Dhe Tadolini is of good and beautiful figure; and I want the lady to look ugly and evil. The Tadolini sings perfectly; but I want the lady not to sing. The Tadolini has a stupendous voice, clear, fluent, powerful; and I’d rather the lady sing in a harsh, choked, and hollow voice. The Tadolini’s voice sounds like that of an angel – and I want the lady’s voice to sound devilish.”
And how does Asmik Grigorian, an icon of the Salzburg Festival since her Salome (2018), deal with a role that was more important to the composer than any other female character in his operas? Otherwise, why would Giuseppe Verdi have had to write well over a hundred letters about the performance and the protagonists, including the one about Eugenia Tadolini, who just didn’t understand the “art of the ugly soul” to which the most powerful effects are owed?
The Lithuanian soprano does the right thing. She obeys the score. She addresses the “ambizioso spirto” of her husband, whose letter she has just read about his greed for power, with declamatory vehemence and follows the prescription “grandioso” in the cantabile “Vieni t’affretta”. When she calls the “ministri infernali” in the Cabaletta and asks for help with her murderous plans. It is not easy for her to shape ornaments so that they flare up like bursts of flame, but her singing becomes a victory over expressive resistance. And how well she knows how to find the rushed tone for the sinister murder plans in the first duet with Macbeth; how forcefully she wraps the arioso phrases of the gloomy monologue “La luce langue” in the pale colors of a dark dream; how cleverly she underscores the tone of false merriment to the trills of the drinking song. Finally, the climax is grandiose: the sleepwalking scene in the fourth act. With Verdi, the heroine no longer indulges in a round dance of coloraturas, she staggers into madness, halting and faltering in her language; the high D flat is not the crowning glory, but the sound of dying.
In addition to her, the woman, there are two other main roles that give Verdi’s first Shakespearean opera a special character: the title hero and the voice of a collective to which the composer gave the ghostly tone of the uncanny. It’s the witches: in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Salzburg production, blind women who sit in a retirement home and follow events that take place in a huge, constantly changing room – set design: Małgorzata Szczęśniak. The comedy of a seemingly bizarre idyll is over when the fantastic Vienna State Opera Choir speaks in riddles of the future of the hero, as in responsories of a black mass. Even the apparently cheerful Allegro brilliant “Through the air, through the waves, we come flying in the storm” is completely devoid of comedy and sounds like a Vitus dance.
Verdi assigned the opera to the “genere fantastico”. Its elements – ambiguous prophecies, encounters with evil beings, dark incantations – the Polish director has alienated in a glaringly contemporary way, also exacerbated by reaching into the darkrooms of analysis. In the first scene, Macbeth and the Lady, sitting left and right on an endlessly long bench, are waiting for their future. Macbeth hears that he will be made Thane of Cawdor. The lady goes into an examination room on a gynecological chair.
The twitching of her face becomes visible on a video screen, and from now on the camera will be there to let the audience – sometimes the guests on stage, sometimes those in the auditorium – participate in the events: in the regicide as well as in the vision of the dagger that Macbeth reminded of the bloody deed in the banquet scene. The camera becomes the means of a scenic exaggeration. In the modern times the monarchy must be illuminated as glaringly as possible, as must criminal acts such as the murder of Macduff’s children be presented in a sensational manner. It is an unbearably macabre scene when twenty or thirty children’s corpses are lined up along the ramp at the end of the third act. And it’s overkill when all these scenes are illuminated by a huge stage set sun.
The director’s aim is to show through the escalation that the descriptions of the horrible disaster have become normal and are easily consumed – a clever example of a current “genere fantastico”. Without the hint with the moral index finger, it becomes noticeable that the murderer’s game takes place in our time and is about our time: the delusion and megalomania of dictatorship and destructiveness. The Macbeth of the fourth act sits in a wheelchair, as if after a stroke, his insane wife tied to him, both fiat justitiagiven to the people.
In the Belarusian baritone Vladislav Sulimsky as Macbeth, Asmik Grigorian finds an equal partner with a room-filling voice that is softly arranged in the piano: concise in the dramatic declamation, for example in the central phrase after the murder: “tutto e finito”, and cantabile in his expansively phrased final aria. In the role of Macduff, Jonathan Tetelman not only shines with the brilliance of his metallic tenor, but also with the subtle design of the recitative. After the loud cry of despair about the loss of the children “O figli, o figli miei” – he only starts again after a long break in thinking and feeling. Tareq Nazmi uses Banco’s aria for four minutes of flowing euphony. The ensembles are overwhelming: the rich-sounding and finely nuanced choir of the Vienna State Opera and the brilliantly disposed Vienna Philharmonic under the enthusiastically celebrated Philippe Jordan.
#Verdis #Macbeth #Salzburg