Giuseppe Verdi, Francesco Maria Piave with additions Andrea Maffei | Macbeth / 2026 [The Metropolitan Opera’s HD-live production]

hitting the spot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Verdi (composer), Francesco Maria Piave with additions Andrea Maffei (libretto, based on the play by William Shakespeare) Macbeth / 2026, Gary Halvorsen (HD director), Louisa Proske (stage director) [The Metropolitan Opera’s HD-live production]

 

Yesterday, Saturday 17, 2026, Howard and I attended the highly acclaimed new Metropolitan Opera production of Macbeth.

    The last time we’d see a production was back in the 1970s at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The production in 1976, was by the famed Teatro alla Scala from Milan, with Claudio Abbado leading the La Scala Orchestra, with a quite remarkable cast with Piero Cappuccilli as Macbeth, Shirley Verret as Lady Macbeth, Nicolai Ghiaurov as Banquo, and Veriano Luchetti as MacDuff. We were young, and we were not wowed, both us now remembering only the witches waving rubber snakes in the air, not at all a memorable production for 29 and 30-year-old graduate students. You certainly might have though we would remember Shirley Verret!

     We still, after seeing yesterday’s performance, recognize that the opera—produced in 1847, before his first great successes such as Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata, and which was revised and expanded in a French version, premiering in Paris in 1865—with several set choral numbers of the displaced Scottish peasants whose husbands, wives, and children have been killed, later in the opera, by the now tyrant Macbeth, looking more like displaced Italian peasants during the Napoleonic Wars than anything out of Scotland.

     Although the witches of this production most certainly did not wave rubber snakes in the air, they were certainly not as austere and terrifying as one might have imagined. Dressed mostly in beige, they looked more, as the head choral singer of the group told host Anthony Roth Costanzo during the intermission backstage conversation, like they were actually having fun in providing Macbeth with truthful but misleading prognostications: he will not be killed by a man born of woman, and his rule shall not fall until the Birnam Forest itself rises up against him. He therefore believes, vaguely, that he is impregnable. The head witch admitted they were indeed having more fun in this opera than all the others. Perhaps a little more austere production might have made us more frightened of them. As it is, they hover over the major actors like ghouls ready to remind them of the awful forces that control their inner selves. The demons in this work are clearly within us.

      Having with their own hands killed King Duncan, the Macbeths have now become paranoid enough that they must destroy Banquo, his son Fleance (who after all is prophesized as becoming his successor), and seek other the deaths of many others.  

      Concerning other problems in the direction, I’m not sure that the complexity of the set, including a turntable set moved to show not only the rough highlands, but several of the Macbeth’s palace rooms, was absolutely necessary or even fully offered us new insights into their complex lives as they move from the killing fields into their bedrooms, unable to wash the blood completely off their hands. At moments the set seemed somewhat cumbersome.

     All these minor quibbles aside, however, this was an absolute joy of an opera to watch with some of the greatest vocal offerings I have experienced in a very long while. With glorious voices such as the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen as Lady Macbeth whose several major arias “Trionfai!” (“I have triumphed!”), the celebratory dinner song, “Si colmi il calice” ("Fill up the cup"), with elements reminding one of bell canto in it, and, of course, the truly great sleepwalking scene (“Una macchia è qui tuttora!”; "Yet here's a spot"), which Davidsen sings with such control that she can almost whisper her terrifying nightmares before truly revealing in full voice her and her husband’s horrific deeds before her lady servant and a male observer the servant has invited to witness the nightly spectacles.

     As opera critic Deryck Cook wrote in his essay of 1964, “Shakespeare into Music,” while again agreeing that Macbeth is not up to Verdi’s greater Shakespeare adaptations such as Otello or Falstaff observed:

 

“Only during the present Verdi craze could his Macbeth be seriously set beside its tremendous original. What can we make of a Macbeth who pursues his fatal vision through a musical desert of the old fustian recitative, or a Lady Macbeth whose prayer to be unsexed is a barn-storming martial cabaletta? In the "Grand scena di sonnambulismo."admittedly, Verdi did so magically stroke the big strumming guitar of his orchestra, and so chasten the vocal pride of Italian 'bel canto, as to foreshadow his achievements of some forty years later.”

      By this time Macbeth (Quinn Kelsy) himself is almost mad. But he is a man of guilt, we perceive, from the first moment he hears of the witches’ prophecies, arguing to himself that he must not interfere with fate, while ambition drives him to almost immediately commit the heinous crime from his early aria (“Mi si affaccia un pugnal?”; "Is this a dagger which I see before me?") to the beautiful and terrifying aria after he has seen the full implications of the witches’ predictions: (“O lieto augurio”; "O, happy augury! No wood has ever moved by magic power").

      His final great aria, in this production sung as he is dying, (“Cielo!”; "Heaven") admits that he knows no one will speak well of him after his death, and that he has ruined his life with ambition, hate, and fear is one of the most brilliantly performed works I have witnessed in my personal operatic history.

    But don’t leave Banquo out, who sings his one great aria (“Come dal ciel precipita”; "O, how the darkness falls from heaven") to his son Fleance as he suspects the journey they are making in escape is filled in danger. Baritone-bass opera singer Rayan Speedo Green sings this song with such a deep passion that he almost, at least for a few moments, upstages all the others. As he told Costanzo during the intermission conversation, “There is a lot of pressure on you since this in the only time in the opera when Banquo is permitted to wow the audience.” He most certainly does wow us with his great performance.

      A moment later, however, he perceives that he has been betrayed and insists he son flee as he, himself, is murdered.

      But in order to create such a wonderful production, one cannot ignore either the talents of Freddie De Tommaso as McDuff nor the truly great Metropolitan opera chorus, now directed by Tilman Michael. If you have ever wondered how to perform soldiers in battle, the wonderful action director Ran Arthur Braun has trained his dancers to perform acrobatic feats as they play out, almost in Japanese Kabuki style their war-time deeds.

      And, obviously, none of this would have made it across the stage lights without the truly great direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who with beautiful painted fingernails brings his baton to one of the greatest orchestras in the world, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. The truly wonderful thing about these HD productions is how alive the sound is on the large, fully amplified theater screen, better than even in the massive hall of the theater itself. The music is utterly overwhelming, and if you love opera and the nuances of the score this is how to best hear it.

      The audience applauded wildly, demanding a significant number of reentries of their favorite performers and choral groups. In her hurry to join the final bows, director Louisa Proske even lost her shoe, grabbing it and holding it on high as if it were her trophy for the brilliant afternoon performance.

      This is what opera is all about.

      This work, about tyranny, betrayal, greed, and unchecked ambition, is something we need to see again now in our own time, if for other no reason but to remind us that it too will some day come to an end and order return.

 

Los Angeles, October 14, 2026

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (October 2026).