Macbeth at the Met

Giuseppe Verdi called the opera his "best beloved child," but audiences have consistently agreed with George Bernard Shaw, who sneered that Verdi tried to turn Shakespeare's tragedy into another Trovatore. Last week, when Manhattan's Metropolitan staged Macbeth for the first time in its 76-year history, the opera kept moving from the sublime toward the ridiculous. The score contains much hauntingly beautiful music,* prefiguring the emotional insights of Otello, but it is also marred by trivia, such as a kind of witches' cancan in the first scene. The libretto (by Verdi, put into verse by Francesco Piave) dimly reflects some of the original's greatness, but it is far behind Librettist Arrigo Boito's Otello and Falstaff, and is essentially a choppy, ill-balanced synopsis. The Met's production, while brilliant in most respects, was faulted by some ludicrous details and a kind of Teutonic touch that is alien both to Verdi's Italian music and to Shakespeare's Scottish setting.

German Director Carl Ebert, general manager of West Berlin's Municipal Opera, superbly handled his cast and particularly the Met's often heavy-footed chorus, achieved some stunning, stylized patterns reminiscent of Bayreuth. Highly effective were the glowingly expressionistic sets by German Designer Caspar Neher, but his costumes were merely foolish: mauve, mustard, rose and lavender, suitable for a Todd A-O musical version of the Wars of the Roses. If Designer Neher tried to follow the romantic music by being deliberately unrealistic, he spoiled his effect with just enough realistic touches, as when platoons of soldiers in what looked like pink pajamas appeared alongside authentically ragged refugees.

The part of Lady Macbeth, which was to have been sung by Maria Callas before Rudolf Bing fired her (TIME, Nov. 17), went to radiant Viennese Soprano Leonie Rysanek, who in her Met debut showed off an unusually pure and beautifully rounded voice and considerable acting talent. Her only fault was that she scarcely fitted Verdi's bill ("I would have Lady Macbeth ugly and wicked ... her voice should be that of a devil"). For the most part, Soprano Rysanek seemed more like an ambitious Org Man's tender helpmate than a driven woman goading her weak husband to murder. But in the sleepwalking scene she rendered Verdi's compassionate music with memorable grace. As Macbeth, Baritone Leonard Warren walked through his part woodenly but sang as well as ever, while as Macduff, Tenor Carlo Bergonzi delivered one of the evening's real stunners.

All in all, as British Critic Francis Toye wrote of Macbeth, it is "a splendid and uncommonly interesting failure"--very much worth reviving and seeing.

* Verdi first wrote Macbeth when he was 33, but 18 years later (1865) revised it, adding some of its best music.

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