The other music is orchestral, and huge, but cannot be bigger than the voices, so it is hidden in a literal pit. The theatre of the thing is embedded in the singing, which is embedded in the score, and the source of the score, the thing in the pit, is meant not to be seen, but to be heard and felt. And there's no point of seeing opera in person if the theatricality makes no sense. If they try to tell the story with unsung words, as in a play, they are no longer purely operatic, so every single dramatic occurrence is sung, or sung about, on average for three hours. But they let you out, sometimes twice, to drink some alcohol, eat some canapés, and talk to your friends, if you have them, and if you do most of them are probably about seventy years old; alcohol drunk and bladders emptied if you made it through the line, they bring you back in for an hour more. Add that the sets are often still paintings with sculpture, and are expected to change a few times in four hours if you are to get your money's worth (opera is a preposterously expensive art form), and that certain operas call for ballet, and you've wrought the makings of a grand mess. No other ritual has the potential to be so exhausting, so numbing, except perhaps a Catholic mass. And should the whole thing somehow hold together, it has something of the divine.
Having been yanked around with opera for at least twenty years, I've concluded separately, indeed after each visit to the opera house afresh, that opera is incoherent, or nice, or worthwhile, only understood live, only understood in recordings, for other people, for me and only me, dead, bland, hit or miss, indulgent, difficult, a status symbol, life-changing, consummate, supersaturated, ennobling, or irrelevant. But I've never left an opera house feeling about opera the way I did upon seeing Verdi's Macbeth, staged by Barrie Kosky at the Operhaus Zürich.
The production probably isn't revolutionary, it might not even be particularly original (see the Orson Welles film), but more than any other opera staging I've yet seen, it uses the stage to show the music. Even more, it hears the music it wants to hear, and instead of settling for Verdi's imperfect musical telling, instead of yielding to Verdi's sometime inability to use music to depict drama, the staging manipulates it, brings to the fore what works, and distorts what otherwise wouldn't. The result is not somehow the perfect marriage between drama and music; instead, it's a magnificent instance of using the dramatic telling of ossified music to renew it and enhance it. It shows the full potential of the stage to keep opera alive.
