MACBETH • THE MUNICH OPERA FESTIVAL

★★★★☆☆

REVIEW OF MACBETH IN MUNICH: ASMIK GRIGORIAN SAVES A TIRED REVIVAL

After three days of powerful opera experiences, Verdi’s Macbeth comes across as a somewhat odd interlude at the Munich Opera Festival. Not bad, not unremarkable – but not even close to the artistic quality that has characterised the strongest.

Part of the explanation lies in the work itself. When Verdi wrote *Macbeth* in 1847, he was in the midst of his famous ‘galley slave years’, during which operas poured out of him at a breakneck pace. Macbeth was revised in 1865, but still stands as a transitional work between the young Verdi’s explosive melodic instinct and the psychological depth that would later unfold in masterpieces such as Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata.

Much points to the future. The popular appeal and theatrical power that Verdi would later deploy so convincingly. Yet Macbeth lacks the momentum that has made the composer’s greatest operas legendary. There are passages in Macbeth where the dramatic machinery simply loses momentum.

This is precisely why Macbeth places enormous demands on a director. For if the staging fails to infuse the work with the necessary tension and movement, the music risks being left to stand alone with its structural weaknesses.

This is precisely the trap into which Martin Kušej falls.

His 2014 production, which is still being kept artificially alive at the Bayerische Staatsoper, now appears remarkably devoid of ideas.

The action unfolds against a set design by Martin Zehetgruber that almost seems to insist on being shabby. Plastic sheeting envelops the stage from floor to ceiling. The foreground is dominated by a tattered tent that is on the verge of collapsing and which apparently has room for as many people as are required. The hidden trapdoor to the cellar is, in fact, no more exciting than that. The challenge to romanticised images of Shakespeare seems more like an aesthetic dead end.

The most frustrating thing is that the production actually begins with an image of genuine power. A desolate, mythical Scottish highland covered in white skulls, as far as the eye can see. The crows turn and caw. Macbeth moves through this landscape of death, heading straight towards the audience. It is the sort of image that raises expectations.

But the visual spectacle comes to an end almost immediately.

Thereafter, the production sinks into a style so monotonous that even Verdi’s most dramatic confrontations lose their impact. The psychological tension between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is reduced to something strangely stagnant. Momentum becomes the evening’s greatest shortcoming.

The comparison with the festival’s other productions is merciless.

Whereas Tobias Kratzer’s Die Walküre had nerve and nimble angles, Kušej’s universe seems watered down. Whereas Claus Guth, in the world premiere of Brett Dean’s Of One Blood, created an intelligent scenic universe that constantly interacted with the music, here a void arises between the stage and the score. And whereas La Fura dels Baus, in their monumental Turandot, allowed space, technology and music to explode into a total theatre of almost overwhelming dimensions, Macbeth appears as a pale footnote.

The fact that the evening never quite collapses entirely is down to one person.

Asmik Grigorian.

As Lady Macbeth, she delivers a performance that alone makes the production worth seeing. With her dazzling vocal prowess, her uncompromising interpretation of the text and her total dramatic presence, she transforms the role from an operatic villain into a deeply unsettling study in the lust for power, guilt and mental breakdown.

Grigorian’s voice possesses precisely the rawness, dark intensity and unsettling beauty that Verdi himself sought for the role. She does not merely carry the scenes – she takes them over. Her sleepwalking scene becomes the undisputed highlight of the evening, an intense psychological portrait in which every phrase seems illuminated by mounting desperation. The audience rewards her with applause after virtually every one of her arias. She alone constitutes the dramatic weight of the performance.

But even Grigorian cannot, in the long run, carry a production that lacks energy and innovation.

This also raises the obvious question of why this particular production of Macbeth continues to feature in the repertoire twelve years after its premiere. The answer seems simple: because the theatre has, time and again, been able to cast the role with stars. Previously, Anna Netrebko. Now, Asmik Grigorian. When the world’s elite take to the stage, many productions can survive longer than they deserve to.

Macbeth ends up being a disappointment. Not because Verdi’s work lacks merit. Not because the singers let us down. But because the staging never strikes the right chord to lift this uneven transitional work to the standard demanded by the setting.

So we settle on four stars.

The fourth belongs entirely to Asmik Grigorian.