Wildly Beautiful

Witches dressed as village ladies of the 1950s
as New York Metropolitan Opera begins its
HD broadcast season with Verdi's Macbeth,
described by MARIA NOCKIN

Macbeth was Verdi's first Shakespearean work and his tenth opera. He wrote it for the Teatro della Pergola in Florence where it was premiered on 14 March 1847. It preceded his most famous trio of successes: Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata, and it was one of the operas he wrote during his most productive period, what he called his 'galley years'. They were sixteen years during which he composed twenty-two operas...