| Shakespeare�s Macbeth is a play about hallucinations, and there is a certain ghostly quality about this edition of the opera as well: the text, though stated with triumphant clarity, is surrounded by a penumbra of variants: first thoughts, second thoughts, restored erasures and cross-outs, smudges unsmudged where possible, alternative versions proposed by censors, stage directors, conductors, scholars, and fools. Indeed to read the critical notes is to follow with amazing detail Verdi�s creative process, as he charges along�carelessly notating his ideas, writing on the wrong stave�then reconsiders. But the reconsiderations themselves tend to be imperfectly written, so the text of the opera, especially in certain details of phrasing and slurring and accentuation, remains to some extent liquid. Even a score edited with Prof. Lawton�s scrupulous intelligence remains a score rather than the score: if Lady Macbeth wished to sing a strange chromatic run during her first-act duet (at lo direbbe l�invitto che fu, chi mai? , in the 1847 version), an ossia printed in the notes (Critical Commentary, p. 253) invites her to do so. Prof. Lawton notes (Full score, p. xli) that in I masnadieri, Verdi didn�t even bother to write out one of the cadenzas, but merely noted the extremes of range, so that Jenny Lind could provide anything she wanted. Opera scores are always hypertexts and hypotexts, incomplete and overcomplete, demanding the performer�s whim, and subject to the performer�s whim even against the composer�s wishes; but here we have, it seems, every possibility that Verdi considered, from the solidly determinate to the conjectural and rejected. Various Macbeths peer out from beneath the score�s main image, like the sortileges of kings that recede from Banquo, who holds a mirror, because we always stare at our own image whenever we stare at a score./ Source |
