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.

The Metropolitan Opera's choice of 'Macbeth' for an opening night is itself a statement about the repertoire. Verdi's opera has never had the reliable popularity of 'La traviata' or 'Aida', and it depends almost entirely on the two principals: Macbeth and his wife carry the evening, and if either is miscast the piece sags. That is why foreign reviews of a new production tend to be reviews of its baritone, and why the New York Times' assessment of Quinn Kelsey is the part of the coverage that matters most to anyone deciding whether to see the staging later.

The postapocalyptic setting places Proske's production in a line of recent European stagings that strip Verdi of period costume and relocate him to a damaged present. These readings are argued about in Italy as much as anywhere, and the debate is not only aesthetic: Italian houses are publicly subsidised, and a director's concept is a claim on that money. A New York success does not settle the argument, but it gives the concept a foreign reference point that Italian programmers can cite.

The season opening also serves a function the reviews only imply. The Met's first night is covered as a gathering as much as a performance, and the Times treated it that way, listing the figures who came. For an opera house, that coverage is part of the business model: it signals to donors and to the wider public that the institution is still an event. Italian houses watch this model closely, because their own opening nights carry the same double burden of art and occasion.

What the wire does not yet tell us is when, or whether, this 'Macbeth' will be seen in Italy. The reviews give a production, a director's concept and a central performance; they do not give a tour, a co-production or a date. Until an Italian house announces one, the honest position is that Italy is reading this 'Macbeth' at a distance, through the foreign press, and that the reading is a good one.