Shakespeare and opera have an uneasy relationship. Opera offers some resources that promise the lover of Shakespeare further, or at least different, illumination. The presence of orchestra and chorus can supply a heft and depth in crowd scenes that is more difficult to achieve through words spoken on the stage. In the hands of a first-rate composer, music can pierce into the inner life of a character in a way that reveals new, or at least complementary, depths of meaning. Music also offers possibilities of exchange and reciprocity, in tightly scored ensembles, that are more difficulty to achieve in plain words. For all of these reasons, Giuseppe Verdi’s three great Shakespeare operas, Macbeth (1847), Otello (1887), and Falstaff (1893) are works that fully equal Shakespeare in power of insight, although they attain slightly different insights and through different routes. (Some would rank Macbeth lower, but though its music is certainly more conventional than that of the two great late operas, it is a splendid work in its own right. In some stretches, for example Lady Macbeth’s Sleepwalking scene, it markedly enlarges the emotional possibilities of the original.)

Read more at City Desk 400