verdi opera based on a shakespearean character

Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901) had his first crack at a Shakespeare story with the tenth of his twenty-eight operas, Macbeth (1847), in the melodramatic, blood-and-thunder style typical of Verdi’s early works. This is why operas based upon or inspired by Shakespeare plays virtually never use his actual text. It would be, to misquote the Bard himself, like gilding the lily.

The problem with Shakespeare is that the music is already in the words, and there is virtually nothing a composer could add to make it more effective. You might think that would make Shakespeare a fertile source, but the reality has not worked out that way. Still, composers have an obvious advantage if they start with a really good text, and it would seem logical to turn to the best playwrights. Because the fact is that many operas succeed in spite of their librettos, not because of them, and many a popular opera is actually a musical silk purse made out of a veritable sow’s ear of a libretto.

That’s the upside the downside is that audiences now know exactly what is being sung. Now, instead of having to study a woefully inadequate synopsis before the performance, audiences know exactly what is being sung. Opera in America was revolutionized in the 1980s, when opera companies started projecting translations of the text over the stage.

Verdi opera based on a shakespearean character