Verdi was 33 years old when he wrote Macbeth, and he knew exactly what he was doing — which is more than can be said for a lot of conductors and singers who have approached it since.
The opera occupies a peculiar position in the canon. It arrives between Ernani and Luisa Miller in that long middle stretch of Verdi’s career that critics used to dismiss as the “galley years,” churning out crowd-pleasers for a hungry Italian public. But Macbeth is no crowd-pleaser. It is deliberately, defiantly strange — harmonically restless, texturally austere in ways that still catch you off guard, built around a baritone and a soprano whose relationship is more psychological chess match than conventional operatic romance. There is no tenor lead. Verdi made that choice deliberately, turning down the safer dramatic option when he realized Alessandro Lanari’s Florence company had Felice Varesi — the man who would later create Rigoletto — and not much else worth boasting about. Necessity sharpened into vision.
Florence mattered. The city prided itself on its intellectual seriousness, its Renaissance pedigree, its willingness to have absorbed Weber and Meyerbeer before most Italian stages had. Shakespeare’s Macbeth had barely been seen in Italy. Verdi seized on that. He wanted to shock, and he prepared obsessively — writing detailed letters to his librettist Piave about exactly what kind of vocal color he needed from his Lady Macbeth, famously insisting she should sound ugly, raw, almost spoken in the sleepwalking scene. Not exquisite. True.
The 1865 revision, which is what virtually everyone performs today, deepened and complicated the original considerably. The added aria “La luce langue,” Lady Macbeth‘s Act II soliloquy, is so much more harmonically sophisticated than anything in the 1847 score that you can hear Verdi’s intervening two decades — Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata, Un ballo in maschera, Don Carlos — in its shadows. The revision shares its musical skeleton with the original but wears different flesh in places. That is not always comfortable.
This Tutto Verdi release from the Parma festival gives us Leo Nucci as Macbeth, and Nucci in this role is — complicated. The voice is still there, or mostly there, the baritone grain still recognizable to anyone who heard him in his prime decades. He understands the text with the bone-deep intimacy of a native Italian who has lived inside this music for years. His “Pietà, rispetto, amore” in Act IV lands with genuine weight. But the line can turn wiry under pressure, the top notes occasionally grabbed rather than placed, and there is a kind of effortfulness in the more demanding passages that a younger Nucci would have made sound inevitable. He is better in the quieter, more inward moments — the dagger scene, the confrontation with Banquo’s ghost — where interpretive intelligence can compensate for what the instrument no longer supplies without cost.
Sylvie Valayre’s Lady Macbeth is a more interesting proposition. She does not have a conventionally beautiful voice, which is arguably exactly right. The tone is pointed, occasionally steely, with a chest register she deploys freely and a tendency to drive the voice forward into the hall rather than bloom outward. In the sleepwalking scene she does something genuinely unsettling — the dynamic control is real, the sense of a mind replaying its crimes in fragments is palpable. “Una macchia è qui tuttora” is not just an impressive piece of singing; it is a dramatic event. She earns it.
Enrico Iori’s Banquo is solid, no more. The bass voice is steady and properly dark, but Banquo is not a role that rewards adequate — it demands genuine authority, the kind of physical presence in sound that makes his murder and ghostly return feel cosmically notable rather than merely scenic. Iori is serviceable. The role needs more.
The rendition as a whole sits somewhere between theatrically alive and vocally provisional. The Parma festival context gives it energy — this is opera performed for an audience that knows and cares, and you can feel that in the ensemble’s commitment. The witches’ choruses have genuine menace. The conducting holds the thing together without particularly illuminating it.
Where does it stand against the competition? Honestly, it does not displace the recordings that serious Verdians reach for first. Claudio Abbado’s classic Macbeth with Piero Cappuccilli and Shirley Verrett from 1976 remains the reference point — Verrett’s Lady in particular is one of the great operatic performances on record, simultaneously savage and aristocratic. Riccardo Muti’s version has its fierce partisans. Even the old Carlo Maria Giulini recording has more interpretive personality than most of what’s been recorded since.
The Tutto Verdi project is admirable in its ambitions — twenty-six operas plus the Requiem, the whole sweep of a creative life documented for a composer’s bicentenary, with those ten-minute introductions in English giving newcomers a handhold. As a document of Verdi performance practice in the early twenty-first century, it has its value. As a recording you would choose over all others for Macbeth specifically, it does not quite rise to that occasion.
Nucci is worth hearing. Valayre’s sleepwalking scene is worth hearing. But Macbeth is one of the operas where Verdi was working at the absolute edge of what he knew and what he could imagine — and a performance that captures that edge, that makes you feel the composer’s audacity and ambition and the genuine strangeness of the thing he made, should leave you slightly undone. This one doesn’t. Not quite.
