Macbeth of iron and blood to break with the honeydew

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“Who finds that I didn’t know Shaspeare when I wrote the Macbet. Oh, in this they are very wrong! I may not have rendered the Macbet, but that I don’t know, that I don’t understand and that I don’t hear Shacpeare no, by God, no. He is a poet of my predilection, whom I had in my hands from my early youth and whom I continually read and reread ».

This is how Verdi burst out in 1865, with some license in the spelling of names and titles, reacting to the criticisms received in Paris while the disheveled firm Boito-Faccio promised, with the imminent debut of theHamlet, to reveal to the world the authentic, modern interpretation of the Bard. Verdi had every reason to get upset. It was he, still young, in the distant 1847, in an Italy nourished by classicist culture, the first to invoke Shakespeare to profoundly renew Italian melodrama thanks to “that great, wide, that superior atmosphere, strange sublime”. As a pick to crack the melodramatic aesthetic chest, he had not taken the easy way out of a Romeo and Juliet, but he had headed straight for a raw and abysmal tragedy, which since its “age of iron and blood” has never ceased to send disturbing signals.

Pergola of Florence on March 14, 1847

The opera staged at the Pergola in Florence on 14 March 1847 represented for the thirty-three-year-old composer the culmination of a professional career, with the conquest, eight years after his debut, of the last important Italian square. But above all the achievement of an artistic goal, a qualitative leap in the dramaturgical-musical writing of which Verdi was fully aware was worth. This is testified by an extremely significant circumstance for those who know the value of gestures for a spirit alien to rhetoric. It was the Macbeth which Verdi dedicated to his father-in-law Antonio Barezzi, “who was to me and father, and benefactor, and friend”, presenting it to him as the title that “I love in preference to my other works”. He had conceived the project in the quiet of the Recoaro spa, with his friend Andrea Maffei, the great translator of English and German classics and contemporaries who will revise the libretto, forcing his loyal Piave to the improbable attempt to render Shakespeare’s word with the sublime brevity that Verdi aimed at without discounts. He went out of his way with the singers as well, torturing them with grueling rehearsals to make sure that much care reached the audience. Nor did he refrain from consulting the illustrious Alessandro Sanquirico, former set designer of La Scala, for the scene of the apparitions, for which he had inquired “from London, where this tragedy has been continuously represented for 200 years or more”. Not bad if the device built specifically in Milan for the planned “phantasmagoria”, “a business to astonish and make a world of people run for that alone”, remained unused in Florence.

Lyric Theater of Parigi

On April 21, 1865, a revised version of the opera, one of the very rare debuts, with The corsair and theAida cairota, of which Verdi did not personally supervise the staging. By consenting to the project of the director Léon Carvalho, who was thus able to contrast with the concomitant preparation of the posthumous African by Meyerbeer a Verdi “novelty”, Bussetano undertook – after almost twenty years, with many masterpieces and a sensitive aesthetic evolution behind him – to rewrite some “weak” pieces, but above all to compose the ballet from scratch, of pragmatic in Paris. Verdi was at first reticent, only to be convinced of this and demanded the performance of the ballet even in the Italian shootings. On this occasion he renewed his fidelity to the theater of speech, simultaneously claiming the function of music. He does so by calling into question Adelaide Ristori, sublime interpreter of the sleepwalking scene in Paris in those years, which leads to a model of extremely effective essential and obsessive gestures, to which the left counterpoint of the English horn responds in the Verdi score.

Verdi would prove loyalty to Shakespeare for life. With the two masterpieces with which he crowned a prodigious career, renewing his own language once again through the word of the Bard, now mediated by Boito, the author ofHamlet quoted at the beginning. Jobs, Othello e Falstaff, in which Verdi respectively took the discourse on the tragic inaugurated with the Macbeth and invented a very new figure of the comic that fascinated the young Wagnerian Richard Strauss. But Shakespearean titles (The storm, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra) circulate everywhere in the correspondence and in the lists of musicable subjects. Above all, as the shadow of Banquo accompanied Verdi’s career since 1843 the ghost of Re Lear, for Francesco Degrada “Shakespeare’s most Verdi drama”, for which he had two librettos prepared, except to resign himself to the impossibility of assembling the necessary cast. And yet, two months after the debut of the Macbeth Parisian, he was still caressing that dream: «Take care that if by chance we choose Re Lear one should stick to Shaspeare and strictly follow in his footsteps. He is such a poet who cannot be touched without taking away from him that originality and that character which is so powerful in him ».