“Voi siete demente” (“You are demented”) Lady Macbeth chides her husband as he begins to come unglued in Verdi’s Macbeth. Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski’s new production for the Salzburg Festival would like us to believe that both Macbeths are demented, and that this is the only relevant fact about them. Following a well worn, if rather unfortunate, trend in European stage production, Warlikowski reduces the opera to a psychiatric diagnosis, with the characters exploring their pathologies in the confines of a mental institution. His approach is hardly original. Such directors as Claus Guth, Alvis Hermanis, Dmitry Cherniakov, Hans Neuenfels, and Stefan Herheim, among others, have also veered in that direction in their exploration of standard repertoire works.
The depressing conceit is that the emotions that draw us to drama—and particularly to opera—are only accessible to the psychologically unwell and certifiably insane. The rest of us can only understand the characters by papering over the abyss with the trappings of psychological interpretations that may or may not be valid. Pursuing this endeavor might comfort creative intellectuals who inhabit a petit bourgeois milieu of cautious social democracy and dour egalitarianism, but the plain truth is that all too often the human experience brims with anger, rage, despair, desperation, jealousy, ambition, and all the other qualities at work in Macbeth. Its characters are humans feeling very real and intense emotions in an extreme situation where much is at stake.
Of course that is the whole reason we want to see them, and denying that leads to a creative dead-end. Fundamentally, the diagnosis idiom means that the work cannot unfold anywhere except a mental institution, preferably one backdated to the middle decades of the 20th century, when analysis had its heyday as the undisputed ‘Science,’ and when strictly regimented institutionalization served as a rigid cure-all for psychiatric disorder. Malgorzata Szczęśniak’s sets thus recreate a familiar environment poached from Warlikowski’s colleagues, where the principals strut and fret upon the stage while exhausted medical professionals—and a noticeably enervated audience—look on. The creative limits already become apparent in placing such an environment on the vast stage of Salzburg’s Grosses Festspielhaus. Simply too big to allow for clinical intimacy, the house’s stage naturally distends the action over a vast operating theater where the Macbeths receive treatment, interact with other patients, and experience their delusions. It looks more like a gymnasium than a treatment facility, though an extendable medical curtain partition allows for some swift entrances and exits.
In Warlikowski’s imagination, the particular hurt that drives the Macbeths’ insanity is that Lady Macbeth is infertile, though film projections suggest that they may also have suffered childhood abandonment trauma. Excerpts from the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex and The Gospel According to St. Matthew reinforce respective ideas of psychosexual dysfunction and the sacrifice of children for the sake of power (Warlikowski chose the latter film’s depiction of the Massacre of the Innocents for stage projection). For all its labor, the effort lands unconvincingly. Plenty of people with childhood abandonment issues and fertility problems exist in our society, yet remarkably few turn out to be murderous tyrants easily manipulated by tricky supernatural prophecies of grandeur. If the Macbeths cannot have children, moreover, one might ask why they would object to Macbeth’s lifetime rule followed by the predicted future line of kings descended from Banquo, his best friend and closest comrade. Indeed, the only reason to arrange for Banquo’s and his son’s murder—the act that hastens the Macbeths on their path to political as well as psychological ruin—is to remove the last remaining rivals so that Macbeth’s line will presumptively reign. A director of Warlikowski’s acumen should be above such obvious lapses of logic.
Despite these inconsistencies, the Macbeths oblige the director’s whims in their confinement. The prophecies arrive in a day room from choruses of blind witches wearing sunglasses. Macbeth’s ‘coronation’ is some kind of inmate dress-up hour. The dinner interrupted by Banquo’s haunting of the new king is a sad cafeteria meal serving up baby dolls. As the couple descends into irretrievable madness, Macbeth castrates himself—to what end, one might ask, if his wife is infertile? Lady Macbeth slashes her wrists at the culmination of her expository sleeping walking aria (“Una macchia è qui tutt’ora”) and obligingly passes out after singing her attenuated high D-flat, which is usually understood to be a musical depiction of her last breath escaping. They both survive the gratuitous loss of blood, but end the opera tied to chairs with electrical cords as the victorious Macduff (is he a patient, a visitor, a character with real grievance? Who knows?) castigates them for their evil machinations.
This missed opportunity was only tepidly served by the music. Philippe Jordan, music director of the Vienna State Opera, took over on the podium from an ailing Franz Welser-Möst, who was originally scheduled for the production. Jordan invested the score with an elegance that lingered on its dramatic figures—a major innovation when Verdi composed the opera in the 1840s. At times, however, especially in the opera’s more martial moments, the effect was languid despite the best playing of the Vienna Philharmonic, which serves as the Salzburg Festival’s house orchestra.
I recall the baritone Vladislav Sulimsky from the early days of his career at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, where he was cast in leading roles shortly after joining the company. His strong, solid technique and fine vocal instrument were well cast in the title role, but sometimes the complex character’s subtleties eluded him.
Any soprano singing Lady Macbeth these days must inevitably suffer comparison to the controversial Russian superstar Anna Netrebko, who remains the role’s leading exponent on international stages and just sang it in loudly cheered performances at Milan’s La Scala. Asmik Grigorian is not exactly a Verdian soprano. She lacks the cool, full-bodied middle register that the part needs to assert the necessary gravitas. She also struggled with the coloratura runs in Lady Macbeth’s excited entrance aria “Vieni, t’affretta” and its treacherous cabaletta “Or tutti, sorgete.” As she settled into the performance, however, her singing grew more assured. The introspective, and ultimately self-justifying aria “La luce langue,” which Verdi inserted into the opera’s revised edition of 1865, came off better. Her unique, if somewhat choppy, reading of the sleepwalking scene was a model of fine diva performance.
Bass Tareq Nazmi sang a stentorian Banquo but lacked the charcoal timbre and sepulchral depth that makes the role most enjoyable. The talented young American tenor Jonathan Tetelman was a standout as Macduff. Ironically, given Warlikowski’s staging, his great aria of regret “Ah, la paterna mano” turned out to offer the performance’s most profound psychological introspection. Coming just after the Salzburg chorus’s superb rendition of “Patria oppressa,” a dirge of national mourning that served Verdi’s fractured Italy as well as it serves Macbeth’s suffering subjects, it was the musical highlight of the evening.
