made history at the
Metropolitan Opera singing Lady Macbeth
—Metropolitan Opera Archives
Classified among Shakespeare’s “high
tragedies” (the others being Hamlet,
Othello, and King Lear) Macbeth was
evidently written in the later part of Shakespeare’s career. In 1603 Queen
Elizabeth died, leaving no heir; the throne of England passed to her
nephew, King James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England
(known for sponsoring the “King James” translation of the Bible). Historians
have suggested that Macbeth was written specifically with James in mind:
James was Scottish, obsessed with witches (especially keen on burning
them), and traced his lineage back to the historical Banquo. It is rumored
that the scene in which Banquo’s descendants appear in a vision before
Macbeth originally featured an actor holding a mirror up to King James,
sitting there in the first audience.
ABOUT THE COMPOSER
The greatest Italian composer of opera,
Giuseppe Francesco Fortunino Verdi, was
also a landowner and farmer; a philanthropist;
an impossible, pessimistic, grumpy old
stick-in-the-mud; and one of the founding
fathers of the Italian nation. At the beginning
of his life, Verdi was a simple peasant boy,
the son of a humble country innkeeper,
watching Napoleon’s troops flee the fields of
northern Italy. At his funeral, 88 years later,
300,000 people burst into song in the
streets of Milan as the coffin of this grand old
Giuseppe Verdi
man of Italian opera approached
its final resting place. Verdi’s music became the life and breath of a new nation
and is still acknowledged by many to be the crowning achievement of a
venerable and glorious art form.
Verdi was born in 1813, in a tiny hamlet named Le Roncole, south of
Parma. In those days, the peninsula of Italy was divided into many little
kingdoms, all ruled from afar as part of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In fact, Verdi was only a baby during the Napoleonic campaigns, during which
Parma passed back and forth between France and Austria. One of Verdi’s
earliest childhood memories was hiding in a church bell-tower with his
mother while their town was being invaded by French troops.
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Verdi’s music became the life
and breath of a new nation
and is still acknowledged by
many to be the crowning
achievement of a venerable
and glorious art form.
The young man showed musical
talent at an early age. So Antonio
Barezzi, a wealthy grocer from the
nearby town of Busseto, took
Verdi under his wing and paid for
his schooling and music lessons.
As a teenager, Verdi wrote for and
conducted the Busseto Municipal Orchestra (not one of Italy’s leading musical groups!)
and played the organ in church every Sunday in Le Roncole. When he had absorbed
everything Busseto had to offer, Verdi married Barezzi’s daughter Margherita and moved
to Milan, the opera capital of the world, to continue his studies and try his hand at writing
an opera. His first opera was a success. But Verdi’s son, daughter, and finally his wife all
died while he was working on his second opera, a comedy which (understandably)
flopped. The composer sank into a black depression from which he never really emerged.
He swore he would never write another note and lost interest in everything.
The general director of La Scala, the opera house in Milan, convinced Verdi to try his
hand at a third opera, and in 1842 Verdi wrote Nabucco, the story of an arrogant
Babylonian king who oppresses the captive nation of Israel. The audience at
the premiere went berserk and Verdi became a celebrity overnight. To this
day, all Italians can sing the familiar “Va, pensiero” chorus from Nabucco,
which became the anthem of the struggle for Italian independence from
Austria. The success of this opera catapulted Verdi back into the composer’s
seat. For the next 10 years, he roamed around Italy and Europe, pouring out
a string of about 20 operas. These operas are all improbable stories of wild
passion set to vigorous and thrilling music. Almost all of them feature sympathetic
nationalists toiling under foreign domination, and Italian audiences, still
languishing under Austrian rule, readily identified with the characters and
passions in Verdi’s early operas. Over the years, Verdi became very good at
outwitting government censors who objected to his presenting certain kinds
of situations (chiefly the murder of kings) onstage.
At the end of his years “in the galleys,” as Verdi once called them, the
37-year-old composer bought a farm near Busseto and moved there with
Giuseppina Strepponi, a former opera singer whose voice had been ruined.
The Verdi-Strepponi relationship (not a marriage) horrified the conservative
Bussetans, especially if—as one biographer has suggested—the artistic couple
gave a child up for adoption. (Strepponi had previously done so with several.)
Verdi even ended up disowning his own parents and kicking them out of his
house. As his family life was (for the second time) embroiled in catastrophe,
Verdi penned three of the greatest operas of all time, all of which scrutinize
tormented relationships between parents and children: Rigoletto, Il trovatore,
and La traviata.
Verdi lived near Busseto in his villa, called Sant’Agata, for the rest of his life,
though he made frequent trips to Milan, Rome, Venice, Genoa (his favorite city
in Italy), Paris, and places further abroad to oversee premieres of his operas.
In 1861, he wrote the opera La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny) for St.
Petersburg and spent two winters in Russia preparing the first performance.
One of his greatest operas, Aida—set in ancient Egypt—received its world
premiere in Cairo, not long after the opening of the Suez Canal.
Interior view of Teatro alla Scala in Milan
—©Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS
When Italy finally united itself as a nation under King Victor Emmanuel II,
Verdi was one of the first members of the Italian parliament. He demonstrated
his patriotism again by writing a magnificent Requiem in honor of the important
Italian novelist and patriot Alessandro Manzoni.
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In his last 20 years, Verdi spent much of his time working on his farm. He also founded
a retirement home for musicians in downtown Milan; to this day, former opera singers and
instrumentalists fill its halls. Verdi wrote only one opera in the 1880s and one in the 1890s:
Otello and Falstaff, his greatest operas and the respective pinnacles of Italian tragic and
comic opera.
ITALIAN BEL CANTO OPERA
When Giuseppe Verdi wrote Macbeth in 1847, he was a hot-shot young composer about
to reinvent the moribund tradition of Italian opera. Pioneered during the Renaissance, Italian
opera had by the 1840s become more a form of entertainment than an art form. While
plenty of operas were being written and performed, few of them had much lasting value.
Verdi, who came from humble origins, first achieved fame and fortune by writing a series
of operas in the bel canto style so popular at the time—only his were more exciting,
featuring a new intensity in the music. In Macbeth, his tenth opera, he began setting
out in a new direction.
[Verdi] first achieved fame and
fortune by writing a series of
operas in the bel canto style
so popular at the time—only
his were more exciting,
featuring a new intensity
in the music.
But Macbeth is still a bel
canto opera. The name means
“beautiful singing,” since in this
period opera was all about the
singing. (Other kinds of opera,
from other historical periods,
have been more about the story,
or the poetry, or the orchestra,
or the scenic spectacle, or the ballet, or any of the other art forms that combine to form
opera.) Every bel canto opera featured roles for three kinds of singers: primarii, or leads,
who expected at least one solo aria; comprimarii, or supporting characters, who expected
to sing a few lines of dialogue and their own musical line in ensembles; and chorus, who
sing and move as a group. Since all these singers were on the staff of every opera house
in Italy, every bel canto opera had to feature roles for all of them. Macbeth features four
primarii (Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Banquo, and Macduff), several comprimarii, and
choruses of witches, assassins, and Scottish nobility.
Writing a bel canto opera was a little like pouring your setting and storyline into a preset
mould. Most of these operas feature standard musical forms: the rousing opening
chorus, the requisite brindisi or “Drinking Song” (in which all the characters hold glasses
and sing about the pleasures of alcohol), the obligatory concertante (in which nothing
happens for several minutes while everyone in the cast sings simultaneously about how
surprised they all are). You will
notice each of these numbers in
Macbeth. In this kind of opera,
the plot unfolds quickly in
declamatory music, known as
recitative, so that we spend
most of our time listening to the
arias and ensembles in which
the singers explore their characters’
emotions. Each aria or
ensemble follows a standard
musical form, featuring a slow
movement followed by a fast
movement. And usually each
piece begins with a catchy tune
that most of us could sing or
hum, and develops into elaborate,
showy music in which the
singer shows off his or her skill
and wows us with “beautiful
singing”—the bel canto that
it’s all about.
ADAPTING SHAKESPEARE
Woodcut book illustration, witches at
cauldron
—©Bettmann./CORBIS
Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language; his words, 400
years later, are still studied, memorized, and adored wherever English is spoken.
And yet his stories, separated from the language he used to tell them,
have a life of their own. His plays have been translated into almost every
other language, and the
“This Macbeth is dearer to
number of Shakespeare
me than all my other
adaptations in other art
operas.”
forms—operas, ballets,
—Giuseppe Verdi
musicals, movies, paintings—is
beyond count. Few adaptations of Shakespeare come close to matching
(let alone exhausting) the richness of the original; but as long as the originals
are around to inspire new artists, the flood tide of adaptations will never let up.
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Films of Macbeth
To this day, Shakespeare’s
Macbeth is constantly being
performed on stages all over
the world. But this evocative
story of murder and insanity
has also inspired several great
filmmakers. Akira Kurosawa set
Macbeth in the Samurai period
of Renaissance Japan in his
1957 film Throne of Blood,
starring Toshiro Mifune and the
Shakespeare was Giuseppe Verdi’s favorite
author, even though Verdi didn’t speak English.
The first complete Italian translation of Shakespeare
came out when Verdi was a young man; he knew
the translator, and kept the book with him for the
rest of his life. In fact, when Verdi traveled he liked
to have a Bible and a complete Shakespeare
placed next to his bed. Verdi’s favorite play was
King Lear, and throughout his life he made several
attempts to turn it into an opera. His final two
operas, Otello and Falstaff, are perhaps the only
Shakespeare adaptations worthy of the originals.
terrifying Isuzu Yamada. In place
Shakespeare was a popular source for composers
of Shakespeare’s poetry,
Seattle Opera, 1979
Chris Bennion photo
of Italian opera. The generation preceding Verdi
Kurosawa uses visuals from
produced two bel canto operas based on
musical tinta matches the poetic tinta of Shakespeare’s play, which
Japanese noh drama—a
Shakespeare, Rossini’s Otello and Bellini’s
obsesses over images of blood and horror, and delights in such paradoxes
tradition older than either
Capuleti ed i Montecchi. But both of these operas
as “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” Inspired by his favorite dramatist, Verdi
Shakespeare or Italian opera.
In 1971, Playboy Productions
released director Roman
Polanski’s Macbeth, a muddy,
bloody spectacle starring Jon
Finch and Francesca Annis,
are more bel canto than they are Shakespeare.
In Macbeth—Verdi’s first Shakespeare opera—
Verdi discovered that the more you ignore the rules
of bel canto and take your cues from Shakespeare,
the more thrilling and dramatic your opera.
would go on to create a tinta, a unique sound-world, for each of his
remaining operas.
Verdi, who was obsessed with King Lear, also found powerful personal
resonances in the story of Macbeth. Politically, Verdi was committed to
the cause of Italian independence from Austria, and in each of his early
which matches Shakespeare’s
operas he managed to sneak in some political propaganda. In Macbeth,
From the first bars of the
grim poetry with grim visual
he writes a mournful chorus for those who have fled Macbeth’s reign of
images. And check out the overture to Macbeth, its
terror, “Patria oppressa!” The anti-tyranny message comes through loud
lighter-weight Scotland, PA, music is unmistakeable:
and clear, as does Verdi’s compassion for the suffering exiles. One of the
released in 2001 and starring unsettling, eerie, and weird.
most moving scenes in Shakespeare’s play comes when Macduff learns
James LeGros and Maura
In particular, Macbeth is Verdi’s first opera to
that his wife and children have been slaughtered. Verdi, who had lost his
Tierney as a murderous couple
have what the composer called a tinta—an allpervasive
musical color. The idea that an opera’s
Macduff a heart-rending tenor aria at this point, “Ah, la paterna mano.”
own baby son and daughter several years before writing the opera, gives
in a fast-food joint in the 1970s.
It’s also possible to find a
music should have an organic unity was new;
And in his music for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, like all his music for
televised stage production of
previous bel canto operas all sound similar to each
baritone and soprano, Verdi is working out his own complicated relationship
Macbeth from Stratford in 1976,
directed by Trevor Nunn and
starring the incomparable Ian
McKellen and Judi Dench.
other, which made it easy to cut and paste arias
and ensembles from opera to opera. But from the
first bars of the overture to Macbeth, its music is
unmistakeable: unsettling, eerie, and weird. The
with Giuseppina Strepponi.
Listen to music clips from MACBETH online at www.seattleopera.org.
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