Lyric Opera 2021-2022 Issue 1 Macbeth

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 32 space. The pews become cof ns and the dead, buried in a crypt beneath the church, rise. Corpses spring to life, holding candles as in Scottish poet Robert Burns’s “Tam O’ Shanter:” “Cof ns stood round like open presses, / That shaw’d the dead in their last dresses; / And by some devilish cantraip sleight / Each in its cauld hand held a light.” ( Cantraip means “a witch’s trick or mischievous device”). Playing out in the dim, claustrophobic, holy space, where the world outside the walls is completely dark, horror develops in the suggestibility of the audience’s imagination. In keeping with the prevailing Romantic-era view, Verdi’s use of the supernatural, like Burns’s, isn’t merely spooky; Verdi’s witches sing jaunty, major-key music that emphasizes the comical and grotesque. McVicar says the nineteenth-century setting matches Verdi’s treatment of the phantasmagorical Scottish tradition, right down to a similar gathering at the climax of “Tam O’ Shanter,” which also takes place in a ruined church. McVicar believes the Macbeths’ lust for power stems from their lack of children. In Shakespeare’s play, Lady Macbeth laments, “I have given suck, and know / How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me,” but the play provides no other evidence of this child. Children are prominently featured in this new production’s Walpurgisnacht-like display. One of the apparitions is a large, bloody, newborn child puppet. In one sequence, Lady Macbeth receives a Christmas gift from a brood of children: a tiny, baby- sized cof n. Birth, of course, pivots the warning that “No man that’s born of woman / Shall e’er have power upon thee;” Macbeth mistakenly believes no man can overthrow him, but in fact, Macduff, born by Cesarean section, or, as he puts it, “From his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d,” ultimately fells him. Two Lady Macbeth scenes demonstrate the versatility of this production’s setting. When the church transforms into a celebratory space for the banquet scene, Lady Macbeth sings a drinking song—a brindisi —“Si colmi il calice” (“Fill the chalice”), that is an earlier iteration of Violetta’s famous brindisi “Libiamo, ne’ lieti calici” from Verdi’s La traviata . Connecting to the toast by way of red wine and red blood, Lady Macbeth sleepwalks through the empty church to sing “La macchia,” an aria about her inability to clean blood off her hands, the “Out! damnèd spot” of Shakespeare’s play. Here, the chapel is a space of confession and guilt. The costumes in the production, designed by Moritz Junge, pertain to the era of Verdi’s Paris revision. Macbeth appears in dress indebted to portraits of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort at Balmoral, the British royal family’s Scottish castle. Lady Macbeth wears layers of crinoline under lush, unadorned fabrics. Banquo’s military out t is akin to an American Civil War uniform. Macduff is in full Highland dress, as is King Duncan—wearing the Duncan clan’s tartan pattern, of course. The chorus women in the Sabbath scene wear period undergarments such as shifts, corsets, and sarks. The production also draws inspiration from memento mori photographs. In early photography, which aligns with the time in which this production is set, when a loved one passed away, relatives would dress the body up, pose it, and take a picture as a symbol of remembrance. The macabre tradition resonates with the bodies left in Macbeth’s wake; memories of the dead persist like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands. No matter what era Macbeth is set or performed in, it offers a lens for current events. At the time of its premiere, King James I believed himself a descendant from the line of the historical Banquo, so Shakespeare may have used the prophecy that Banquo’s heirs would rule as a form of royal attery. When the Paris revision premiered in 1865, Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated less than a week earlier. Shakespeare and Verdi paint Macbeth with mythic brushstrokes, inviting patrons to see a historical template in the mayhem wrought by Macbeth’s ambition. “Macbeth’s tragedy is our tragedy,” McVicar says. Those hungry for power will always be with us, and some will inevitably turn to violence to acquire or sustain it, failing to recognize the mayhem is of their own making, as so happens with Macbeth in his last moments of introspection before the English forces reach him. Instead, he resorts to self- pity, seeing himself as a victim in a meaningless world, life as “...a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.” Now, as audience members return to Lyric after a hiatus imposed by a modern-day plague, the company hopes the Scottish play portends a future in which successions are smooth and the tragedy stays onstage. Let the trees march onward. Graham Meyer covers classical music and other arts for publications such as Chicago magazine and Crain’s Chicago Business . “Macbeth’s tragedy is our tragedy.” - Sir David McVicar