Dancing and fighting. On the production’s staff are listed both a choreographer (Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson) and an action director (Ran Arthur Brown). The presence of a significant dance element integral to the opera (not imposed upon it, as in several recent Met productions) called my mind back to the ’50s once again, when the Met had its own resident ballet, through which a number of dancers soon to gain NYCB prominence passed. Zachary Solov was the usual choreographer and Alicia Markova (a Balanchine discovery, back in his Diaghilev days) its prima ballerina. But from time to time, our opera companies could also also draw on the resources of the NYCB. At the Met we had, for instance, Arthur Mitchell and Melissa Hayden (one of my favorites) for the Dance of the Furies in Orfeo, and for the lead soloist in the Polovtsian Dances of Prince Igor the NYCO was able to trot out Edward Villella. Now everyone—choreographers and dancers in great number—are jobbed in at the Met. This isn’t necessarily for the worse in some cases, but in Proske’s Macbeth the action director’s choices have superseded the choreographer’s. Brown has imported (from Brooklyn) a group of Georgian folk dancers, whose highly athletic, warlike style is marked by swordplay, and just as she decided that the witches must be ever with us, so she has determined, perhaps after having been “stunned” by the leaping and clashing of these dancers, that the opera’s actions must be bracketed by battle. This is again not what Verdi and his librettists specified. According to them, in the opening scene the battle is over at rise; the music depicts a violent storm, during which the witches enter amid thunder and lightning. For Proske and Brown, on the other hand, the Georgians put on a circus act, full of vaultings and landings and sparks flying off real weapons. They’re good, no question, and great fun to watch. But they don’t so much set the scene for the witches, and then for Macbeth and Banquo, as give them a hard act to follow. (For the the supposed closing “bracket,” see below.) Three solo Georgians pop up in the Banquet Scene, too, cavorting flashily for us atop the long table to the brief and incongruously trivial music dragged in for the purpose, and inserting a foreign element that breaks the tension of the scene. These aren’t thoughtful uses of dance where supportive of the drama, to say nothing of pantomime (for Duncan’s arrival, for the Apparition Scene), whose lost crafts do not come to the rescue. They’re just showbiz pizzazz, whose injections are administered by a doctor who sees illness in a perfectly healthy patient.

Death and triumph. This is the most damaging, and puzzling, of Proske’s interventions. The opera’s last scenes show the intersecting arcs of the ursupant royals. Lady M., so adamantine through the events of the first three acts, sinks to what we might call a death of unacknowledged guilt—as Julian Budden pointed out, she has repressed all traces of regret or shame lest they restrain the drive of her ambition—an ambition, I’d add, that she can satisfy only through her husband’s actions. So her shame and awareness of her guilt emerge only in her sleep, and finally pull her down to an otherwise inexplicable death. Macbeth himself, though, beset by horrid fantasies that alternately accuse him and lead him on, and driven ahead against his premonitions by his wife, at last comes to a full realization of his moral downfall. We could call “Pietà, rispetto, amore” a Recognition Scene—Macbeth sees the series of perverse chivalric acts he has committed to win and maintain his Lady’s love for what they really were, and the effects they’ve really had. Then, released by his consort’s death, he rises valiantly, even nobly, to confront his fate. As the Shakespeare scholar G. Wilson Knight put it, he “ascends to tragedy.”