Met Opera Opens With Verdi's 'Macbeth', and Italy Reads the Season Abroad

The Metropolitan Opera opened its new season with Verdi's 'Macbeth', the New York Times reported on Wednesday, in a production directed by Louisa Proske and set in a postapocalyptic landscape. The paper's review praised the baritone Quinn Kelsey, who it said 'commandingly charts each step in Macbeth's decline'. A separate Times item described the opening night as a gathering of luminaries.

The choice of Verdi for the season's first night is the detail that travels. 'Macbeth' is the earliest of the composer's Shakespeare operas and one of the works through which foreign houses most often introduce Italian repertoire to a general audience — a nineteenth-century score, a familiar plot, and a title that does not depend on a star soprano to carry the evening.

That the Times filed two pieces — one on the social occasion, one on the performance — is a measure of how the American press still treats an Italian opera premiere as an event with both a cultural and a civic dimension. The review's focus on the baritone rather than the production concept suggests the evening's success rested on singing rather than on the dystopian reading.

Verdi's 'Macbeth' occupies an unusual place in the repertoire. It was written in the 1840s and revised for Paris two decades later, and the version a house performs changes what audiences hear: the earlier score is leaner and the later one adds choral weight and a revised finale. The Times review does not specify which version the Met is using, so La Veduta will not assume either.

The production's postapocalyptic setting is the kind of directorial choice that foreign critics tend to debate in terms of whether the concept serves the score or competes with it. The Times review's emphasis on Mr Kelsey's performance, rather than on the staging, reads as a judgement that the singing carried the evening — a useful signal for Italian houses that programme the same opera and watch how it lands abroad.

For the Cultura desk, the interest is in the traffic rather than the evening itself. Italian opera is a standing export: the scores travel, the productions travel, and the singers travel, and the foreign notices they collect abroad are part of how the repertoire is valued at home. A Met season that opens with Verdi, reviewed twice by the paper of record, is the most visible form that traffic takes in a given autumn.

The Times coverage names no Italian institution, no co-production partner and no Italian conductor or designer, and does not report any Italian involvement in the staging. What it does report is the work, the production concept and the central performance. That is the extent of what can be said, and it is enough to note that the season's opening night belonged to an Italian composer.

The Met's season continues from here, and the foreign press will follow it. Italian houses opening their own autumn programmes will be watching the reviews for the same reason they always do: to see which of their repertoire still reads as a live proposition to an audience that did not grow up with it.