Nothing needs to be said about Shakespeare's Macbeth: one cannot help but know and love the darkest and most profound meditation that Western civilization has produced on the themes of evil, power, destiny, guilt. Verdi set it to music in 1847, giving the world a work of terrifying power, cloaked in a black and shiny orchestral dress, in which he experiments with unprecedented wisdom with the "weapons" of Italian opera to evoke witches and ghosts from the Scottish mist: and so we have fiery cabalettas, demonic marches, infernal dances, and a type of veiled and suffocated singing, cared for in the smallest inflections. Nothing of the original tragedy is lost, if anything it is enriched. Verdi considered this his tenth opera the best he had composed up to that moment, in his youthful years of frantic work (or "prison", as he called them).
Riccardo Muti has been conducting this masterpiece for fifty years, refining it more and more, and is today its greatest expert. His return to the Regio — the fourth in five years — will see him accompanied by Chiara Muti, creator of a new, eagerly awaited staging of the opera. In the title role is the baritone Luca Micheletti — who, being a born prose actor, has Shakespeare in his blood — and on stage with him a team of impeccable Verdi singers such as Lidia Fridman, Giovanni Sala and Ildebrando D’Arcangelo.
Riccardo Muti conductor
Chiara Muti direction
Alessandro Camera sets
Ursula Patzak costumes
Simone Valastro choreography
Vincent Longuemare lighting
Paolo Vettori assistant to director
Andrea Gregori assistant to sets
Piero Monti chorus master
Orchestra and Chorus Teatro Regio Torino
New staging Teatro Regio Torino
In coproduzione con Teatro Massimo di Palermo
Melodrama in four acts
Music by Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave e Andrea Maffei
based on from the tragedy of the same name by William Shakespeare
World première:
Firenze, Teatro della Pergola, 14/03/1847
Overtitles in italian/english
Duration: 3h 25'