{"id":1678,"date":"2026-10-06T07:58:24","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T14:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=1678"},"modified":"2026-10-06T08:17:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T15:17:12","slug":"proskes-macbeth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/proskes-macbeth\/","title":{"rendered":"Proske’s Macbeth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Let me start by saying that the music was terrific. A number of times last night, as I sat watching Louisa Proske’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth<\/em> (now running at the Metropolitan Opera<\/a>), I was struck by the beauty of the sounds reaching my ears. It was almost distracting, the way the voices melded so harmoniously together, or the orchestra so skillfully played around those voices. I do not love Verdi the way I love, say, Handel, so I did not expect this reaction. Verdi, on his own, does not usually send me wild with delight. So I have to assume that something about the production foregrounded the opera’s musical strengths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previously, when I’ve gone to a Louisa Proske opera (which I’ve been doing for a decade or more), I’ve been totally swallowed up by the enactment of character onstage. This happened through plot, through music, through dialogue, and above all through physical action. Whether she was engaging with Cos\u00ec fan tutte<\/em>, Carmen<\/em>, or Don Giovanni<\/em>, Proske managed through her dramatic interpretations to bring something new to each opera, something that was nonetheless true to its old, original self. I wouldn’t say the music was ever secondary in these earlier productions, but it was one of many factors that made the opera work, blending indiscernibly with whatever else we were taking in from the stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the stage, in these cases, was always quite small. Whether it was at Heartbeat Opera (the company she founded with Ethan Heard), or another small New York opera company to which she was temporarily on loan, a Proske production was always playing to an audience of about a hundred or at most two hundred people. I often sat as close as I could get to the singer-actors, which meant I was about ten or fifteen feet away. These young, as-yet-to-be-discovered singers could do just about anything\u2014with their voices, but also with their faces and their bodies. And because we were sitting so close to them, we in the audience could distinguish every subtle detail of the performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Metropolitan Opera is the opposite experience in many ways. It’s not just that the stage and the auditorium are huge, so that any gesture needs to be huge to project. It’s also that the habits and needs of such a large-scale opera company mean that casting has to be planned years in advance. The determining factor is thus not the director’s judgment about character suitability, but the star power of the singers. Some of these singers\u2014I’m thinking of people like Peter Mattei, Luca Pisaroni, Nina Stemme\u2014happen to be excellent actors as well, but at the Met that is considered an extra, not a necessity. (This is not, I should add, a problem with all the world’s major opera houses. At the Komische Oper in Berlin\u2014where Proske performed as a child singer and then trained as a young assistant\u2014I’ve watched a number of fine productions that featured actor-singers with great physical and emotive as well as musical abilities. But the Met has yet to catch up in this regard.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So part of the reason I was perhaps excessively focused on the music last night was that other elements of the production left something to be desired. All the principal singers\u2014Quinn Kelsey as Macbeth, Lisa Davidsen as Lady Macbeth, Ryan Speedo Green as Banquo, and Freddie De Tommasso as Macduff\u2014had gorgeous voices (though Davidsen’s was only truly effective in the upper reaches of her soprano range: she tended to be near-inaudible when she had to reach down to the lower notes). But none of these principals, and virtually none of the other named singers, had any gestural or dance ability to speak of. They moved slowly and grandly into position, from which they delivered their stunning arias, and then they strode off again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was not to say that the production was ever static. Proske had countered the relative immobility of her singers by a flurry of action on the part of other people and things. The Met’s grand revolve came into frequent play, moving both clockwise and counterclockwise\u2014though not in any symbolic way, as it did in last season’s marvelous production of Innocence<\/em>, but just because that enabled the singers to move from one post-apocalyptic space to another without any wasted motion. At various times, tall shadows and drifting smoke pervaded the stony scenery, as if to emphasize that we were nearing End Times. And throughout the production, a series of dancers\u2014from the three Cossack-like figures who danced on the banquet table, to the warriors who fought with splendid leaps and turns, to the ever-present witches (there were way more than three of them) who spun and pranced and hobbled their way through almost every scene\u2014enlivened the stage for us. In a talk she delivered two days after the opera’s opening, Proske said that she eagerly demanded dancers because it would give her extra weeks of rehearsal time. But that seems to me a less-than-serious explanation. She needed<\/em> those dancers to provide the visual, physically elemental quality that is usually a keynote of her opera productions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, the exploration of character\u2014which has always been another keynote for her\u2014could not be accomplished by any of this surrounding frenzy of activity. As I watched and listened to this Macbeth<\/em>, I began to ask myself, as I never do in the staged version of the Shakespeare play, how we were supposed to feel about the Macbeths themselves. Are they tyrannical monsters whose deaths we should welcome, as the happy-ending celebrations in the opera announced? Or are they occasionally sympathetic mortal creatures trapped by their own flaws (or by the machinations of the gods, which may come to the same thing)? What, precisely, is the point of this plot?  “Do not murder other people to improve your own status” seems a bit flat. “Do not base your decisions on the words of fortune-tellers, witches, or other spiritual mediums,” while good advice, hardly seems strong enough to support a whole tragedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I watch a good stage production of this play, I become so involved in the intense relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and their differing paths to deterioration, that I never stop to ask myself why I should care. Here there was no such relationship. The two bodies, Davidsen’s and Kelsey’s, barely manifested any chemistry between them. Their only tender moment came after the first murder, when she washed his bloody hands one at a time with a wet rag, exactly as a mother might wash her child’s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was definitely something going on in this production about mothers, babies, and childbirth. This theme\u2014which Proske highlighted in a central dance sequence involving a pregnant witch\u2014clearly harks back to the language of the play itself. Macduff only can kill Macbeth because he is “not of woman born,” having been “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb. Lady Macbeth famously urges Macbeth to commit the first murder by arguing that even as she suckled a child, she would have “pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this.” Proske studied and directed the Shakespeare play at Cambridge University (where one of the favored assignments has always been Wilson Knight’s essay “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”), so she has undoubtedly been thinking about such issues for a long time. But amidst the swirl of activity onstage at the Met, these moments of revelatory insight into the drama itself had no coherence, no emotional strength. If you wanted emotional satisfaction from this Macbeth<\/em>, your only option was to fall back on Verdi’s music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let me start by saying that the music was terrific. A number of times last night, as I sat watching Louisa Proske’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth (now running at the Metropolitan Opera), I was struck by the beauty of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[950,437,948,946,379,481,13,387,947,945,949,944,943],"class_list":["post-1678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-freddie-de-tommaso","tag-heartbeat-opera","tag-komische-oper-berlin","tag-lisa-davidsen","tag-louisa-proske","tag-luca-pisaroni","tag-metropolitan-opera","tag-nina-stemme","tag-peter-mattei","tag-quinn-kelsey","tag-ryan-speedo-green","tag-shakespeares-macbeth","tag-verdis-macbeth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1678"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1690,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678\/revisions\/1690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}