Macbeth (Sciarrino)

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Opera dates
Title: Macbeth
Shape: Opera in three "nameless" acts
Original language: Italian
Music: Salvatore Sciarrino
Libretto : Salvatore Sciarrino
Literary source: William Shakespeare : Macbeth
Premiere: June 6, 2002
Place of premiere: Schwetzingen Palace Theater
Playing time: approx. 1 ¾ hours
people
  • soprano
    • Lady Macbeth, with a barely audible low register without timbre
  • Old
    • A sergeant
    • Fleance, Banquo's son
    • a hit man
    • a guard
  • tenor
    • Banquo, Scottish general
    • the ghost
    • a servant
  • baritone
    • Macbeth, Scottish nobleman and general, later king
  • dark baritone
    • Duncan, King of Scotland
    • a courtier
    • Macduff (Scottish Noble)
  • Voices I and II, courtiers (mixed choir )
  • six solo voices (soprano, mezzo-soprano , alto, tenor, baritone, bass)

Macbeth is an opera in three “nameless” acts (“ tre atti senza nome ”) by Salvatore Sciarrino (music and libretto ) based on the tragedy Macbeth by William Shakespeare . It was premiered on June 6th, 2002 in the Schlosstheater Schwetzingen .

action

The opera has no progressive and comprehensible plot in the usual sense, but rather describes the dark feelings and thoughts of the protagonist. The following table of contents is therefore fragmentary and limited to the dialogues and stage directions given in the libretto (in italics).

first act

Scene 1. Remains of a battle: bodies lying around one another, in a semicircle, hardly recognizable, gradually further rooms; Darkness. A sergeant reports to the Scottish King Duncan about the course of the battle against the Norwegians. Although the final score is not yet clear, Duncan's generals Macbeth and Banquo appear to have won. Duncan names the particularly heroic Macbeth Lord of Cawdor, as the previous holder of this title had joined the enemy as a traitor.

Scene 2. "The room shows its flesh". Darkness from which a bluish glow or mist like burning sulfur emerges. Voices announce a future as king for the masked Macbeth. Lady Macbeth appears in the same mask as her husband. Both call for the night. As in a vision, Macbeth approaches the veiled king from behind and rips off his mask. Duncan disappears. At the same moment a figure with a black rooster rises and rips off its head. The picture blurs in the darkness.

Scene 3. The mess of bodies divides the space barely noticeably. Macbeth tells a servant to look for his mistress. He pulls out a dagger that shines red in the dark and thinks about what he is about to do. A bell rings. A hand reaches for the dagger to perform the ritual opera of a rooster. Macbeth disappears between the jumbled bodies.

Scene 4. Same place. Nocturnal voices like moans, amplified by the silence, distorted in the distance. After the murder, Macbeth's conscience stirs. Noises frighten him. Lady Macbeth tries to calm him down. She takes the bloody dagger from him to wipe it on the servants' robes.

Second act

Scene 1. Banquo and a boy under a rain of twigs: restricted view, warm as old ivory on a sky made of enamel. A zither on the floor. In the shade of the vegetation, a centaur watches motionless. On the way home at night, Banquo and his son Fleance are troubled by shadows. Banquo draws his sword. Daggers light up.

Scene 2. Enclosed inner courtyard or salon with several floors of loggias; lifeless figures in it. The perspective is shortened in a dizzying way from below, but develops horizontally towards the background, where the ceiling is, so that the presence of the protagonists on the ground floor - or the appearance of real people in the arcades - gives a strong sense of dimensional imbalance. Night festival. Nobles and courtiers in an absurd tangle of bodies from which the actors step out. Macbeth welcomes his guests to the banquet. His mind is still on the murder. A hit man informs him that Banquo is dead, but that his son escaped. Voices and an appearance of Banquo's ghost so upset Macbeth that the guests are worried. Lady Macbeth tries in vain to calm her down. The ghost announces to Macbeth that no one born of a woman can beat him. The voices promise that he can never be defeated until the forest marches against him. Lady Macbeth sends the guests away.

Third act

Scene 1. The same room as in the previous scene, but with the reverse perspective foreshortening; in the background the floor can be seen from above. The balconies are now almost deserted. The lady seems to fall very slowly into the void as she retreats, and the fall lasts almost to the end of the scene. It's night. Maddened by voices, Lady Macbeth tries to wash blood from her hands. Her fall accelerates until she stays in the background.

Scene 2. Macbeth prepares for the upcoming battle. A servant informs him of the death of his wife. One soldier reports that the forest appears to be moving in their direction.

Scene 3. Remnants of a battle: bodies jumbled up. Darkness. The victor Macduff calls Macbeth to account. However, he no longer wants to fight. As they speak, the bodies rise like a forest. It's even darker than in the first act, and a shadow like a full moon crosses the scene. In the middle, Macduff emerges from the shadows. Voices proclaim Macduff the new king. Analogous to Macbeth's murder of Duncan, Macduff now reaches for Macbeth's face, tears off his mask and pulls it onto his own face. Disfigured by a terrible disease, Macbeth and the Shade merge into a single figure, retreating into the shadows. The darkness devours everything.

"Congedo" - farewell. The closing words belong to the choir: “Not a trace. The unspeakable is too sacred to be scattered in signs. "

layout

orchestra

The opera requires two orchestras with the following instruments:

Orchestra I (in the pit)

Orchestra II (on stage)

According to the information from IRCAM , a harp is also required.

music

Salvatore Sciarrino viewed the Macbeth material as an eternally rotating "spiral" of horror that describes all deaths and massacres in human history. The introductory fanfare is therefore already spiral-shaped, from which he develops his typical compressed, noisy and detailed sound language. The reviewer of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung compared this style to "musical [m] realism". He believed "to experience the movement himself, to feel the noise of the nerves, the pulsation of the blood" and found the repetitive character of the vocal style to be downright hypnotic. The "psychogram of evil" characterizes Sciarrino by minimal means. In his Opernwelt review of the Wuppertal performance, Albrecht Thiemann named a “short, breaking line of the cello; a few pale, atomizing tones of horn and trumpet; thin harmonics -Triller the strings; dry blowing and key noises from the woodwinds; shimmering, fragmentary textures of the xylophone ; a dull, never exactly localizable rumble of the percussion ”.

For the appearance of Banquo's Geist (II: 2), Sciarrino quotes the appearance of the Commander in Mozart's Don Giovanni and a few bars from Verdi's masked ball . Sciarrino wrote: "This is how the graves of music throw out Mozart and Verdi again."

Work history

Salvatore Sciarrino composed his opera Macbeth in sections over a period of more than 25 years. It bears the subtitle " Tre atti senza nome " - "three nameless acts" and is based on the tragedy Macbeth by William Shakespeare . Sciarrino wrote the libretto himself.

The world premiere took place on June 6, 2002 in the Schlosstheater Schwetzingen by the symphony orchestra of the SWR Stuttgart under the direction of Johannes Debus . The production was done by Achim Freyer , the costumes by Am Freyer. It was a co-production of the Schwetzingen Festival with the Frankfurt Opera , the Lincoln Center Festival and the Musica per Roma. Annette Stricker (Lady Macbeth), Sonia Turchetta (Sergeant, Fleance, contract killer, guard soldier), Richard Zook (Banquo, Geist, Diener), Otto Katzameier (Macbeth) and Thomas Mehnert (Duncan, Höfling, Macduff) sang in Schwetzingen . The production was shown in November 2002 as an Austrian premiere under the musical direction of Sylvain Cambreling in the Schauspielhaus Graz . The New York performances took place in July 2003 at the John Jay College Theater. The production was voted "World Premiere of the Year" in Opernwelt magazine's critics' survey .

Since then there have been several new productions:

  • 2004: Lucerne Theater - Swiss premiere; Production: Reinhild Hoffmann , stage: Hugo Gretler, costumes: Sandra Münchow; Lucerne Symphony Orchestra , conductor: Johannes Debus; Anna Radziejewska (Lady Macbeth), Valery Tsarev (Banquo and others), Sorin Coliban (Macbeth), Woon-jo Choi (Duncan and others), Nina Amon.
  • 2006: Wuppertaler Bühnen in the Schauspielhaus Wuppertal - production and stage: Thomas Drei 30acker, costumes: Maria Roers; Conductor: Evan Christ; Jennifer Arnold (Lady Macbeth), Stefanie Schaefer (Sergeant and others), Stephan Boving (Banquo and others), Ekkehard Abele (Macbeth), Assaf Levitin (Duncan and others).
  • 2011: Kleines Haus des Staatstheater Mainz - staging: Tatjana Gürbaca , stage: Stefan Heyne , costumes: Sigi Colpe; Conductor: Clemens Heil; Katherine Marriott (Lady Macbeth), Almerija Delic (Sergeant and others), Christian Rathgeber (Banquo and others), Patrick Pobeschin (Macbeth), Kai Uwe Schöler (Duncan and others).
  • 2011: Kollegienkirche Salzburg as part of the Salzburg Festival - concert; Conductor: Klangforum Wien , Vocal Ensemble NOVA, Conductor: Evan Christ ; Anna Radziejewska (Lady Macbeth), Sonia Turchetta (Sergeant and others), Richard Zook (Banquo and others), Otto Katzameier (Macbeth), Thomas Mehnert (Duncan and others). An audio recording of this performance was released on CD.
  • 2014: Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin - production: Jürgen Flimm , stage: Magdalena Gut, costumes: Birgit Wentsch; Oper Lab Berlin, conductor: David Robert Coleman; Carola Höhn (Lady Macbeth), Katharina Kammerloher (Sergeant and others), Stephen Chambers (Banquo and others), Otto Katzameier (Macbeth), Timothy Sharp (Duncan and others).

Recordings

  • June 16, 2002 - Johannes Debus (conductor), Symphony Orchestra of the SWR Stuttgart .
    Annette Stricker (Lady Macbeth), Sonia Turchetta (Sergeant, Fleance, contract killer, guard soldier), Richard Zook (Banquo, ghost, servant), Otto Katzameier (Macbeth), Thomas Mehnert (Duncan, courtier, Macduff).
    Recording of the world premiere production from Schwetzingen.
  • 2011 - Evan Christ (conductor), Klangforum Wien , vocal ensemble NOVA.
    Anna Radziejewska (Lady Macbeth), Sonia Turchetta (Sergeant, Fleance, contract killer, guard soldier), Richard Zook (Banquo, ghost, servant), Otto Katzameier (Macbeth), Thomas Mehnert (Duncan, courtier, Macduff).
    Live, in concert from the Salzburg Festival from the Kollegienkirche in Salzburg.
    Col legno WWE 2CD 20404.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b information on the work on salvatoresciarrino.eu, accessed on November 8, 2019.
  2. ↑ a b c d Albrecht Thiemann: Suggestive Stille. Review of the performance in Wuppertal 2006. In: Opernwelt , August 2006, p. 51.
  3. ↑ Work information on ilsaxofonoitaliano.it, accessed on November 11, 2019.
  4. ↑ a b c network information of IRCAM , accessed on November 8 of 2019.
  5. ^ A b Alfred Zimmerlin: Obsessions der Macht, review of the performance in Lucerne 2004 . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 29, 2004, accessed on November 11, 2019.
  6. ^ A b c Anthony Tommasini: Lincoln Center Festival Review; A Shakespeare Tale, Down to the Essentials. In: The New York Times , July 11, 2003, accessed November 11, 2019.
  7. ↑ a b Information on the performance in Graz 2002 on steirischerbst.at, accessed on November 11, 2019.
  8. ^ A b Salvatore Sciarrino. In: Andreas Ommer: Directory of all complete opera recordings (= Zeno.org . Volume 20). Directmedia, Berlin 2005, p. 16975.
  9. ↑ Bruce Hodges: Review of the 2003 New York performance on the Classical Music Web, accessed November 11, 2019.
  10. ↑ Bernd Feuchtner : The old and the new. In: Opernwelt Jahrbuch 2002, pp. 84–87.
  11. ↑ Uwe Schweikert : Wealth through Reduction. Review of the performance in Mainz 2011. In: Opernwelt , July 2011, p. 6.
  12. ↑ Wolfgang Schreiber: Music theater for the ears. Review of the performance in Salzburg 2011. In: Opernwelt , September / October 2011. p. 8.
  13. ↑ Andrew Clements, CD Release Review. In: The Guardian , November 28, 2012, accessed November 11, 2019.
  14. ↑ Wolfgang Schreiber, Albrecht Thiemann: Shoreless, abyssal, lost. Review of the performance in Berlin 2014. In: Opernwelt , August 2014, p. 16.
  15. ↑ CD information on the Col legno label , accessed on November 8, 2019.