Deutsche Oper Berlin, season 2024/2025
“MACBETH”
Opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave and Andrea Maffei, based on a tragedy by William Shakespeare
Macbeth ROMAN BURDENKO
Banquo MARKO MIMICA
Lady Macbeth FELICIA MOORE
Chambermaid of Lady Macbeth NINA SOLODOVNIKOVA
Macduff ATTILIO GLASER
Malcolm THOMAS CILLUFFO
Macbeth’s servant/A Messenger DEAN MURPHY
A doctor/An assassin GERARD FARRERAS
Senior with/call girl/Lady Macduff DANA MARIE ESCH
Deer man PIERRE EMÖ
Chor & Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin
Conductor Enrique Mazzola
Chorus master Jeremy Bines
Director Marie-Ève Signeyrole
Stage design Fabien Teigné
Costume design Yashi
Light design Sascha Zauner
Video Artis Dzerve
Berlin, 23rd November 2024
William Shakespeare was one of Giuseppe Verdi’s favourite poets and Macbeth became the first out of three great operas based on a play by the English bard. Premiered in Florence in 1847, Verdi revised it for a production at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris in 1865 by essentially adding Lady Macbeth’s famous aria “La luce langue” in act 2 and the inevitable ballet music in act 3. He also dropped Macbeth’s final aria to replace it by the triumphal chorus Vittoria! There was a celebrated production of Verdi’s gloom-and-doom opera without a love story at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in the 1980s with Renato Bruson, Mara Zampieri and Giuseppe Sinopoli conducting, which led to a recording by Deutsche Grammophon. I still saw it around 2000, followed by a more modern one in 2011 that was running for few years only. 
On 23rd November 2024, the curtain rose to a new production by the French director Marie-Ève Signeyrole. She announced the action would take place today: Scotland becomes independent of the UK under the new king Duncan who nationalizes the oilfields in the Northern Sea, leading to an economic war between Scotland and Norway. The witches are lobbyists of a secret but powerful investment company that can make money only by privatized oilfieds. They want to dethrone the king to install Macbeth as a president they can manipulate… Unfortunately, there is not much left of that approach in the production but its text projected on a big screen where videos by Artis Dzerve are shown or close-ups of a live camera on stage. All that is distracting rather than helpful to understand symbols such as the head of a stag as part of Fabien Teigné’s stage design and the so-called deer man performed by Pierre Emö who wears the mask of a stag or hart. Does he refer to the Christian saint Hubert of Liège or is the stag a symbol of fertility or death? He already appears during the prelude along with Macbeth and Banquo who are wielding their swords on the battlefield in traditional kilts 
costume design by Yashi. Lady Macbeth disposes of baby clothes in her opening scene Ambizioso spirto, obviously after an abortion. Later she gets pregnant again by artificial insemination with Macbeth’s sperm to lose the baby again. Banquo is killed after a birthday party of children who die from poisoned cake, only Banquo’s son survives to re-appear with the stag’s mask. One idea after the other, a hotchpotch of symbols mulitplied by different media: stage, live camera, videos etc. All that seems to oppose rather than illustrate the music. Verdi made a point of the witches who are a main character along with Macbeth and the Lady. Signeyrole reduces them to a black-and-white uniformed mass of female programmers behind laptops, supervised by a senior witch played by Dana Marie Esch who appears in two video clips opening the two parts of the opera night before the music sets in. She praises the new era of AI as if she were an artificial intelligence herself. Signeyrole’s intention to bring the plot up-to-date ends up in a superficial, nearly ridiculous attempt to modernize it at any price. Too bad that her staging affects the musical 
performance as well. Italian and French opera specialist Enrique Mazzola starts to conduct the Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin in a loud, slow and little dynamic manner, which does not get better so that the performance takes nearly four hours, the more so as he plays the complete score of 1865, including the Parisian ballet music in act 3 and Macbeth’s aria Mal per me che m’affidai from 1847 in act 4. Chorus master Jeremy Bines did sterling work: the Chor der Deutschen Oper Berlin sings magnificently. There are big voices for the two leads:Roman Burdenko as Macbeth gives a vocal performance of amazing power, opulence and dramatic intensity, his baritone sounds warm and at times crystalline. Felicia Moore as Lady Macbeth follows suit. Her sumptuous, warm-timbered dramatic soprano climbs up to an effortlessly floating top at the end of Una macchia. Banquo is handsomely sung by Marko Mimica. Attilio Glaser is a moving Macduff: he sings O figli miei with refinement, despite live broadcast on big screen. Along with Thomas Cilluffo in strong form as Malcolm and the chorus, he makes a musical high light out of the concluding La patria tradita. To my mind, opera does function in a different way to film or theatre. I wonder why the director of the Deutsche Oper does not have the final say in what Marie-Ève Signeyrole was doing: lousing up Verdi’s masterpiece!Photos by Eike Walkenhorst