The Met Saturday Morning Broadcasts are back.....

Kobbe's Complete Opera Book informs me that Verdi worked hard at revising Macbeth for its Paris premiere in 1865. Paris was the city for which Wagner had revised his Tannhauser in 1861, and Paris required that all evenings at the Opera include a ballet sequence. The revisions of both works show enough artistic growth that I wish their composers had revised them more extensively. But the stylistic clash between the post-Tristan Venusberg and the original version of the ensuing scene actually makes a satisfying dramatic point, whereas I always feel that Macbeth remains something of a stylistic and dramatic patchwork, with some of its peppy, rum-ti-tum Italianisms in need of replacement by something more...well, Don Carlo-ish. The bleak, yet pathos-laden, Verdian darkness of his penultimate period, as we hear it in the shadowy "La luce langue," is something the opera, here and there, needs more of. Still, there's genius enough in the work for an effective evening in the theater, provided the singers can get to the heart of Verdi's intentions.

It's possible that I was in attendance at the performance broadcast today, one of my very few opera experiences at the Met. That was 50 years ago, and since those days I haven't heard Sherrill Milnes in the role of Macbeth. His virtues and faults were on full display in this performance, the intense dramatic involvement and basic handsomeness of timbre up against that very peculiar vocal adjustment in the upper mid-range that always makes me wonder how he went on singing for as long as he did. His lady, Martina Arroyo, did a lot of loud singing but failed to project much character by means of it, and her sleepwalking scene was a carbon copy, but of course paler, of the Callas recording - the best possible model, but still somebody not Martina Arroyo. It's probably no accident that until I saw this broadcast scheduled I had forgotten who, besides Milnes, was in the cast of the performance I witnessed.

I'm always glad to renew my acquaintance with Verdi's take on Shakespeare's dastardly couple, but all performances since Callas's only serve to remind me of why I'm not tempted to do so more often.

Listening to this historical live recording being broadcast and streamed on WFMT:


I'm already enjoying the heck out of it.