The Met Opens With Verdi's 'Macbeth', and a Dystopian Reading Travels Home

The Metropolitan Opera opened its new season with Verdi's 'Macbeth', in a staging by Louisa Proske that the New York Times describes as postapocalyptic. The same paper's review singles out the baritone Quinn Kelsey, who it says commandingly charts each step in Macbeth's decline. The season opening was also covered as a social occasion, with the Times noting the luminaries gathered for the first night.

For Italian audiences the interest is not the gala but the frame. 'Macbeth' is the first of Verdi's Shakespeare operas and the one in which he asked the singers for a sound the Italian houses of 1847 did not much want — a score written to be ugly where the drama is ugly. A production that sets the play after a collapse is therefore making an argument about the opera rather than decorating it, and the argument will be tested again when the staging reaches European houses and, eventually, the Italian circuit.

What the foreign notices establish is narrower than a verdict: a reading, a lead performance, and a house willing to open its season on it. Italian opera houses and festivals will decide in their own time whether the dystopian frame travels. Until then the reviews are the only evidence available outside New York, and they are favourable.