Opera in four acts
Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave and Andrea Maffei
based on a tragedy by William Shakespeare

About the work
Macbeth was the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be set to music by Verdi, in 1847. Despite his decades of interest in the English playwright, he did not adapt another work of Shakespeare’s until late in his career. Verdi’s operatic rendition of this tale of murky prophecies and bloody struggles for the throne of Scotland came in the hugely productive decade that Verdi himself came to refer to as his »galley slave years«. Still striving for critical recognition, he turned out a string of operas that expanded on the bel canto genre. Macbeth was part of an evolution in Italian opera, a development that was even more evident in the modified version released in 1865. In typical fashion Verdi roughened up the storyline and injected some emotional twists and turns, intensifying the drama in the process and creating a tense momentum that sends the protagonists hurtling towards their respective gruesome ends.

About the production
Following on from her triumphs with Baby Doll and Negar in the Tischlerei of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and her recent productions at the Bayerische Staatsoper, the Semperoper Dresden, the MusikTheater an der Wien and La Monnaie in Brüssel, Marie-Ève Signeyrole returns to the venue on Bismarckstrasse for her first staging of a new production on the main stage. Verdi’s hard-hitting Shakespearean tragedy provides the perfect material for the arresting visuals that are a hallmark of the French director, whose aesthetic vision can hold its own with any modern cinematic blockbuster.