William Shakesperare, Francesco M. Piave, Edoardo Sanguineti, Andrea Liberovici
Andrea Liberovici
Andrea Liberovici
Macbeth MASSIMO VENTURIELLO
Lady Macbeth OTTAVIA FUSCO
Voix off JUDITH MALINA
Witch, Banquo, Seyton, Lennox PAOLA BACCHETTI
Filippo Garrone
Milena Canonero
Pippo Ghisoli
Sandro Sussi
Spoleto Festival 98
teatrodelsuono
Alessandra Vinotto Sukkar
by Filippo Garrone
The scene develops essentially from the elaboration of a central idea: Macbeth is a machine, and he cannot make other than follow its destiny; he is pushed by a world, that is a great machine, where Macbeth has got into, manoeuvred by the Lady who levels him every doubt, dimming every idea or desire of "Good". A series of apparitions will torture Macbeth's conscience: they are the ghosts that will appear in scene, sometimes like people of the story (some are killed), sometimes like symbols, metaphors; they are hands which want to touch him, or resounding swords which fall heaviest from the high, in order to remember the disappearance of someone murdered violently...these and other presences, evocations that will not be able to make anything, if not to accelerate the inevitable end of the tragedy.
The collaboration with Liberovici was born by chance some years ago. We had understood that we were covering parallel roads and therefore we hoped of being able to realize one show together in the future. The idea of Macbeth born and grows in this way, and we both work using rather sophisticated and technological means. Liberovici "collects" and transforms sounds, he elaborates again pieces of music and voice, which approach little by little, and they arrive to the final composition, the "remix". I cover parallels roads, collect images, emotions, impossible feelings, I proceed to try again, I destroy, I reconstruct, I whisk all, and I paint: here is a collage. I don't make sketches. The pencils are white and black, they produce clean lines: they nail you. The colour guides me in the dark, towards new distances, towards emotions and unusual shapes. Finally the result, that is the image I define and touch up, and I leave the rest of the travel to the magical lights of the theatrical box.
by Andrea Liberovici
There are many reasons about this new Macbeth. I just list some of them, which are more personal, and which make us, Sanguineti and me, to continue for the third time (after "Rap " and "Sonetto, a Shakespeare’s disguise") this lucky collaboration. My search begins from the supposition that the Theatre is, because of its intimate nature, music. I have experienced this conviction by producing two shows substantially without "history", entrusting me to the power and effectiveness of Sanguineti's verse, following more the "reasons" of the sound, than not those of the "sense". At this point of the distance I needed to apply this sort of "technique" (that includes the use of new means of musical computer science, giving space to the sound, and so on) to a great history, that is perhaps one of the more musical, of the great Bard, not for pure exercise of style, but because it seems to me the vision, more ahead exposed, of the interpretation of the text, which can bring an other contribution to the literature of a great classic.
Macbeth is: "... just a shadow, which walks, " which is caught in a scene and in a world, which: "... means nothing". He is paradoxically the only one who tries to maintain a contact with the common sense and the principles in spite of him personal destiny, which pushes him in another direction. Macbeth is also the only one (until the madness of the Lady, which is a sign of a sort of "humanity") who lives a conflict that is a doubt between what is good and what is not. For this reason, Macbeth, in our show, is the only character who doesn’t speak in music but he fights with it. Around him, in fact, the music, as magic, as fate, as continuous evocation of the poetic sound, will become dramatic counterpoint, with a tightened score among the orchestral deflagrations, the sounds of nature and of text (Macbeth is one of Shakespeare works with the highest number of sound "signals" of " concrete music ": the continues temporal, the premonitory owls, the duels of swords, the screams of children, the voices etc.), and the sprechgesang of the witches and of the Lady, (is not the Macbeth by Verdi, perhaps, the first Work in which it is used, exactly, one sort of first sprechgesang?). Macbeth will be pushed and led to the tragedy by the music, but he remains, till the end, steady to the thin wire of a speech reason. His being and not being in music, or more precisely, his being caught in a music, that is his same destiny, will determine the humanity. The two protagonists of this show are substantially two linguistic plans, which have a dialog between themselves: the word of reason (Macbeth) and the music of destiny (Lady, Witches).
by Edoardo Sanguineti
The staring point of Sonnet, the work I have prepared with Andrea Liberovici
last year, was a mix between Shakespeare, translated by me, and several sonnets
of mine. And still Shakespeare, it’s not a coincidence, presides (in conjunction
with Francesco Maria Piave, who collaborated with the libretto by Verdi) over
this Macbeth Remix, which belongs, in my opinion, to that kind of "disguise",
that I have submitted, music or not music, to Ariosto, Goethe, Dante... Also
in this case, we proceed to a translation, rather rigorous, of the archetype
tragedy, or to a series of episodes, selected in a project by Andrea, where
I have deliberately respected, with the exception of minimal additions or minimal
cuts, the choices and the pleasure to keep fragments of the original text.
It is mine, instead, the responsibility of the provocative conjunction between
that ingenious barbarian and that melodramatic adapter, and the union, lightly
monstrous, between Shakespeare and Piave. And finally Liberovici, who has got
out that musical profit that I attended, didn’t dislike at all.
It is not useless that the public know that this product of mine, in the collaboration
with Liberovici, is by now the third one, in a tightest turn of times, and that
at the beginning it was a show with the title, not arbitrary, Rap, with the
acting by Ottavia Fusco, and with a poetic of mixing and assembly in levels
of writing (literary, musical, scenic), which are traditionally considered,
wrongly, incompatible.
To increase the horizon of the languages, to point at friction and choc, to
speculate over connections of shapes and absolutely not prudent tones, are for
me ancient exercise and precise plan of poetics. The theatre, that it is exactly
"disguise" for excellence, seems to me that invoke such manipulations,
in this full of inventiveness, anarchically very moderated. And this is valid
for the word, the sound, the image, and the gesture. Of the rest, it is known,
Shakespeare teaches.
She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty deth. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
( by William Shakespeare)
Andrea Liberovici meets Pierluigi Petrobelli, director of the Istitute of Studies Verdiani in Parma.
A.L.: Dear Petrobelli, as director of the Institute of Studi Verdiani, how do you fell about the idea of another Macbeth, are you terrified?
P.P.: No, I find it very natural. Macbeth‘s themes are universal, and nobody has to be astonished if periodically the artists see this work and they think about it again. Therefore there isn’t any surprise. But it will be the artist who will be terrified in facing the topic. It is obvious that an artist of our time cannot see the topic of Macbeth, as it has been watched in the past. It is the same thing Verdi has made, when he has approached Shakespeare: he has certainly understood the fundamental topics of Shakespeare, but he has given a very personal interpretation. An example: he has completely eliminated from Shakespeare’s text the whole comic element, it disappears the scene of the porter, who strikes the doors when he wakes up after the killing of Duncan. Also Verdi didn’t start fascinated by the central problem that in my opinion is that of the power, but from the fantastic aspect, that is to say the witches, the apparitions. In this sense, it was continuing what it was succeeding in Florence in 40 years, when he wrote that work, that is the discovery of the fantastic through the grand-Opera by Meyerbeer. Therefore the starting point for Verdi is the fantastic: but he also discovers the problem of the power, the thirst of power, able to overwhelme the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Verdi’s vision maintains, compared to Shakespeare, a very different view, totally new, therefore I don’t see why an ourdays artist cannot work again on Shakespeare, taking from his writing what he perceives like similar, and elaborating with his language the thematic that he thinks fundamental.
A.L.: Without doubt this tragedy has fascinated me, but the thing that interests me more, is the fact that inside the work there is, according to the contemporary vision of music, a sort of "score" for hidden concrete music, to make it "living". In the text in fact there is a richest collection of samples of bestial "sounds", nearly every struck has got, as term of comparison, metaphor or whatever, a crow, a wolf, a thunderstorm and so on. In this direction, but above all in the direction of shakespearian language, I have thought and "mixed" again both the zones of far writings (for example I have put part of the scene of the Porter to the beginning, to indicate the stage that is the "world" as hell, and not only as castle of Macbeth) and different musical "kinds". I started composing the score, tracing and "sampling" all the text sounds and as a consequence I have manipulated and assembled them again. After this I inspired to various musical " kinds", treating them like "personages". That is to say, but a wider speech would be opened here, for example, between a piece of rock music and a piece of music written for orchestra, I have not searched for "harmonies" but conflicts. I don't love in fact the so-called World Music, that aims at approving and homogenizing all the sounds and the traditions of the world as a sort of United Colours... as American stile, but I love all the musical "kinds", without hierarchies, which, thought in new way as "personages" in dialectic comparison, contribute to trace a new idea of musical theatre.
P.P.: Yes, there are different stylistic plans. From Varèse onwards, the history of western European music has played above all in the sound. Also the theatre is a theatre of sound. Therefore I see well your production that goes well with Sanguineti’s work, an artist who has always worked on the sound of the word as ulterior development.
A.L.: He has also translated in hendecasyllables nearly all the cues of the original texts.
P.P.: The fact that Sanguineti uses hendecasyllable, it seems to me an interesting moment. It means he always feels the necessity of giving a formal structuring to these sounds, that is, I think, what you make with the music, in other words, you also organize these sounds, make a shape for them, and then also the sound is a starting point for your formal elaboration. Now I would like to make a question. In my opinion, one of the fundamental topics of the Shakespearian tragedy is the problem of the power, the fundamental topic is the thirst for power, nearly the libido of the power that moves Macbeth and moves Lady Macbeth, and all two. Do you feel this theme as a present theme or not?
A.L.: Yes and not. There could be a series of things between "the naturalistic" and the psychoanalytic, which are interesting and which I have obviously studied for a long time, as for example the possible sublimation of a prematurely lost son. On this purpose the text gives indications even if not explicit... but this is not the way that I have chosen; in this particular version of Macbeth, in my opinion, it is interesting to follow the interaction between words and music, between Macbeth and the "witches-destiny".
P.P.: Therefore I have understood that you don’t feel it...
A.L.: In this interpretation the power is a sort of excuse, it is a pre-test and perhaps it is the hazard of this operation that it seems to me having its coherence: that is, if the witches know Macbeth’s destiny from the beginning, they are the destiny. They exist, like the air, before after and during the passage of Macbeth through the world. You know, for example, that in the air there are some sounds, which are very high or very low frequencies, that we cannot hear, but animals can perceive them. Here I have thought that the witches are the materialization of these sounds. It is clearly that the materializing of these voices cannot be obviously anthropomorphic.
P.P.: There is the materialization and the personification of these sounds that otherwise would not be heard. It seems to me an extraordinary idea. We turn back a moment to Shakespeare’s writing: the witches are not other that becoming body of the secret aspirations of Macbeth. The prophecy it is not other that an oral sonorous expression of what the character already feels; and Verdi has understood this very well, because if at the beginning the witches are a little good-natured - who sing this song "the wandering sisters go in the air and go in the waves", that is a sort of waltz -, at a certain point they assume the prophetic tones, with all the conventions of the voices of the hereafter, because these prophetic voices are the projection of Macbeth’s aspiration to the power. Then this, on Verdi's plan, goes exactly in the direction that you say, because there is not Verdi's score, that has got many indications of vocal colours like the score of "Macbeth". In this score there are in fact the many extraordinary variations of the production of the vocal sound as "explained" voice, as "dark" voice, as "open", and "closed as a lament". The score is full of things like these. Therefore your search is, in this point of view, a continuation of what there is in Verdi's score.
A.L.: Perhaps yes. Moreover, the "Macbeth" by Verdi is the first grand opera, and Massimo Mila has been the first to speak about it in a detailed way, if I don’t mistake, where there is on the acting of the singers a sort of anticipation of the sprechgesang.
P.P.: Exactly, acting in the sense of "acting", that is a singer who act, and not a singer, who does the beautiful sounds, or who expresses only the feelings, but acts; and this was absolutely an innovation. It's a matter, which I am very concerned to emphasize, because in my opinion it is very important.