It is the opera event of the year and radiates far beyond Milan and Italy: The season opening of La Scala in Milan, the most famous opera house in the world, took place, as always, to a great roll of drums, including the President. This time, the attention is likely to be even greater than usual. After all, due to the corona, it was the first opening in two years and also the premiere for the new artistic director Dominique Meyer, formerly the Vienna State Opera. The members of the social program always include the angry demonstrators, whose outrage over so much glamor and celebratory mood was absorbed by hundreds of people this year by police officers standing around quite relaxed. But also in the hall a few shy boos penetrated the presidential box through the thick curtain of applause. Which was not surprising, on the contrary. Politicians and opera directors should worry when the boos fail to appear.
Boos for Netrebko: At La Scala, even the biggest have to earn their applause first
This is usually not the case for female singers, but in this respect too, the clocks tick differently in Milan. The world’s greatest soprano Anna Netrebko also had to take in between buffs to applause. There were no artistic reasons for this, it seemed to be more about the fact that even the greatest had to earn their applause at La Scala. It was the same for Maria Callas, but what took her years Anna Netrebko managed in one evening. Elsewhere, the announcement that Netrebko – four weeks ago she had to cancel a premiere in Vienna because of a shoulder operation – would have sung Lady Macbeth in the opera of the same name by Giuseppe Verdi, triggered storms of joy. At La Scala, you met her in a reserved and even hypothermic manner, the cloakroom staff rang out lively conversations in the hall during her arias, and it took until after the break for curiosity and finally enthusiasm to spread.
Powerful images: the high-gloss production by director Davide Livermore.
(Photo: Brescia e Amisano, Teatro alla Scala)
Perhaps the gripping stage drama itself helped, in which, close to the Shakespearian original, the family battles for the royal throne are fought as bloodthirsty as hardly any of the numerous blood-soaked net series can manage. Director Davide Livermore put the drama in an aesthetically conciliatory high-gloss production that more than did the play justice. With spatially spread-out video projections, broken and multiplied in stage-high mirror walls, he brought together a smelly, brownish castle interior with shiny metallic cityscapes, where today’s intrigues and royal murders take place: behind glamorous facades, bundled in city views and perfectly illuminated in the morning light, often mirrored in the middle, so that half the world is upside down. That was eye-catching and diversely entertaining, but perhaps a bit too harmless in view of the father and child murders, which went over the stage, so to speak, in chord. Even if it’s theater, one flinches briefly when a ten-year-old toddler sinks the sword in his father’s neck.
Sometimes a little embarrassing: the choir choreographies.
(Photo: Brescia e Amisano, Teatro alla Scala)
In between and completely unimpressed by the decimation of the marital status: Anna Netrebko as cool calculating Lady Macbeth, who has to comfort her husband (brilliant: Luca Salsi) when the ghosts of the past catch up with him. In general, ghosts and witches, fortune tellers and demons determine the scene. Verdi wrote partly lively Rossini-like banter, partly martial ballet music, and sometimes Richard Wagner sounds over the top. Daniel Ezralow has inspired the house’s dance troupe to create extensive choreographies. But the choreographies were a bit embarrassing as always. Maternal choristers aren’t contortionists, no matter how much they throw arms and bend rumps.
Macbeth, who in the end rises from general of the Scottish army to king, can hardly believe his luck at first – the witches had prophesied it – and in the end he cannot cope with it. One is almost relieved when Macbeth is slain by the opponent Macduff in front of a great, slow-motion tamed explosion backdrop. Army and people pay homage to the new king, it always happens very quickly, and so everyone is actually happy. Only one is not: Lady Macbeth, who did so much to make her husband king, or rather, to make her queen.
Netrebko is the ideal cast, and in the end the boos become “Bravas”
Immediately after the witches’ prophecy about the fabulous rise of her husband, she has nothing else in mind than to make this prophecy a reality. She doesn’t quite trust the heavenly and hellish powers; she takes the prediction as a very good idea that needs to be implemented now. If her husband is to become king, the one who is currently ruling must disappear, i.e. be killed. This, of course, is the husband’s job. What is he a soldier for? In the Kavatine, an elegiac Andantino, Anna Netrebko showed one thing above all else: that behind Lady Macbeth’s calculation there is a deeply emotionally rooted thirst for power that she cannot control herself, no matter how cool she appears. It is more than just ambition, it is the lust for power that reveals itself to the outside world as unrestrained cruelty and megalomania.
Netrebko is an ideal cast for this. She hits the right expression more precisely than others, lives musically and also as an actor in the role, masters lightning-like color changes that are always based on the role and often go hand in hand with a change of perspective in the character’s thinking. Even in the most extreme positions it seemed incredibly effortless and natural. This is what distinguishes Netrebko, and in the end the Milanese audience also appreciated it. Boo became “Brava” and the initially reserved splashing applause grew into waves of enthusiasm.
At the end there was a standing ovation at La Scala in Milan.
(Photo: Brescia e Amisano © Teatro alla)
The other singers were also celebrated, and rightly so. Luca Salsi as Macbeth shone from the start as a powerful, yet intelligently flexible baritone, Francesco Meli as Macduff had a great hero tenor appearance after the break, even if he likes to grind the target notes a bit. Ildar Abdrazakov as a banco was also convincing, although his bass doesn’t go all the way down. But that would all be nothing, or still not enough, if chief conductor Riccardo Chailly did not keep everything together. And how elegant and perfect the Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala sounded this time, and also the choir, which always has important roles in Verdi, by no means just unison stadium chants like in the prisoner’s choir from “Nabucco”. In “Macbeth” it is a kind of small prison choir of the oppressed Scots. Director Livermore has also lowered a large grille for this. You can rely on this director. And the Netrebko? Defeated on the stage, undefeated in the hearts of opera lovers.