Marriage Story

In debuting director Louisa Proske’s season-opening new production of Verdi’s Macbeth, the principal couple is not just power-mad; their violent quest for the throne has a deeply erotic charge. Under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star as the Shakespearean couple with a lust for control—and for lust itself. By Nicholas Rinehart

“Unsex me here.” Lady Macbeth’s notorious command is easy enough to follow. To be ambitious, one must be cruel; to be cruel, one must be a man. But in Shakespeare’s tragedy as in Verdi’s opera, things are never quite so simple. Macbeth’s forceful ascent to the throne, through the murder of King Duncan (and then Banquo, and then Macduff’s entire family), is not the outcome of mere masculine ambition—as the Lady might suggest in her early soliloquy—but rather a peculiar form of marital bliss.

For director Louisa Proske, who makes her company debut with the Met’s new production of Macbeth, the violence perpetrated by the power-hungry pair is a kind of “perverse lovemaking.” “The murder becomes their project, their secret, their crime,” Proske says. “You get a sense they’ve talked about it under the sheets. It’s almost a point of arousal for them.” At the Met, this unholy union is portrayed by preeminent Verdi baritone Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen, the world’s reigning dramatic soprano, who last shared the stage as the title diva and Baron Scarpia in a heated run of Puccini’s Tosca during the 2024–25 season.

Director Louisa Proske presents a model of Jon Bausor’s set.

The visions of murderous matrimony Proske lays out would feel familiar to Giuseppe Verdi, who, in adapting Shakespeare’s play, expanded the role of Lady Macbeth in crucial ways. In the opera, for example, it is only as a result of her prodding that Macbeth resolves to slay Banquo, his comrade whose descendants are prophesied by the Witches to reign over Scotland. When the opera was revived in Paris in 1865—nearly two decades after its 1847 world premiere in Florence—Verdi inserted a chilling aria for Lady Macbeth in the subsequent scene, “La luce langue,” which has no equivalent in Shakespeare’s text.

Yet the composer hardly played fast and loose with his source material. On the contrary, Verdi was a devoted Shakespearean. Macbeth was his first Shakespeare adaptation, followed decades later by Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893)—his final opera—based largely on The Merry Wives of Windsor. He also toyed with the idea of adapting King Lear; a completed libretto was found among the papers at his estate following his death, as well as a versified draft of La Tempesta and a French prose work called Rowena based on the Bard’s late Celtic romance Cymbeline.

Beyond underscoring the influence of Lady Macbeth on her sometimes-feckless husband, Verdi also literally enlarged the role of the Witches so that each of Shakespeare’s trio of “weird sisters” is represented by a small chorus of at least six singers. In the new Met staging, 38 singers—as well as a dozen dancers—make up the coven, which lingers on and around the stage for the duration of the opera. Multiplying like maggots on a corpse, the Witches feed on the corruption and greed of the Macbeths, creating a world whose moral decay is mirrored by the deterioration of the built environment. “There is a sense that they have invaded, they’re peeping in through the ceiling, through the cracks in the walls,” Proske explains.

A scene from Macbeth

The Witches’ centrality is part and parcel of Verdi’s operatic design. “The roles in this opera are three and no more than three,” the composer famously wrote to French impresario and publisher Leon Escudier in 1865. “Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, and the chorus of the Witches.” In this way, he effectively consolidates the action of Shakespeare’s tragedy by focusing on its primary dramatic movers. He was evidently pleased with the results, having contributed more directly to the libretto than with any previous work. “Here now is this Macbeth,” Verdi wrote upon sending the score to its dedicatee, Antonio Barezzi, “which is dearer to me than all my other operas.”

Like Verdi, Proske, too, had an inspiring early encounter with Shakespeare. Born in Berlin, she moved with her family to the United States for a year and a half at the age of 12. “One of the first pieces I was assigned in school was Julius Caesar,” she recalls. “I started reading these words, which were very obscure to me, and they had a sort of incantatory power. I started looking up every single word, and that’s kind of how I learned English.” Since then, Proske—who co-founded the innovative New York–based company Heartbeat Opera in 2013—has built an impressive Shakespearean resume, having studied the author at Cambridge University and directed productions of Cymbeline, As You Like It, and Macbeth, as well as Verdi’s Falstaff.

But for Proske, the Bard isn’t merely a poet; he’s also a keen observer of the fragility of political institutions. “Shakespeare is one of the preeminent thinkers about social disintegration,” she remarks. “I think he was one of the artists who really articulated the terror of living in an era that is deeply divisive, with the sense of the world having gone mad.” Reflecting this focus on political violence run amok, the set of Macbeth, designed by Jon Bausor, is replete with rubble, bombed-out apertures, walls splitting apart, and towering funeral pyres. Costumes designed by Montana Levi Blanco combine medieval and Elizabethan silhouettes with modern materials—like latex, in the case of the Witches—to depict a world out of joint.

A scene from Macbeth

That the atmosphere of Macbeth might be described as harsh, hollow, or ugly is just as Verdi would like it. Indeed, in this work the composer sought to reject the tyranny of “those flowing, conventional melodies” typical of bel canto style, “which can be found everywhere and which are all alike.” He counseled Marianna Barbieri-Nini, the soprano who premiered the role of Lady Macbeth, that the sleepwalking scene should be “acted and declaimed” but not sung. That aria, “Una macchia è qui tuttora,” includes no virtuosic displays of rapid-fire arpeggios, scales, and ornaments. Instead, Verdi gives us halting, short phrases in the vocal line; a steady, repetitive orchestral accompaniment; and a fragmented style of expression, as if her capacity to sing is going out like the flickering candle she carries.

Meanwhile, the scheming couple themselves remain deeply anxious about being snuffed out. Macbeth is indeed a work preoccupied with questions of reproduction, offspring, and lineage. (Shakespeare wrote the play in homage to James I of England, who was believed to be a descendant of Banquo.) The greatest existential threat to Macbeth’s ascendancy is not another general, but Banquo’s son Fleance, who outmaneuvers the assassins targeting him and his father.

Freddie De Tommaso as Macduff

“I have given suck,” Lady asserts in Act I, Scene 7 of the play, “and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.” For some readers of Macbeth, this remark serves as evidence that the couple has previously had a child. From this perspective, Lady Macbeth’s cruelty finds its origin not in naked ambition alone, but also in mourning for a future that never came to be.

For Davidsen, who also sees the Lady as more than an emasculating villain, this notion adds an exciting new dimension to the character. “People think Lady is power-hungry and ruthless. But, of course, she is so much more than that,” reflects the soprano, who continues her partnership with Met Music Director Yannick Nezet- Seguin following their standout collaborations in Tosca, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. “I look forward to seeing how we portray not just the power, but the vulnerability, the love, the other side of her.”

Ryan Speedo Green as Banquo

Bringing this perspective to bear on one of the greatest characters in all of literature and opera is no small feat, and Kelsey sees his co-star as more than up to the task. “She’s willing to gamble a little bit with characterization and how far she’s willing to take it,” Kelsey says of Davidsen. “An artist like that just gives you so much dramatically.” (Kelsey and Davidsen are joined, in a bit of luxury casting, by tenor Freddie De Tommaso as Macduff and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green as Banquo.)

Early critics of Verdi’s opera took issue with its lack of romance, and one reviewer went so far as to suggest that the composer didn’t know his Shakespeare. “Oh, in this they are very wrong,” Verdi protested in an 1865 letter, “No, by God, no.” As the Met’s new production of Macbeth reveals, Verdi had a keen sense of this deeply Shakespearean truth: Foul is fair in love and war.

Nicholas T Rinehart is the Met’s Director of Education.