Macbeth (Opera)

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    Russian Soprano Anna Netrebko Sings in Berlin, Amid Protests

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    The Russian star soprano appeared in her first staged opera in Germany since the Ukraine invasion, still under fire for her past support for President Vladimir V. Putin.The Berlin State Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Macbeth” begins with the madly ambitious Lady Macbeth slowly walking over a burning battlefield, carrying a sword as she negotiates a stage littered with corpses.As the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, who sang that role at the State Opera on Friday, crossed from left to right, the scene was a hallucinatory version of real life: a powerful woman attempting to make her way through a world aflame with war.Netrebko, one of opera’s biggest stars, has been under fire in the West since the Russian invasion of Ukraine for her long history of support for President Vladimir V. Putin. But on Friday, she was appearing in a staged opera in Germany for the first time since the war broke out, the latest milestone in her return to major cultural institutions.She received a warm ovation at her curtain call, even as she performed in the face of opposition from political leaders and robust, angry protests outside the opera house that continued through the end of the show, including rounds of chants that her appearance was “Schande,” a disgrace.Inside, isolated but loud, sustained boos were mixed with the applause after both parts of her opening aria. She responded by standing center stage with arms folded and lips pursed, breaking character to blow kisses to the conductor and orchestra.After the Russian invasion, in February 2022, Netrebko’s performances were called off for a time as she gave confused signals about her position. That March, the Metropolitan Opera canceled her contracts, and did not change course after she announced she opposed the war but refused to denounce Putin. (Last month, Netrebko sued the Met for discrimination, defamation and breach of contract.)But over the past year and a half, she has gradually returned to stages in South America and Europe, including the Vienna State Opera, Paris Opera and Teatro alla Scala in Milan. The response has been a mix of protests (usually outside) and cheers (in).Berlin, though, is a hotbed of pro-Ukraine sentiment. So her appearance at the State Opera — she was engaged for four performances of “Macbeth” that continue through Saturday — has been the object of intense scrutiny.Netrebko bowing on the stage of the State Opera after performing in Verdi’s “Macbeth.”Annette Riedl/DPA, via Associated Press“It’s a difficult decision, of course,” Matthias Schulz, the company’s general director, said in an interview. But, he added, “I’m still absolutely behind that decision.”He and Netrebko’s other defenders argue that her statement was sufficiently clear — “She used the word ‘war,’” Schulz said, “and she used the words ‘against Ukraine’” — and that she distanced herself from Putin, even if she stopped well short of criticizing him.Such direct criticism, they add, is nearly impossible when dealing with an authoritarian government, as it might expose Netrebko, her family and friends, especially those still living in Russia, to security risks. (Netrebko, a citizen of Russia and Austria, lives in Vienna.)Schulz emphasized that her behavior since the war began has not further compromised her. Unlike some Russian artists — including her mentor, the conductor Valery Gergiev — she did not remain in the country, nor has she returned to perform there. The Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis has drawn criticism for the support he received from a sanctioned Russian bank, but has continued to be engaged in the West, though he has made no public statement about the war.It is crucial, Netrebko’s supporters say, not to tar all Russian artists with the same brush and thus play into the hands of Putin, who claims that the West is implacably Russophobic.Yet agreeing that all Russian artists shouldn’t be condemned isn’t the same as saying that none should. Given Netrebko’s stardom, and her documented history praising and receiving recognition from Putin, her case is different from that of less prominent Russian musicians who have condemned the war. Nevertheless, her posture has been that of victim.“She just doesn’t understand why she’s been made responsible for this,” Schulz said.Netrebko seems to believe that she is being held responsible for actions in which she’s had no part, and that she has been blamed for her behavior before the war more than, say, political leaders in Germany and elsewhere who did business with Putin. The Met and other companies were protested for years for engaging her and Gergiev as Russia passed anti-gay laws and annexed Crimea.But many of those people and institutions have admitted that they were wrong. Netrebko’s statements have expressed no remorse for her support of Putin, nor for an incident in 2014 in which she gave a donation to an opera house in Donetsk, a Ukrainian city controlled by Russian separatists, and was photographed holding a separatist flag.And on social media, Netrebko has kept up her prewar parade of lavish dinners, designer fashion and family vacations — a spectacle that was amusing enough before the invasion but feels dishearteningly tone-deaf now.“Yes, I think she was politically naïve or stupid in the past,” Schulz said. “But is this enough to say you cannot sing any more on any stage?”Netrebko, though, doesn’t have any inherent right to be onstage. And yet her artistry is still formidable. For a listener who had not heard her live since well before the pandemic, she has maintained her immediately recognizable, seductively dark and heavy sound, with its slightly, excitingly breathless quality.There were protests outside the opera house that continued through the end of the show, including rounds of chants that Netrebko’s appearance was “Schande,” a disgrace.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesLady Macbeth has been one of her greatest triumphs, and she still clearly relishes the character’s machinations and chesty exclamations, even if the top of her range is now more effortful and less powerful. Her soft singing doesn’t quite have its old floating presence, making the final sleepwalking scene impressive rather than unforgettable.Her future is not entirely clear. Some of her performances, including a concert in Prague next month, continue to be canceled under pressure. Serge Dorny, of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, which canceled her engagements early in the war, wrote in a text message that there were no current plans for her to appear there, declining to comment further.But she is scheduled to return to Vienna, Milan and Paris in the coming months. At the Salzburg Easter Festival early next spring, she will sing the title role in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda,” directed by Oliver Mears, the artistic leader of the Royal Opera in London.“At the beginning of the war, things were very raw,” Mears said in an interview about the possibility of her return to London, adding: “Never say never.”Nikolaus Bachler, the Easter Festival’s director, said, “The passage of time always has a big meaning.”Things inevitably take on a Rorschach quality in these polarized situations. If you’re for her, the fact that Netrebko is appearing at the plainly pro-Ukraine Berlin State Opera, and that “Macbeth” depicts the devastation wrought by war, is a kind of covert admission of feelings she cannot openly express. If you’re against her, she is merely using the company’s — and Verdi’s — ethical bona fides without earning them.As with so much else in our politics, the battle lines have been drawn, and are wearily unmoving. What has happened, as Macbeth puts it in the opera, has happened.This is all really between Netrebko, her conscience and what she hopes will be written in the obituaries when she’s gone. “She did the bare minimum” is hardly the noblest epitaph, and even her defenders can’t argue that she’s shown courage.“She is no Marlene Dietrich,” Schulz said, referring to the German film star who renounced her citizenship in 1939 and spent World War II rallying American troops through the U.S.O., earning a Medal of Freedom. “And she will not be rewarded as such.” More

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      Spotlighting Lady Macbeth’s Anguish: Can What’s Done Be Undone?

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      With radical adaptations of Verdi’s “Macbeth” and Puccini’s “Tosca,” Heartbeat Opera shows why it’s so vital to New York’s music scene.Heartbeat Opera, a small, nimble company that has received its share of plaudits over the years, is on the cusp of a milestone birthday: its 10th. But there was a time recently when it didn’t know whether it could go on, its artistic director, Jacob Ashworth, said.Speaking from the stage after opening night of Heartbeat’s two-part spring festival on Tuesday, Ashworth said that the departure of the company’s founding artistic directors during the pandemic put its future in doubt.On the evidence of the new, radical reconceptualizations of Puccini’s “Tosca” and Verdi’s “Macbeth” — Heartbeat’s first mainstage shows since 2019, which opened this week at the Baruch Performing Arts Center — the company hasn’t skipped a beat.Taken together, the operas demonstrate the strengths that make Heartbeat so vital to New York’s opera scene. “Lady M,” an utterly original recreation of Verdi’s opera that places Lady Macbeth’s doubts and moral quandaries at its center, is an astonishing display of the company’s musical imagination, theatrical instincts and intellectual firepower. “Tosca,” more ambitious but less successful, shows how Heartbeat, agile and daring, can quickly align with an issue as urgent as the women’s rights movement in Iran, where uprisings in the fall captured international attention.A scene from “Lady M,” with Algozzini and Kenneth Stavert as Macbeth.Russ Rowland“Lady M” is Heartbeat at its best. The production’s director, Emma Jaster; its music director and arranger, Daniel Schlosberg; and its original adapters, Ashworth and Ethan Heard, have reoriented the audience’s point of entry into one of Verdi’s most distinctively colored scores, trimming the length, the orchestrations and the list of characters to reveal the work’s core. Macduff, the chorus, Macbeth’s big Act IV aria — all scrapped.In typical stagings, Lady Macbeth comes across as an unsubtle, unrepentant harridan whose abrupt crisis of conscience in the opera’s final act stretches credulity. The soprano role offers a string of marvelous set pieces — a hell-raising letter scene, a chaotic drinking song, a spellbinding sleepwalking scene — but they rarely form a coherent arc.Heartbeat starts with Lady Macbeth’s breakdown as the essential truth of her character and then molds the narrative to fit it. The show begins with Lady Macbeth in bed, sobbing uncontrollably, full of remorse for all the blood she has helped to shed. Her crying is so relentless that Macbeth, irritated and unmoved, gets up to go sleep on the couch. Then, the action flashes back to the score’s beginning, in which Macbeth — often treated as a weak-willed hero buffeted by supernatural forces and a monstrous wife — appears as a cool, calculating, sociopathic yuppie handing out his business card to members of the audience. The witches prophecy that he will climb the corporate ladder.In Heartbeat’s telling, Lady Macbeth, no longer the scapegoat for her husband’s foul behavior, is the one who is led astray by an avaricious spouse. The Macbeths’ desire for public glory finds an outlet in the hollow vanities of social media, represented throughout the show by a ring light, its bright cast a reminder of manipulated reality rather than truth.As Lady Macbeth, Lisa Algozzini charted the gradual degradation of a woman forced to reflect her husband’s ambitions back to him. Her “La luce langue” — haunted, fearful and quivering with uncertainty — became an elegy for people that she and Macbeth had not yet murdered, and “Una macchia” had a raw guilt to it. Algozzini simplified the cabaletta in the letter scene and skipped the high D flat in the sleepwalking scene, but her performance was still filled with gripping details. Kenneth Stavert, as Macbeth, showed a bright, open baritone sound that had depths of strength and propulsion.Schlosberg, with the vision of a master sculptor, chipped away at Verdi’s score to reveal new contours and continuities in the music and action. He didn’t so much reduce Verdi’s orchestration as reinvent it for an ensemble of six musicians (including himself as conductor and pianist). Samuel George’s trombone playing was jauntily demonic and, in its brief imitations of a French horn, somehow noble. Paul Wonjin Cho’s wild, soused clarinet solo in the drinking song injected instability into a predictable aria form. At one point, the percussionist Mika Godbole bowed a vibraphone to make it sound like a glass harmonica. They played like a band possessed, and the use of electronics added an otherworldly texture bubbling with disruption. It was flat-out brilliant.Anush Avetisyan and Chad Kranak in “Tosca,” set in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms.Russ RowlandThe orchestrations for “Tosca” never quite rose to that level. Schlosberg started with an unassailable idea to feature three cellos and a double bass — a nod, probably, to the famous cello quartet in Act III — but despite the handsome string playing, the instrumentation was too bare to deliver the score’s romance.“Tosca” had one of those Heartbeat concepts that lends itself to a zeitgeist-y epithet, along the lines of its Black Lives Matter “Fidelio” in 2018 and a #MeToo “La Susanna” in 2019. But the depth and ingenuity of the company’s engagement consistently erases any suspicion of topical opportunism.Staged by the Iranian American director Shadi G. and adapted by her in collaboration with Ashworth, “Tosca” had a show-within-a-show structure. They set Puccini’s opera — a melodrama roiled by sex, murder and the abuse of power — in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms. Even the ushers and musicians wore head scarves. We see a cast of singers staging a traditional production of “Tosca,” set in Rome, under the watchful eye of security forces and morality police, who stalk the edges of the stage and take note of the performers’ violations of the country’s moral code.Shadi’s framing introduced a fresh sense of danger. At one point, the police drag the actor portraying Cavaradossi (the tenor Chad Kranak) offstage and beat him. He desperately lunges back onto the stage only to be clawed back into the wings. It was harrowing to watch.Still, the staging could feel forced and, at times, risible, as security forces popped up, Whac-a-Mole style, in unexpected places. The singers — including Anush Avetisyan (a Tosca with a dark-hued voice), Gustavo Feulien (an elegantly underplayed Scarpia) and Joseph Lodato (a vocal standout as Angelotti) — brought a sense of scale and subtlety to their assignments that suited Baruch’s black box theater.In a way, “Lady M” expresses a more compelling sense of displacement. In its final minutes, Lady Macbeth and the witches sang the refugee chorus. As a choice it felt unusual, then somehow inevitable. Here was a woman mourning a homeland that wasn’t gone but still unavailable to her, because she had lost her way — proof, if any were needed, that Heartbeat certainly hasn’t. More

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      Verdi’s Shakespeare Resonates Across Italian Opera Houses

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      Glamorous opening nights came with “Macbeth,” “Falstaff” and “Otello” — as well as a new version of “Julius Caesar.”“Ah, Shakespeare, Shakespeare!” exclaimed Giuseppe Verdi in 1872. “The great maestro of the human heart.”Twenty-five years before, as a young man, Verdi had set “Macbeth,” and his final two operas to come, the fruits of his old age, would be “Otello,” in 1887, and “Falstaff,” in 1893, as he turned 80. He contemplated settings of “Hamlet” and “King Lear.” Germans sometimes label Mozart the Shakespeare of music, but no composer cared about this playwright more than Verdi. And Italian opera companies, now opening their seasons under stressful pandemic conditions, are looking to these works for the cathartic secrets of the heart.There were glittering opening nights recently at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, with an “Otello” starring Jonas Kaufmann, and at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, with “Macbeth” and Anna Netrebko. In Florence, John Eliot Gardiner conducted a new production of “Falstaff,” and the Rome Opera presented a world-premiere setting of “Julius Caesar,” composed by Giorgio Battistelli. (The trend isn’t confined to Italy: A recent adaptation of “Hamlet,” by the Australian composer Brett Dean, will come to the Metropolitan Opera in May.)Gardiner is an early-music specialist, and he approaches Verdi with the Renaissance of Shakespeare and Monteverdi in mind, emphasizing lightness, clarity and agility. In an interview he said that Monteverdi created the model for through-composed operas (like “Falstaff”) that blur the distinction between aria and declamation, using the music to underline the text, and exploring — like Shakespeare, Monteverdi’s contemporary — the full dimensions of the human condition.Falstaff’s declamations were magnificently delivered by the baritone Nicola Alaimo: In the first act the clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets joined with him in saluting his splendid belly. Gardiner presided over the delicate nocturnal tones of the final scene, which began with a hint of early music: a musician alone onstage playing a valveless horn.Nicola Alaimo, center, in the title role of Verdi’s “Falstaff” in Florence, with Antonio Garés, left, and Gianluca Buratto.Michele MonastaThe theatrical genius of Shakespeare often nests a play within the play, and Verdi captures this brilliantly in “Otello” and “Falstaff,” both with librettos by Arrigo Boito. In “Falstaff” the tricking and trapping of the libertine knight is masterminded by Alice Ford, one of the merry wives of Windsor — sung in Florence with lovely vivacity by the soprano Ailyn Pérez.In “Otello” the nested play is “staged” by Iago — instilling and amplifying jealousy — and on a night when many had come to hear Kaufmann as the tormented hero, the young Russian baritone Igor Golovatenko was hypnotically compelling as the villain. (Victor Maurel created both Iago and Falstaff, and Verdi required him to declaim, musically, in Shakespearean fashion — in Iago’s nihilist “Credo,” as in Falstaff’s mockery of honor.)In Naples, the conductor Michele Mariotti seemed to sing — or at least mouth — every word along with his singers, presiding over a subtle performance of many moods and colorings. Since 2017 Kaufmann has been singing Otello, Verdi’s most challenging dramatic tenor role, and it suits him beautifully: the heroic moments that draw on his Wagnerian forcefulness, and the anguished lyricism and modulated dynamics that have always been features of his artistry.He performed with silvery gray hair, a visibly aging titan. Desdemona was the soprano Maria Agresta, capable of exquisite grace but also dramatic urgency. Mario Martone’s production, set in a contemporary military encampment, put Desdemona in soldier’s fatigues, and even had her pulling a gun on Otello in an inevitably unsuccessful attempt to defend her life.A new production of “Otello” in Naples, starring Jonas Kaufmann, was set amid ancient ruins in a contemporary military encampment.Luciano RomanoVerdi’s Shakespeare is so important to Italian operatic culture that it was bold indeed for the Rome Opera to open with Battistelli’s “Julius Caesar.” Robert Carsen’s production presented Roman statesmen in modern suits, and the ancient Senate was represented by an auditorium resembling the Italian Parliament. The English-language libretto (by Ian Burton) used Shakespeare’s words, and Battistelli said in an interview that he listened carefully to the syllabification of the English verse before composing the music.Influenced by atonal composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Battistelli even makes use of Schoenbergian Sprechgesang — suspended between singing and speech — for the delivery of some of the text. The great speeches of Brutus and Mark Antony at Caesar’s funeral were addressed to the chorus, which responded with volatile moods: aroused, becalmed, confused, manipulated. Battistelli said he sees his opera as relevant for understanding populist and authoritarian presences in politics today; in Rome, the audience looks up at an inscription over the proscenium acknowledging Benito Mussolini’s help in restoring the opera house in 1928.Battistelli makes use of an extended percussion section — located in one of the side boxes above the orchestra — to establish an unsettling mood: the tam-tam and snare drum, bells and glockenspiel, bongos and marimba, cymbals and gongs. The score, conducted with great commitment by Daniele Gatti, creates a sense of uncanniness and suspense that also evokes cinematic music. Diverging from Shakespeare, the opera offers a large musical role to the ghost of Caesar, who, returning to the stage in the concluding act — like the Commendatore in “Don Giovanni” — actively participates in the suicides of his assassins.Clive Bayley, with hands up, plays the title role in a new “Julius Caesar,” staged to evoke today’s Italian Parliament.Fabrizio Sansoni/Teatro dell’Opera di Roma“I want Lady Macbeth ugly and bad,” Verdi once said, adding that even her voice should be not altogether beautiful, but “harsh, stifled and dark.” At La Scala, however, Netrebko offered an undeniably glamorous sound and presence, her lower and middle registers more gorgeous than ever, and her top notes emerging with thrilling beauty. The baritone Luca Salsi was extraordinary in the challenging title role, with its whispered introspection and agonized exclamations, while the conductor, Riccardo Chailly, conjured the dark orchestral moods of Verdi’s first Shakespearean masterpiece.Salsi’s Macbeth suffers spiritually, almost from the start, singing on his knees in the great duet that follows the murder of Duncan, while Netrebko was at her most haunting in the sinister waltz rhythm of “La luce langue,” dismissing the dead in a nihilistic spirit as dark as Iago’s.In Davide Livermore’s production, the Macbeths live in a rotating penthouse that looks out on a skyscraper city projected as if in an urban fantasy video game. The opera begins with Macbeth and Banquo performing a gangster execution during the prelude; they then encounter the witches in an underground parking garage before ascending (while singing their duet) in the building elevator. Netrebko soon steps into the same elevator during her mesmerizing summoning of dark spirits.The cast was acclaimed by the audience. But the biggest ovation of the night came before the opera began, when the country’s president, Sergio Mattarella, entered his box. The audience cheered for a full six minutes, with cries of “bis” — which usually means “encore” at the opera, but was here a call on the president to consider a second term.Mattarella has been a well-loved leader through the pandemic, which reached Italy before the rest of Europe in February 2020, and struck Milan hard. There was no opening night for La Scala last year, so this year’s was a gesture of faith in the future.When the last act began with the hushed chorus “Patria oppressa” — a grim reaction to Macbeth’s oppressive rule — it was hard not to think of the tragedies of the past two years. With the opening of new opera seasons, the carefully masked and vaccinated Italian public has taken a tentative step toward normal life. At the end of “Falstaff,” Alice Ford tells her co-conspirators that when the farce in the woods is finished, “ci smaschereremo” — “we will unmask” — to come together in a spirit of final celebration.They do — and we will, too. But not quite yet.Larry Wolff is a professor of European history at New York University and the author of “The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage.” More