St Petersburg, Mariinsky II

Macbeth


opera in four acts
(сoncert performance)

Viva Verdi! Marking two centuries of Giuseppe Verdi

Performers

Conductor: Mikhail Sinkevich
Macbeth: Edem Umerov
Banco: Pavel Shmulevich
Lady Macbeth: Irina Gordei
Macduff: Dmitry Golovnin
Age category 6+

Credits

Music by Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, after the tragedy by William Shakespeare

Mariinsky Chorus and Orchestra
Principal Chorus Master: Andrei Petrenko
Musical Preparation: Irina Soboleva


VIVA VERDI!
Like any great talent, Verdi is an embodiment of his nationality and his age. He is a flower of his native land. He is the voice of modern Italy <…> an Italy that has awoken to consciousness. An Italy troubled by political storms, an Italy that is bold and passionate to the point of frenzy.
Alexander Serov

The words in the epigraph above are all the more poignant for having been spoken by an outstanding Russian musician who had previously often appeared in print criticising Verdi’s operas. In their battle for Russian music, many cultural figures in Russia protested against the preponderance of Italian music at Russian opera houses. Once the “teething troubles” of its infancy had been overcome and when the operas of Glinka, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky stood shoulder to shoulder with the very best classical works, the music of the great Italian was discovered in all its artistic beauty and meaningfulness for all humanity.
Verdi’s compatriots understood this before anyone else. The twenty-six-year-old composer’s very first opera Oberto (1839) proved a success and was staged in Milan, Turin, Genoa and Naples... And, just three years later, the premiere of Nabucco at the Teatro alla Scala resulted in endless ovations from the ecstatic audience; by the end of 1842 the opera had been performed sixty-five times! The famous chorus of Hebrew slaves from Act III Và, pensiero, sull’ali dorate (“Fly, thought, on wings of gold”) was taken by the Italians as a symbol of the struggle to free themselves from an oppressive foreign power. It should come as no surprise that, sixty years later, this chorus was performed impromptu by the several-thousand-strong crowd that accompanied Verdi on his final journey! In February 1859 the Teatro Apollo in Rome hosted the premiere of Un ballo in maschera; the audience gave the composer a standing ovation with cries of “Viva Verdi!” This was to become the slogan of the Italian revolution – for contemporaries, the naively concealed meaning was obvious: VERDI – Vittorio Emmanuele, Re D’Italia (Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy). It doesn’t come as a surprise that when declaring victory, Cavour (a minister of the king who unified Italy) was unable to find the right words and in some surge of inspiration started to sing Manrico’s heroic cabaletta from Il trovatore! Verdi’s music is inseparable from the age of “Risorgimento” – the name given to a time of intense upheaval in spiritual life in Italy, a time of national and political renaissance.
The two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, a composer admired across the globe, provides us with a wonderful opportunity to remember the love that is felt for the composer’s music in Russia. And also that, with a few rare exceptions, more than twenty of his operas have been staged at Russian theatres over the years, both in St Petersburg and Moscow and in the provinces. The Mariinsky Theatre is continuing the tradition of the St Petersburg Board of Imperial Theatres, which commissioned Verdi to compose one of his most famous operas – La forza del destino – one hundred and fifty years ago. Alongside incredibly popular masterpieces (such as Aida, Don Carlo, Macbeth, La traviata, Rigoletto, Un ballo in maschera, Otello and Falstaff...), the theatre’s playbill also lists the comparatively rarely staged Nabucco and Attila. Gala concerts of Verdi’s music introduce audiences to choruses and arias from the composer’s operas. There have been concert and stage versions of the epic Requiem in memory of Alessandro Manzoni, an Italian author whom Verdi considered to be a fine example of patriotic valour. The music of Verdi, one of Italy’s most outstanding composers, makes up some of classical music’s most timeless treasures.
Iosif Raiskin


Any use or copying of site materials, design elements or layout is forbidden without the permission of the rightholder.
user_nameExit

The highlighting of performances by age represents recommendations.

This highlighting is being used in accordance with Federal Law N436-FZ dated 29 December 2010 (edition dated 1 May 2019) "On the protection of children from information that may be harmful to their health"