BRUSH UP YOUR SHAKESPEARE

Giuseppe Verdi held a strong affinity from an early age for William Shakespeare. He affectionately referred to Shakespeare as “Papa” in conversation and correspondence, and although he never learned English, Verdi was known to have two copies of Shakespeare’s complete works as constant bedside companions: the Italian translation by Carlo Rusconi (prose) and that of Giulio Carcano (prose and verse). His love of Shakespeare led Verdi to adapt Macbeth into an opera in 1847, without ever having seen a Shakespearean play performed in his lifetime. In fact, Verdi’s first experience of Shakespeare in the theater came shortly after the premiere of his own version of Macbeth. 

It is important to note that hundreds of operas have derived from Shakespeare’s plays — even more than from the works of Schiller, Goethe, or Sir Walter Scott. Phyllis Hartnoll and her collaborators in Shakespeare in Music counted more than 180 Shakespearean operas, but admitted it was an incomplete list. The editors of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare claim the number is closer to three hundred. However, most of the Shakespearean operas in nineteenth-century Italy, France, and Germany were taken from the plays indirectly, from parallel sources, or from poor translations. Rossini’s Otello (1816), for instance, was based on a French adaptation of Shakespeare’s own Italian source, Cinthio’s Hecatommithi. Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi (1830) came from a play by Luigi Scevola. Verdi was the first Italian composer who worked hard to get back to Shakespeare’s authentic text and he did not take this task lightly. When he read the score of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet for instance, he said of the librettists, “Poor Shakespeare! How they have mistreated him!” 

With Macbeth, Verdi transformed the famous Shakespearean monologues into tour de force arias, with Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene as a prime example. Macbeth was a true passion project for Verdi, and he himself described the opera as “unlike any other.” With Macbeth, one can see that Verdi was truly starting to define his own operatic style.

Soon after the triumphant premiere of Macbeth at the Teatro della Pergola of Florence on March 14, 1847, Verdi dedicated its vocal score to his father-in-law, Antonio Barezzi:

“Here now is this Macbeth, which I love in preference to my other operas,
and thus deem more worthy of being presented to you.
The heart offers it; may the heart receive it.”

Verdi's affection for his first opera based on Shakespeare can further be seen by one of his own letters that stated:

“Bear in mind that there are three roles in this opera, and three is all there can be: Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, and the chorus of witches. The witches dominate the drama; everything derives from them. [...] In both their singing and their acting, they must be brutal and coarse from the beginning up to the moment in Act III where they are confronted with Macbeth. From this point on, they are sublime and prophetic.”

Verdi would not adapt another Shakespearean play until 1887 with Otello and then Falstaff, his final two operas. Nonetheless, Shakespeare remained a major source of inspiration. In fact, Verdi regularly worked on sketches for an opera based on King Lear, but felt that he never met a singer up to the task of portraying the diminished king. Verdi also briefly contemplated adaptations of The Tempest, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet.

It is fascinating to think that despite living centuries apart, each man, Verdi and Shakespeare, made significant contributions to their respective art forms in comparable ways. Just as Shakespeare revolutionized the English play through his brilliant manipulation of existing theatrical conventions, Verdi forever changed Italian opera by infusing old musical formulas with real and specific characters and drama.