Macbeth at The Metropolitan Opera

 I hope that many of you saw the Met Opera broadcast of Verdi's 1847 opera (revised in 1865), Macbeth, from Shakespeare's violent drama about a sociopath murderer king and his even more evil wife. Lady Macbeth was ever-so-Melania as portrayed by the statuesque Lise Davidsen, and baritone Quinn Kelsey gave a chilling portrait of an assassin torn between cowardice and power-lust. Opera multiplies all emotions, so when Lady Macbeth urges her husband on to murder the old king, a guest in their own home, we see the depth of the lust for power. Later, we see the price, as madness and guilt crush them.

 

Luisa Proske's production was the young director's first outing at the Met, and it provided a rotating set of battlefields, castle interiors, court halls, and other dark wastelands.

The real Macbeth ruled briefly in the 11th century, but this production costumes all in Elizabethan finery and military armor. By displacing time, the director is able to fold in the witch-crazes that roiled over Scotland and England, and she turns the three weird sisters of Shakespeare into a huge coven-chorus of screeching witches, who are seen vampirizing dying soldiers on the battlefield. They slither around the set in most scenes and whether they are a projection of the inherent evil of Macbeth and his wife, or are meant to be supernatural agents and figments of madness -- the audience can take it literally or not as they wish.

 

"Patria oppressa! il dolce nome

No, di madre aver non puoi,

Or che tutta a figli tuoi

Sei conversa in un avel."

 

In the last act, we see a chorus of war survivors, orphans, widows, the wounded, the oppressed, and as they are costumed as the generic poor of Europe, their cries make us instantly think of Ukraine. Was this intentional, or coincidental? No one looked especially Scottish in this scene, and Verdi, swept up the politics of his time, had good cause to make this scene about everyone, everywhere. Conductor Nezet-Saguin opined that this is Verdi's greatest chorus, and it was truly sublime.

 

Further suggestions of the witch-craze come in when the furious crowd decides to add burning at the stake to Macbeth's on-stage death.

 

So many new opera productions commit violence against the story through anachronisms. Here, the liberties all worked, and this was a day to remember at the Met. Bravi!

From The Dream Book

 Converting all my poems that came directly from dreams in prose-poems, with words and passages added as needed. My dreams are no common dreams, as this example shows. Who dreams of being a mountain range?

 I DREAMT I WAS THE APENNINES

I dreamt I was the Apennines, a thousand miles of me from Liguria to Reggio, on to my toe-hold across the water in Sicily. I was so large that a cloud-front was but a single breath into my caverned lungs. My sleep withholds the fury of volcanoes, the wrath of avalanche. I hoard one tiny glacier to ice my summer fever.

Then Zeus came back in his dark thundercloud — welcome after so many centuries of slumber — to tell me his temple had been restored in Athens, and that a sacrificial fire now burned anew, to the despair of the bearded Orthodox. The old Gods are worshiped once more!

He brought me a great earthquake. Ah, I wanted it to go on forever. All the way to Rome, they will be feeling my fervor. Let Paris burn, and Lisbon shudder! Like the old days: down, Babylon — Atlantis, sink! Rise, seas, even above Poseidon’s head!

Look at them running, the little ants!

Tyrants and breakers of oaths, flee from your shabby brickwork assemblies!

Now that I am awakened, I summon the poets, musicians, painters, and madmen. Come to the Abruzzi and its sheltering peaks, where the secret police will never find you. Come to my untamed forests beneath, where the Italian wolf still suckles Romulus, and where the brown bear alone abides. Forte e gentile, mountains of bandits, hideout of excommunicated patriots, refuge of Partisans disguised as shepherds.

I dreamt I was the Apennines, and how, one day, I would walk to Rome with boulders as my sandals, mendicant to bring the stones of Chthonic temples back, to rebuild the halls of dark serpentine ophiolite, to rest upon the stones of the Nazarene. No bread, no blood, for his followers — lava and ash instead!

These things take time. A volcano would help to move my plans along.

Meantime I will tread on landslide, mudslide and flood. Sink holes will be my footprints, but I will come. Mountains are more patient than clouds, more full of purpose than the churning sea. Tremble, Rome, before my bells of stone!

 

Bad Angel

 by Brett Rutherford

I would most likely be among
the angels who rebelled.

While others were hurled
from the cliff-edge of Paradise,
I, sick of the place, 
would leap willingly.

Nine days we'd fall.
Then, from my own
individual Hell,
I’d plague the Devil.

Clueless

 by Brett Rutherford

I neither hip nor hop,
I neither tik nor tok.
My hand has never turned the key
to make an auto start.
The things I wish had never been
make quite a list, you see:
the gas-bomb car foremost of all,

the things I call inedible —
okra and cottage cheese,
mushroom and avocados.
Strip malls and six-lane
highways make me yearn
for a sudden apocalypse.

Ears covered, I uninvent
the electric guitar
(there, I have said it!)

Each day fresh horrors
present themselves,

some incomprehensible.

Vape stores one side of me,
tattoo parlors the other,
a shop-sign offering
to thread my eyebrows,

or make my visage
botox paralytic.

Born in another
century, I have no clue.

I still have no idea

what a Kardashian is.

 

The Solitary White Moth

 by Brett Rutherford

The white moth, solitary, the meadow’s
lyric poet, has neither master nor peer.
His wingbeats define, defend domains
as the quest for the lover, invisible,
a smidgin of a thing dun-brown,
expectantly athwart a trembling branch,
the thought of whose existence sustains him.

His quest will be epic in advance of the frost.
Together they might meet tragically
if at all: Romeo, too late, at Juliet’s grave,
or Isolde, too late, expiring upon
his grounded, dead, pale pinions.

On every lawn I pass, on each
well-tended patch of native plants,
even the most denuded place presents
its single, white, solitary moth.
For the first time ever, one lands
upon my open palm, lingers
just long enough to hail me:
Brother!

The Morning After Rosh Hashanah

 by Brett Rutherford

Did anything happen?
Two days of waiting,
of doing nothing,
contemplative rest.

No “creating” allowed
so as not to compete
with the solemn anniversary
of, well, the creation of everything.

Christian New Years
is nothing next to this --
some random day
observing the seeming orbit
of a planet around its sun.

They gather in crowds.
A ball drops. Then, drunk,
they all fall down.
What a bunch of schmegegge!

Now, Rosh Hashanah
is something else, no less
than the anniversary
of the universe itself.

Chaos, clouds,
the formless void,
the parting of waters,
the making of suns,
dust clotted into planets,

all of it, as counted out
on earth-days, sun years,
galactic time, gravity
and space curvature
all taken into account,

this is the birthday
of birthdays, the Big Bang’s
candle blowout. Go for it!

Did anything happen?
Two nights of candlelight
and some uneasy sleep
(like a greedy young boy
on the eve of gift-giving).

The sun is up.

Time to turn on the news.

When the clock of the cosmos
tipped up to midnight
and down to dawn,
was there even a bump,
a rattle, a shake in the treetops?

Did tyrants tumble off
their gilded thrones? Did
evil-doers apologize
and make amends to the poor?
Did anyone intending
to decapitate anyone
think better of it
and put the sword aside?

Did missiles sputter out
and fail to drop? Did guns
forget where their bullets were?

Alas, the news
seems just as bad as ever.

Yet as I walk this morning
it seems a softer sun,
an air less dense
with the burning of forests,

birds calling one another
with shana tova greetings,
a sense from them at least
that things, if not great,
will not be as bad as they might.

At the top of the year,
something there is
that is not schmegegge.

The Piano Uprising

by Brett Rutherford

A Dream, from the Dark Years of Poland


1

Troops at the border; all weapons are confiscated.
Advisors in place, an abundance of secret
police. The informers are always willing.
The Church, pretending everything, doing nothing,
locked in the stasis of state against god,
the people’s servitude a foregone conclusion.
The men are drafted into the army.
The miners and workers uneasily obey
the order to stay at their critical jobs.
The women wait in endless queues,
their shawls and kerchiefs aligned
like segments of an endless tapeworm
kept at the edge of hunger.
The meager stores can barely feed them.
The cattle and chickens and eggs go East,
get eaten by the well-fed army,
leaving a handful of dwarfish cabbages,
the ubiquitous potato, the accusing spaces
of emptiness on the collective’s shelves.
Women work in the steaming kitchens,
coaxing soup from skeletons,
bread from rye, a bottomless pot
of cabbage ends and sausages. Somehow,
everyone eats.

They put aside an extra helping
for the buxom and blonde granddaughters.
At night, or in slices of stolen afternoons,
youthful and agile-fingered,
girls master the dancing of eighty-eight steps,
play on thousands of legal pianos —
the old Mazurkas, the Waltzes, of Chopin.
No one has thought to outlaw the instruments.

As Nadia practices in Gdansk,
Lidia plays grandmother’s spinet in Krakow.
A school piano in Warsaw
hums by itself in resonance.
No one knows they play to one another,
that the Polish girls have long ago ceased needing
to guide imprinted keys in their etudes.
No one suspects they are secret weapons,
strings drawn taut,
brass frames like crossbows.

Determined and sinister, shining and black
as coffins in a showroom,
they bide their time rehearsing
the Revolutionary Etude for the people,
the Marche Funèbre for the martyrs,
roulades of Paderewski held in reserve.

The police think nothing of the white-haired tuner —
he goes from home to home, adjusts,
re-strings and tempers,
adds unusual parts to the pedals.

An abandoned piano factory springs to life,
new models in crates on the loading docks,
the shipping manifests immaculate.
It seems that everyone is getting a piano.
The Minister of Finance shrugs. The economy
opens an eye and goes back to sleep.

The Minister of Culture smiles:
music without words is a harmless
expression of the people’s art.

2
Nadia practices in Gdansk.
In Krakow her grandmother’s
piano is waiting.
In Warsaw the instrument
she studied on
hides in a cellar
(the piano underground).

Then from a million radios
a great C resounds,
eight octaves thick,
a Resurrexit of brass and wood,
a rhapsody of unity,
harmonics to the nth degree.

Casters unlock, wheel guards
are thrust aside.
Grands roll through empty apartments,
tiptoe impossibly
down curving stairs.

Spinets swerve out
from alleyways.

Baby grands dart
from tree to tree,
play cat and mouse
with the traffic police.

The sergeant leafs through
reports of abandoned furniture,
scratches his head in puzzlement.

It is, of course, the piano rebellion.

The pianos are coming:
wheeled piano tanks
death black, coffin-shaped,
polished and retrofit
with well-tuned armaments.

They all play Chopin in unison —
the Military Polonaise.
Their lids drum open and shut like jaws,
rolling on tractor tires, juggernauts
rumbling bass notes, the r-r-r-rum-ta-tum
of Polonaise audacity.

The battle begins:
Pianos crash from the rooftops.
A phalanx of interlocked pianos
take the field, sound boards locked
in invincible wedges.
Flying pianos buzz over the airport,
their black and white teeth
rat-tat-tat arpeggios,
down with ease the clumsy MIG fighters.

They drive the generals into the sea.
The troops desert,
lock arms and dance
into the countryside.
File clerks toss documents from windows,
topple file cabinets,
pour chicken soup on bureaucrats,
sing r-r-r-rum-ta-tumin in the hallways.
Cornered in public squares
the secret police deny everything,
their crimes, their ranks, their names.

In Warsaw the sweating minister
of secret police and internal security
shouts on his hot wire to Moscow:
“Not royalists, stupid, royali, pianos!
it’s an uprising of legions of pianos.
Tell them — tell them the pianos are coming!”

The connection is broken by a piano wire.
Instruments re-gather in the countryside.
Flying Becksteins invade Soviet airspace,
lead missiles cat-and-mouse
back to the planes that launched them.
(Whoever thought a hammerklavier
could turn right angles at Mach 2?)

The Polonaise goes on.
Others conduct guerrilla war
to the shifting beat of Mazurkas.
Lithe and supple assassins
hunt down the Russian advisors
(those white enamel spinets,
fast on their wheels,
eager to leap from a third floor window
to squash a fleeing foreigner!)

Steinways roll through Warsaw,
Polish flag on their sides,
Bösendorfers to the rescue at Lidice,
Baldwins at the border to reinforce them,
Becksteins fight shoulder-to-shoulder
with lowly domestic models.

Antique pianos in square cases
come apart at the joints but fight;
half dozen harpsichords at the windows,
watch wistfully.
Their quills fly out like arrows.
A tiny virginal bursts its frame
to whip a visiting professor of Marxism,
draws blood with snapping steel wires.

The highway is clogged with black Volgas.
Battalions of Russians fall back in retreat.
And this is but the start of it:

As Anna practices in Leningrad,
Irina plays grandmother’s spinet in Moscow.
A school piano in Odessa
hums by itself in resonance.