Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Shakespeare: Macbeth

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Composer: Opera

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

You heard Giuseppe Verdi's operatic take on Shakespeare's Scottish play last Sunday. Well, Birnam Wood does indeed come to Dunsinane a second time this Sunday as you listen to the original stagework. Spoken word presentations have always been part of my broad-spectrum concept of lyric-theater programming.

I have broadcast recordings of many of William Shakespeare's plays. Often these were on early stereo Decca/Argo LPs. These studio recordings, made between 1957 and 1964, were part of Decca's series of the complete recorded works of Shakespeare, issued in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of his birth. It was an audio project of historic significance equal to Decca's recorded series of Wagner's Ring cycle of operas made during the same period with Georg Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and a singing cast of some of the greatest operatic voices of the mid-twentieth century. Decca's Shakespeare project engaged distinguished director George Rylands and the Marlowe Dramatic Society of Cambridge University, plus other "professional players," who included some of the finest Shakespeareans that Britain possessed at that time. Many of them remain famous names even now in the twenty-first century. In 2016 the entire Decca Shakespeare series--all thirty seven plays, the sonnets and the narrative poems--was reissued on one hundred compact discs to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the Bard's death.

In the chronology of Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth probably dates from 1606. It's the shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies. Even the versification of the play is terse, compacted, and constrained. The delivery of so many of the lines is rapid-fire to the point of throwaway. This quality of the verse contributes to the overall mood of the play, rendering it so dark and spooky. Macbeth is the jinxed play in the Shakespeare canon. The old theatrical superstition has it that to avoid misfortune its official name must never be uttered among the players. The bloody doings of the story of the "Scottish play" suit so well the dark and dismal month of November. I last presented this same recording of Macbeth almost exactly five years ago this month.