Verdi admired Shakespeare above any other dramatist, calling him the "master of the human heart."  There were two translations of Shakespeare's plays always in the bookcase by his bed, and in a famous letter of 1865 he said, "He is a favorite poet of mine, whom I have had in my hands from earliest youth, and whom I read and reread constantly."

However, Shakespeare's plays were not generally performed in Italy and it is most probable that Verdi had never seen any of the plays before tackling Macbeth.  We know that he saw Macbeth performed in London in June, 1847, after the opera's premiere.  The opera was first composed earlier that year, during a period Verdi called his "years in the galley," when he produced 16 operas in 11 years.  He revised Macbeth in 1865 for a production in Paris.

For Verdi there were several steps in the conversion of a work of literature to an opera. A synopsis was prepared, an outline of the libretto, which frequently Verdi did for himself.  It was the job of the librettist to turn the synopsis into poetry suitable to being set to music.  On average, it takes two or three times as long to sing something as to speak it, and this was one reason that stories were compressed, with subplots and characters omitted. Other reasons were the economics and conventions of the opera business.  Why pay two singers when their functions in the drama could be combined in one character?  Furthermore, there were certain conventional primary and secondary roles in opera, apportioned among the different types of voices, which did not necessarily dovetail with the cast of characters of the original drama.  Another convention, that there be a chorus, affected Verdi's decision to have so many witches.

But perhaps most significantly, opera, in comparison to a story or a play, achieves its purpose not in the logical elaboration of a theme or the contemplation of the human condition, but in the intensification of the human emotions and the drama through music. In the pruning of the original work, elements which lend themselves more to the musical drama might be chosen over those not so well suited, resulting in a different emphasis.

Verdi was most meticulous about being faithful to Shakespeare in some ways.  For example, the following letter concerned the costumes for the play: "Do me the favor of informing Perrone [the costumer] that the period of Macbeth is well after that of Ossian and the Roman Empire.  Macbeth assassinated Duncan in 1040, and he was then killed in 1057...Don't fail to give this information to Perrone immediately, as I believe him to be mistaken about the period."

In the case of Macbeth, however, it might be pointless to criticize departures of the opera from the play, since there was a long stage tradition, stemming from the time of Shakespeare himself, of taking any opportunity for sensation, adding songs and dances, elevating the witches to the status of main characters, and, of course, stage machinery to enable them to fly.  The character of Hecate, who appears in Act III, scene V and Act IV, scene I, of the play seems to have been written by Thomas Middleton, or at any rate not by Shakespeare.  So almost from the very beginning there was no standard, authentic version to which any other could be compared.  In fact, in spite of the freedom with which Verdi sometimes handled the text of the play, it is often conceded that he captured the spirit of the drama and conveyed its essence as Shakespeare would largely have approved.

Next month: The Libretto