Sight vs. Sound: notes on the most successful opera staging I've yet seen

Of all the problems with opera, the art form to end all art forms, the conflict between the many sources of stimulation is the hardest to resolve. The feast of the senses can leave you with gout. First is the singing, which is solo, where one human voice has to hold up a house. The singing can be doubled, tripled, multiplied up to eight, and then these single voices sing different things in unison, with or without a choir behind it; and you, the listener, the seer, the audience goer, who is not satisfied with a recording of the opera, or for that matter with refraining from the potential tedium altogether, are supposed to either sort it all out, or somehow let it all in.

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.




For example: Act 2, Scene 7. The banquet. Opera loves banquets, and Verdi is an Italian composer coming out of the belcanto style. He's using essentially the same musical vocabulary as in the Barber of Seville in order to depict a horrorshow of terrifying omens. This is like commissioning a student of Monet to paint "Guernica" -- there would seem to be a ceiling on how drastic a scene could be yielded. Now, Verdi's music is powerful, and he alternates convincingly between the "Si colmi il calice" aria, in which Lady Macbeth tries to celebrate her husband's assumption of the Scottish throne, and Macbeth's terror at the apparition of Banquo, when he sings "Va, spirto d'abisso!" Have a listen (the video is from another production):

It's terrific music. But it seems limited, hemmed in, too tuneful to depict the full distress of Macbeth. How did Shakespeare do it?

If charnel-houses and our graves must send

Those that we bury back, our monuments

Shall be the maws of kites.

And

It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood:

Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;

Augurs and understood relations have

By magot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth

The secret'st man of blood. 

I think we can safely declare a winner in this contest of viscera: Shakespeare 1, Verdi 0. Furthermore, because the above lines are theatre, you can play this scene as many ways as your imagination allows, which is precisely what directors and actors are tasked with doing. On the other hand, Verdi being theatre plus music, your hands are somewhat tied; the music is the music. The possibilities of a great staging of Macbeth are then greater if it is a play than if it is an opera. Opera, being so full, is finite.

Barrie Kosky has an answer. He has stripped the stage of every lick of colour and every flourish of decoration that may compete with what demons are in the music. The entire thing is in black and white, and of the white there is far less than of the black. (The chorus sings in niqabs.) There is hardly any set to speak of, and it never changes; it's merely a vanishing point of darkness, made so by a line of diminishing lights. The stage is tilted towards an abstracted foreground, where Klaus Grünberg's set design is at its most ingenious: all else being totally obscured, the action of the story takes place at an oblong of bright, claustrophobic light. This space, the exact size of a banquet table, is so abstracted that it can stand for any of the things the story needs it to: the throne of Scotland; conscious thought, surrounded everywhere by the monstrous id; vain hope, embraced by threat; power, with a moat of violence. Twice in the opera, mobs and protagonists alike chase the shadow of this space from upstage, as it slips away before them.

Kosky and Grünberg have figured out that if Verdi's music is limited in its ability to menace, then they can build a scene that doesn't compete with the music, but frames it, frames it so tightly and darkly that you can only hear those sounds that reinforce the power on the stage. At no point does this production indulge in any temptation to break with this tightness, either. Even at the beginning of the fourth act, when the opera is its most period Italian, when the tuneful, syrupy pathos of Macduff's aria "Ah, la paterna mano", gorgeous as it is, threatens to snap the audience's focus from the abstracted wasteland before it, the oblong of light doesn't budge.

Let me say again that this certainly isn't the first staging of Macbeth to be so dark (again, see the Orson Welles film). But it is the first time I've heard the sounds of "Una furtiva lagrima" matched to the looks of a Wieland Wagner Tristan und Isolde. And it works extraordinarily well, better than any busier, more boisterous, and for that matter more historical production ever could. Further, it points to the power of a director's vision in sewing together a fuller experience than the (magnificent) music alone could.