Thinking Out Loud

Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” Verdi wrote to his librettist, is “one of the greatest creations of mankind!”

“If we can’t make something great with it, let’s try at least to make something out of the ordinary.”

But they did make something great. At the Venice premiere in 1847, Verdi had to take 38 curtain calls.

Nevertheless, for the Paris premiere, which took place 18 years later, a musically more mature Verdi decided to revise the work to reflect his then-current style. It is this version that Opera Pacific is presenting this week at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“It’s really wrong to do the first version,” stage director Colin Graham said by phone during a recent rehearsal break. “Verdi made so many refinements in the second version, so many improvements.”

For Paris, among other changes, the composer beefed up the role of Lady Macbeth, added a ballet and added or completely recast several arias. Opera Pacific is dropping the ballet but using the discarded death aria.

“The only reason the ballet is there at all is because Paris insisted on it,” Graham said. “It comes in as a very absurd element in the plot. There’s absolutely no excuse for having it.”

But there is a good reason for restoring Macbeth’s aria.

“If you don’t, there’s no resolution for Macbeth’s character. It’s very anticlimactic otherwise. It’s a very beautiful aria anyway, and short. A lot of people do it these days.”

Curiously, for all the changes, the Paris premiere was at best a mixed success. Verdi was crushed.

“I thought I had not done too badly, but it appears I was wrong,” he said.

One reason the opera did not please was its lack of a traditional love story.

“ ‘Macbeth’ may not have a romance in it,” Graham said, “but it has a . . . lot of sex. Getting the sexual or sensuous relations between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth right is very important.”

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Indeed, for Graham, whose distinguished career includes acclaim for his staging of the works of Benjamin Britten, the problem is showing the development of these characters.

“In the theater, it’s perfectly clear. Macbeth starts out as the strong one, a highly successful general who is adverse to doing evil. Gradually he becomes infected with achieving power and once he achieves it, stops at nothing.

“But when Lady Macbeth sees his sanity beginning to crack, she can’t sustain her part. So you start looking for chinks in her armor and the process of their psychological development. There’s absolutely no reason for [her] sleepwalking scene if we haven’t seen cracks in her armor.

“When you’re doing the opera, it’s really important to think these things through. If you ignore them, it becomes turgid melodrama.”

Although the music of an opera determines its success, Graham’s “basic precept is that the composer wouldn’t have written what he wrote if the words didn’t inspire him to do so. Mozart said that. Britten said that. Bellini said that. You’ve got to invest the music with the meaning of the words.”

That opens a can of worms. Graham feels that many young singers today have serious defects in their training.

Many are well-prepared to sing in foreign languages, for instance, but are less prepared to sing in English. (“Macbeth” will be performed in Italian, with English supertitles.)

“I don’t mean you have to do opera in the vernacular, although it would be lovely if they did,” Graham said. “But until you know how to sing in your own language and use your own language, who could possibly ever sing [an opera] in a foreign language?”

Similarly, many young singers may lack sufficient dramatic preparation.

“They’re not prepared as far as the study of the role is concerned,” Graham said. “They really are not. Dozens of people have never thought about the text. They do [Tchaikovsky’s] ‘Eugene Onegin’ without having read the Pushkin novel. It’s just wrong. They must realize the job should be a thought process. They’re not just up there to make a great sound. Life would be much easier all around if they realized that.”

With limited rehearsal time, much of the burden has to fall on the singers’ backs.

“People have to do a great deal on their own,” Graham said, “going back to the source material to see how the composer dealt with it.”

His Opera Pacific singers, he feels, have risen to the challenge.

“They’re a wonderful thinking lot, every single one of them. They’re interested in Shakespeare, in seeing where this line in Verdi came from and how four lines [in Shakespeare] are condensed into this one line [in Verdi] and what do the other three mean? It’s been extremely rewarding.”

For all his criticisms, Graham has no truck with the notion that today’s singers are any less than their illustrious predecessors.

“Every age is the Golden Age,” he said. “Every generation produces its stars and its wonderful people, and if you’ve grown up with those stars, you consider that as the Golden Age, not these newcomers barging their way into my dream and my life.

“It’s all relative. I’ve been through at least three Golden Ages myself.”

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Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.

SHOW TIMES

Opera Pacific will present Verdi’s “Macbeth,” with stage direction by Colin Graham, tonight, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $29 to $107. (714) 556-2787.