Macbeth 101: Director’s Notes
It’s very likely you’ve heard the story before: Macbeth hears a prophecy that he’ll be king, and then he and Lady Macbeth make sure of it. For the first time since 1999, and for the first time ever in The Ellie, get ready to see Verdi’s Macbeth. Enjoy this first look into one of the creative minds behind Macbeth, our stage director, Dan Wallace Miller. Called “imaginative and extremely effective” by The Seattle Times, Miller is ready to bring you the Macbeth you know told in a way you may have yet to experience: through the voice of opera.
Greed, ambition, the will to power, and the violence born of these ubiquitous human traits have no greater embodiment in art than Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Acting on an unnatural seed of prophecy planted by a group of witches to Macbeth, Lady Macbeth impels him to commit murder and take the throne of Scotland. The story, taken by Shakespeare from a dubious historic chronicle and used to strengthen the political dominance of the Tudor dynasty, was similarly adapted by Verdi in the throes of his involvement with the Italian Risorgimento and his support for the bid of eventual King of unified Italy, Victor Emmanuel II. It is a narrative that spans millennia and affixes itself to the root of political ambition.
Macbeth’s eponymous couple represent two differing ascents to the summit of power that arise from the witches’ prophecy. Macbeth—an honorable warrior and faithful officer of the king—upon hearing that he shall be Thane of Cawdor and then king of all Scotland reacts with guarded skepticism. Only when the first premonition is proved true does he let himself be tempted by the expectation of power. His journey is one of intoxication and exponential decay. Once led on by promise he lets himself sink into the merciless barbarism of entitlement. No incremental victory is enough even with the knowledge of an eventual and immutable end.
For Macbeth, power is ever expanding and all consuming; it must persist and pervade even after death.
Lady Macbeth is of sterner and more spiteful stock. She has a hatred of the constraint society places on her and the narrow cage in which she is forced to exist. Her name is a testament to this drive: it indicates only her gender and the true wielder of power to whom she is attached. Her lust for power, then, comes from a place of rebellion and Macbeth becomes her pathway to achieve it. She is Macbeth’s eternal spur, pushing him toward and engaging with him in slaughter. Verdi has her fill this role with determination all the way up to her death. This distinction from the Shakespeare (where she is made ignorant of the murders committed beyond Duncan’s) makes her guilt in the sleepwalking scene more profound. It is only when Lady Macbeth is unconscious that she can understand the true horror of what she has done. As Macbeth succumbs to growing moral rot, Lady Macbeth’s soul defies her ravenous appetite for power.
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are two sides of the same drive. But the question posed by the perennial relatability of this narrative is chilling: is yearning for power—for political and social dominance—inherent to human nature? Macbeth persists because we all have doubts and desires in our lives. The question is, how much can they be tortured and twisted until we are driven to atrocity?
—Dan Wallace Miller, Stage Director