What does classical music offer now? Or, rather, what could it offer?
These are ideas inspired by the Kirov Opera’s performance of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Lincoln Center Festival, which I saw July 12 with my wife Anne Midgette, who’s a classical music critic for The New York Times. (You can read her review — which I certainly I agree with — right here, from the Times website.) What struck me first was Valery Gergiev’s conducting, which was in many ways stupendous. At first I thought it was (along with the playing of the Kirov orchestra) like Italian opera performances, conducted by Italians, in the 1950s — big, rough, imprecise, but dramatic and alive. Then I realized that it also in many ways was, for lack of any better word, contemporary, or maybe postmodern, but in any case not at all classical.
Let me explain. If you look at the orchestral scores of early Verdi operas (like Macbeth), or for that matter operas by Verdi’s predecessors Donizetti and Bellini, you can see that the music is very noisy. Piccolos scream, cymbals crash, bass drums thunder; in loud, fast music you’ll often find the bass drum, cymbals, and the timpani bashing along on every beat. This isn’t very refined, so most conductors — as if they thought the music had to sound like Art — will suppress these noises, blending the piccolo and crashing percussion into a smooth orchestral wash.
But not Gergiev. He let it all hang out (God, here I am, sounding like the ’60s!), and in fact, at least to my ears, made a virtue of all the noisy orchestration. (Of course, he tends to do that in any music he conducts.) That made the music tensile — physical, wild, arresting, just as operas like Macbeth were meant to be. Even softer sounds (because of course not all the opera is a crash of noise) were physical, as if Gergiev realized that the noise can’t be separated from the rest of the score, and let everything evolve from it. (Or maybe he just feels all music that way.)
As I thought all this, I backtracked a few steps. What would Macbeth look like if we forgot about operas, opera houses, tradition, and even history, and just approached the work as if it were new? Three things might jump out at us.
1. Noise. Which I’ve just talked about. And it ought to make the piece immediately accessible to the 21st century. Surely an age that produced the new Metallica CD can figure out how to play Macbeth.
2. Singing. Yes, that’s the basis of Italian opera. To say so is — obviously — not to say anything new.
But from the point of view I’m taking here, it really is remarkable that everybody sings. It’s stylized, even mannered; it’s unusual, in contemporary art; it really is new. And the singing, by and large, is pretty static; nothing changes, as a rule, once an aria, duet, or ensemble gets under way, and its melody begins. Oh, sure, the singers might move around while they sing these pieces, but they don’t have to (except, I’d think, for Lady Macbeth’s Sleepwalking Scene, where of course she’s supposed to wander restlessly around, something the Kirov soprano didn’t bother with, but don’t get me started on that). In the big ensembles, the singers, chorus emphatically included, pretty much can’t move, because moving a lot would lead to physical and, even worse, sonic traffic jams on stage.
So if the singers just stand there and sing, that means — from our modern point of view — that their singing, the physical act of it, is what we watch them do. So they’d better deliver. They have to project their singing, physically, musically, and emotionally, something that didn’t happen nearly enough in this performance, except maybe when the tenor singing Macduff — a very tenor-like tenor, all force and not much subtlety — threw himself across what looked like half the huge Metropolitan Opera stage, to mark the striking moment when his aria changes musical and emotional gears, moving from a minor key into major.
From a high-art opera standpoint, that was silly. But in the “what does this piece look like today?” conception that I’m playing with, it was completely appropriate, exactly the kind of thing we needed more of to make the opera come to life on stage. Which is not to say, by the way, that tenors have to lurch. But something has to happen, whether it’s movement, an arresting arrangement of people on stage, or just the intense focus of a singer so completely at one with the music that he or she rivets our attention without moving at all.
(Gergiev, by the way, fell down in his conducting whenever people sang long melodic lines. Granted, the singers weren’t making anything happen on their own. But that’s no reason for the conductor to simply let them hang there doing nothing, and in fact, in Italian opera, it’s precisely the conductor’s job (or one of them) to inspire and energize the singers in any way possible. You can’t just treat them as if they were instruments in the orchestra, some oddly fleshly kind of oboe or trombone, that can be counted to get caught up in the flare of your conducting. They’re soloists, and, more to the point, singers, which means that they may very well go their own wandering, sometimes not so energetic way. What you need, then, is to give them energy from their accompaniment — to goose the Italian-opera oompahs the orchestra plays while they sing, so that those oompahs push them forward. That can be especially important when the singers are holding long notes and might appreciate some collaboration, some extra juice, as they keep their sound alive, and move it toward its goal.)
3. Gore. There’s a lot of it in Macbeth — the murder of the king, the blood afterwards on Macbeth’s hands and knife, the blood that Lady Macbeth says should be smeared on the king’s attendants (and which she finally smears on them herself). And also Banquo’s murder; Banquo’s bloody ghost, which terrifies Macbeth during the big banquet scene; and the imagined blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands, when she rubs them as she sleepwalks.
So what do we know about gore in these latter days? We’re swimming in it, whether in the movies (walking corpses with their riven eyeballs slopping down their cheeks) or in real life (TV shots of bloodstained Iraqi children, which we read about, and the rest of the world saw). So any gore in a production of Macbeth should acknowledge its everyday presence in our culture, as, for instance, Deborah Warner did with the shocking splash of blood in her Medea, at the moment when the children die.
The Kirov production was feeble, bloodwise; Banquo’s hapless ghost wouldn’t have scared a kindergarten class, let alone Macbeth. And the worst moment was the removal of King Duncan’s body during the final ensemble of Act 1, which was gratuitous to begin with, because — since the music is so powerful — you don’t need anything on stage (assuming, of course, that your stage picture is as gripping as it should be) to turn the screw any tighter. But if you’re going to cart out Duncan’s body, at least make it ghastly to behold, so it enhances what ought to be already a baleful scene. The way it looked in this performance was only a distraction.
Finally, though, what’s crucial is this — that all three factors I’ve cited here, noise (and physicality), singing (and physicality), and gore (more physicality), amount in the end to aspects of the same thing. Macbeth, like any Italian opera of its period, is intensely physical, and should be almost physically searing to experience, a devastating hit to our emotions. All the elements I’ve listed say it ought to be that way, and can help to make it so. But the traditions of the opera house most likely hide the devastation from us, as a brand-new reading of the piece might not.
Disclaimer! I’m not mandating any one kind of staging of Macbeth. Art doesn’t work like that; it’s dumb to rule out possibilities. I only mean to point out one path that we might take.
And here’s sometihng I love: Macbeth has the most wonderful expressive marking, in Verdi’s score, that I’ve ever seen in any music. Over the music in the witches’ chorus that begins the piece, Verdi writes nè dimenticarsi che sono streghe che parlano. Or, in English: “Don’t forget that these are witches speaking.” A comment, to judge from many letters he wrote about the first production of the opera, on the lazy drama habits of Italian opera houses. And one we might remember when we look at the opera freshly. These are witches, and if everyone in the opera house doesn’t know that four seconds after they appear, and doesn’t have it reconfirmed the moment that they open their mouths to sing, something’s badly wrong.)