Macbeth Underworld

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Opera dates
Title: Macbeth Underworld
Shape: Opera in eight chapters
Original language: English
Music: Pascal Dusapin
Libretto : Frédéric Boyer
Literary source: William Shakespeare : Macbeth
Premiere: 20th September 2019
Place of premiere: Brussels Opera House La Monnaie / De Munt
Playing time: approx. 1 ¾ hours
people

Macbeth Underworld is an opera in eight chapters by Pascal Dusapin (music) with a libretto by Frédéric Boyer based on William Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth . It was premiered on September 20, 2019 at the Brussels Opera House La Monnaie / De Munt .

action

The porter introduces the audience to the action with a spoken prologue.

Chapter 1: "So foul so fair"

Enter Banquo's Ghost, Lady Macbeth, and the Child. All three are in the underworld. The Lady recalls her husband's message about the prophecy: Three sinister sisters greet Macbeth and the ghost. They announce that Macbeth will soon be king. The descendants of the spirit are also to become kings. Macbeth is plagued by bloodthirsty fantasies. The mind realizes that it is insane.

Chapter 2: "Come thick night!"

Macbeth and his wife await the arrival of King Duncan, who will spend the night with them. You want to take the opportunity to murder him. Macbeth has a vision of a floating dagger that urges him to act. The sisters comment on this.

Chapter 3: "Sleep no more"

Lady Macbeth dreams of her future child in her bed. Macbeth tells her in confused words that he has killed the king. The sisters comment again. The ghost appears. He fears his impending death and the day that will follow. Macbeth is delusional and does not think she will ever sleep soundly again. A loud knock frightens him even more. The gatekeeper opens the gates to the underworld.

Chapter 4: "Nox perpetua"

The sisters sing a requiem for the murdered man. Meanwhile, Macbeth and his wife are crowned. You want to forget the past.

Chapter 5: "Look the Ghost enters"

At the coronation ceremony, Macbeth's madness comes out more and more. The porter announces the appearance of the ghost, which only Macbeth can see for himself. His reactions worry the lady. She tells her husband to go to bed and sing a lullaby to calm them down.

Chapter 6: "A deed without a name"

Lady Macbeth ponders the loss of her ability to love. Meanwhile, Macbeth demands that the witches clarify his fate. The sisters announce to him that no man born of a woman can overcome him and that he will remain undefeated until the forest of Birnam rises against him.

Chapter 7: "Out damned spot!"

Lady Macbeth tries compulsively to remove an imaginary blood stain from her hands. She's also showing signs of madness. The porter paraphrases 1 Corinthians : "Death, where is your sting".

Chapter 8: "Out brief candle!"

The ghost tells Macbeth that the lady is dead. The two watch the Birnam forest set in motion. Macbeth feels deceived by the prophecy. Beside himself with anger and despair, he calls floods and storms. The child and the sisters appear and warn him to repent. The child explains that it was cut from its mother's womb before it was born. His voice is his sword. Macbeth will be remembered as a monster and a tyrant. Still, Macbeth doesn't want to give up.

layout

The Macbeth subject occupied Dusapin for a longer period of time. He gained inspiration primarily from the more than 100 film adaptations of the subject, which he said he watched all of them - from the oldest silent film version from 1908 to student work and the Hollywood blockbusters. The Macbeth -opera Giuseppe Verdi played as a template hardly matters. Dusapin realized that the subject always remained intact, no matter how much the text was changed. Therefore, treated the subject with great freedom. For him, the story begins at the point where all the characters are already dead. Roman Polanski's Macbeth film from 1971, from which he took the figure of the porter, had a special meaning - according to the description in the score a somewhat confused and funny, but in a certain way scary character and guardian of the underworld. The Lady Macbeth is based on Judi Dench's portrayal of this role. Dusapin adopted the rhythm of the words in the scene of washing hands (Chapter 7) unchanged in his opera. As with Polanski, the lady in Macbeth Underworld is not a “perverse narcissist who dominates the world around her”, but rather a fragile character for whom Dusapin chose the “fragile voice” Magdalena Koženás . Their depiction in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea in Paris gave him the idea of ​​having them accompanied by an archlute to conjure up the Elizabethan age . Macbeth's character description in the score is limited to the words "Macbeth is crazy" ("Macbeth has gone mad"). The three sisters are always accompanied by the women's choir, which acts like an echo. Your text is enigmatic and contradicting itself. They express Macbeth's desire. The child is a kind of phantom, possibly Banquo's son, thirsting for revenge, or a never-born child of the Macbeths. Ideally, it should be portrayed by a boy with a firm, resolute voice, as it kills Macbeth at the end of the opera. The spirit of Banquo represents both the fate and the conscience of Macbeth.

The plot is not told in context, but in the form of fragments with the familiar elements from Shakespeare's tragedy in the form of memories of the protagonists who have already died. Knowledge of the template is therefore a prerequisite for understanding the content. The focus is on the dark episodes. Joachim Lange described the work in the Neue Musikzeitung as a “gripping night walk through the abysses and fog of man-made and man-willed evil. It's a Shakespeare turned through the mill of a nightmare. "

The singing parts use different means of expression from speaking and spoken singing to arioso. The orchestra is dominated by the gloomy sounds of the wind instruments and lower string instruments. An organ stands for the “metaphysical dimension of the material”. Michael Stallknecht described the orchestral setting in the Süddeutsche Zeitung as "harmonious [] surfaces in which the orchestral network is constantly shifting, thinning out and condensing again."

orchestra

The orchestral line-up for the opera includes the following instruments:

Work history

Pascal Dusapin's opera Macbeth Underworld was commissioned by the Brussels Opera House La Monnaie / De Munt . The libretto was written by Frédéric Boyer based on William Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth .

The world premiere took place on September 20, 2019 in the Brussels Opera House in a production by Thomas Jolly . The equipment came from Bruno De Lavenère, the costumes from Sylvette Dequest and the lighting design from Antoine Travert. Alain Altinoglu directed the symphony orchestra and the women's choir of La Monnaie. The singers were Magdalena Kožená (Lady Macbeth), Georg Nigl (Macbeth), Ekaterina Lekhina, Lilly Jørstad and Christel Loetzsch (scary sisters), Naomi Tapiola (child), Kristinn Sigmundsson (ghost) and Graham Clark (doorman). It was a coproduction with the Paris Opéra-Comique and the Opéra de Rouen Normandie.

The production was well received by the public, and the reviewers were mostly positive. Joachim Lange from the Neue Musikzeitung predicted the work will have "an afterlife after its successful premiere". Waldemar Kamer praised both Dusapin's music and the performers in Online Merker . He also considered the production “from Shakespeare's world” to be “decisive for the success of the evening”. Jolly and his team had "congenially made more of the piece than was in the template". He gave the director "extra praise [...] for the excellently thought-out theater-effective action processes and leadership". In the Italian Giornale della musica, Alma Torretta particularly praised the performers, the orchestra led by Altinoglu and all the singers. Hans Reul from the Belgian Broadcasting Corporation saw “the libretto [as] the only small weak point in an otherwise very successful new Macbeth opera in every respect”. Michael Struck-Schloen expressed his disappointment in the opera world with the “piece and its presentation”. It remains "in tension and magic far behind Shakespeare's original (and also behind Giuseppe Verdi's setting)". Despite the performance of the interpreters, the characters are "anemic zombies because they lack conflicts". Manuel Brug von der Welt called the work an "almost shamelessly accessible [] Shakespeare paraphrase". Guillaume Tion from France Musique found the set “extraordinary, terrifying, gigantic” (“extraordinaire scénographie, terrifiante, gigantesque”) and compared its aesthetics with the style of the Pre-Raphaelites . The music is also "beautiful" ("magnifique"). They combine a variety of different styles through to folklore.

Recordings

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d information in the score
  2. ^ Macbeth Underworld through the lens of the seventh art. Work information on the Brussels Opera House website , accessed January 6, 2020.
  3. ↑ a b c Joachim Lange: A nightmare in music - Pascal Dusapin's opera “Macbeth Underworld” premiered in Brussels. In: Neue Musikzeitung , September 25, 2019, accessed on January 7, 2020.
  4. ↑ Michael Stallknecht: "Macbeth Underworld": Under the ancient spell. Review of the premiere in Brussels in 2019. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 29, 2019, accessed on January 8, 2020.
  5. ↑ a b c Information on the world premiere production on the Brussels Opera House website , accessed on January 6, 2020.
  6. ↑ a b Waldemar Kamer: As the start of an innovative new "program architecture", a fantastically successful world premiere. Review of the world premiere in Brussels 2019. In: Online Merker, September 28, 2019, accessed on January 8, 2020.
  7. ^ Alma Torretta: Macbeth secondo Dusapin. Review of the world premiere in Brussels 2019 (Italian). In: Giornale della Musica, September 25, 2019, accessed January 8, 2020.
  8. ↑ Hans Reul: Pascal Dusapin's opera “Macbeth Underworld” is premiered in La Monnaie. Review of the world premiere in Brussels 2019 on the Belgian Broadcasting website , 23 September 2019, accessed on 8 January 2020.
  9. ↑ Michael Struck-Schloen: In the dead of night. Review of the world premiere in Brussels 2019. In: Opernwelt , November 2019, p. 16.
  10. ↑ Manuel Brug: Opera night and nightmares: the Brussels Monnaie bravely starts its season with two world premieres by Dusapin and Attahir. In: Die Welt , September 27, 2019, accessed on January 8, 2020.
  11. ↑ Guillaume Tion: Retour de spectacle: Création de Macbeth Underworld de Pascal Dusapin au Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie. Review of the world premiere in Brussels 2019 (French) on France Musique , October 2, 2019, accessed on January 8, 2020.