The meaning of Dramatic Transformationin Verdi’s opera, Macbeth

Abstract

In spite of the different genre between Shakespeare's Macbeth and Verdi's opera Macbeth, both of them have the same context of theme, basically. It is well known that Verdi borrowed the plot of the opera and musical inspiration from Shakespeare's original text. Especially, in two works, Shakespeare and Verdi represented the same theme of human-beings' extreme quest for power and their inescapable destruction as its result by means of drama and opera. Verdi overcame the convention of opera focusing on beautiful melodies to which Rossini and Donizetti had contributed. He never let singers sing only their sweet arias. Rather, he tried to inject powerful theatricality into the work. Verdi deepened the passion and the simplicity of tragedy by eradicating the comic elements to make his work powerful as the opera without imitating the original. He thought that opera could be more effective by using simple and radical destruction rather than complex structure. He transformed the characters in order to clarify the contrast of characters. He made the character of Macbeth paler and made that of Lady Macbeth more cruel than those of the original. These extreme transformation of character reduced the reality of the work, but could add the strong theatrical impact toward the audience. By doing so, Verdi offered the opportunity to enjoy the original with a new point of view by giving more focus to Lady Macbeth than to Macbeth. Verdi's strategy of creating extreme characters is intended to represent a powerless woman and heroic protagonist in the latter part of the opera. In the sleepwalking scene, Lady Macbeth, the powerless woman can elicit more sympathy through the extreme reversal of character. Meanwhile, Macbeth restores his manhood as the tragic hero by facing his destiny of catastrophe. Verdi gives symbolic significance to the musical keys as the strategy to inject the theatricality into the opera; supernatural forces and the ultimate powers punishing the evil to Bb; murder and death to C; guilt to Db etc. This method can be evaluated as his important strategy to let the audience enjoy theatrical symbols as well as beautiful melodies of the opera. According to his biographical materials, we discovered that he asked the singers to do consistent theatrical training, which can be interpreted as his recognition to develop the opera theatricality as Shakespeare did.