The two versions of Verdi’s Macbeth treat these developments quite differently. In 1847, Macduff wounds Macbeth mortally onstage, Macbeth struggles to a semiprone position to voice the short “Mal per me,” forces out his final realization, “Vile crown, vile crown, ’twas only for thee!”, and expires. Malcolm and Macduff sing that oppressed Scotland breathes once more; the gathering of victorious warriors hails Malcom as their new king; and with five simple, emphatic bars from the orchestra, the opera comes to an end. In 1865, all this is radically altered. Macduff and Macbeth disappear from view while fighting, and when Malcolm, rushing onto the scene, asks “Where is Macbeth? Where the usurper?”, Macduff, re-entering, indicates offstage and sings “Over there, where I struck him down.” And now, the full mixed chorus of warriors, women, and bards joins in the joyful, extended final laud which, at least for me, contains one of the supreme moments in all Verdi with the entrance, legato e dolce, at “Salgan mie grazie a te,” of the female chorus, which then soars above the whole ensemble to the end like a great benediction.

The reason this population is present to sing the laud lies in the big change Verdi made for 1865, with the replacement of the act’s opening chorus with the bleakly powerful “Patria oppressa,” which brings the condition of the common people, hitherto unnoticed in the opera, suddenly to the fore. That was a theme always dear to Verdi, and between 1847 and 1865 political events had taken a direction that, I would suggest, gave wind to his sail in its direction, and gives the last act an entirely new feel. Proske has chosen to bring Macbeth’s onstage death scene into this reconditioned Act 4, and as I’ve indicated, I second that motion. It entails an awkwardness, though: what to do with the body during the several minutes of that wonderful final chorus? Just leave it there? Order a couple of soldiers to cart it away? There’s nothing indicated. Proske makes the worst possible choice. She props him up, face pressed against a wall in a sort of cubicle, and then, with a crank of the turntable that has kept the sets in rotation (Jon Bauser, designer), dumps him out to be taunted by the folk, like the boyar Krushchev in the Kromy scene of Boris Gudonov, and for the final coup, straps him up above the crowd, still alive, with a lurid lighting effect that strongly suggests burning at the stake, Krushchev to Joan of Arc, as the opera come to its close. The message conveyed is that Malcolm’s reign will see a new usurpation, this one by The People, and it will be just as vicious as Macbeth’s. That does reverse the creators’ values, written into the music as Verdi finally conceived it.

As with the singing, the newbies, save perhaps for a few of the unusually curious among them, will have no reason to doubt that they are receiving the moral drawn by Verdi and his team 150 years ago, or to question the workings of the auteurial mentality.