Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Verdi: Macbeth

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Amongst his many early operas, Macbeth (1847, revised 1865) is acknowledged as Giuseppe Verdi's first true masterpiece. It inaugurates the composer's glorious middle period, with La Traviata, Rigoletto, and Il Trovatore soon to follow. Verdi was attuned to all the fantastic and horrific elements in Shakespeare's Scottish play, especially the witches, who have an even more important role in the opera than in the original Elizabethan stagework. Those nineteenth century "gothick" elements make this opera ideal for broadcast at Halloweentide.

Macbeth is well represented in the Verdi discography. We have several now historic recordings of it in our station's classical music record library. The oldest one, released through RCA Victor in 1959 in early stereo sound, features the cast, chorus, and orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, Erich Leinstorf conducting. I last broadcast that vintage recording way back on Sunday, November 15, 1987. You also got to hear Swiss American composer Ernest Bloch's operatic take on Macbeth (1910), as presented on Sunday, October 28, 2001, and Shakespeare's original spoken word tragedy on Sunday, November 4, 2008.