Learning from Macbeth about Kings
It was a happy conjunction that on the eve of Reign of Christ Sunday, Sheila and I made our first visit to the San Francisco Opera, to hear Verdi’s “Macbeth.”
First Shakespeare, and then Verdi with his powerful translation of central ideas in the seminal play, and finally this highly intelligent production of the opera, gave me bitter food for thought; bitter, but almost greedily consumed by me, as I continue to struggle with how to be a Christian living in an empire that is showing a frightening reactivity to its dim consciousness of its own increasing weakness.
I will concentrate on a few of the great number of arresting musical and production-based elements that made this “Macbeth” a strong critique of the human lust for power, and the psychological self-deception we practice to cover our own awareness of this otherwise naked desire.
First, the opera opened with Lady Macbeth singing from atop a cube set in the middle of an great space defined by a high curved wall, and a ceiling with a huge, ragged, gaping hole, as from a meteor piercing the vault of heaven. The cube is an abstraction of a castle, a narcissistic personality, the sad prison we create when we give ourselves over to the drive for power. Lady Macbeth moves restlessly over the upper plane of the cube, packing, a caged predator, tethered to the surface by a black rope.
After the murder of the King, Duncan, people and nobility gather in shock bewilderment, and pray to God for a righting of the chaos imposed by the regicide. The voice of Lady Macbeth soars over the chorus, singing the same pleas for divine deliverance from the very deed she had incited her husband to commit.
Similarly, at one point the seemingly mono-focus Lady Macbeth bends piteously over, in prayer, and sings, to a gentle, beatific melody, “The dead have lost their lust for power; give them a requiem and then eternity.” We have been presented in Lady Macbeth a person who has been led into temptation, given over to evil, who yet is aware of her entrapment in the distorting search for dominating power, and who craves release from it.
Finally, after the deaths of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and the triumphal entry of the boy king, Malcolm, who is welcomed with a stirring chorus, the opera’s director provides us with yet one more critique of our cultural addiction to dominating and being dominated – the soldiers of the hailed boy-king, the savior who they suppose will set things right, goose step their way across the stage. The substitution of one monarch for another is not release, but yet more bondage and deep frustration of the submerged dream of liberty.
I found this production of Verdi’s “Macbeth” helpful as I prepared for my annual discomfort on the Reign of Christ Sunday. Rather than attempt to redefine monarchy in terms of the reality of Christ, would it not be better to turn to another model for human life entirely, one that comes from Christ and is free of the besetting cultural addiction. In this way, the Church may move to become the remnant for “after empire.” We may look to Advent as a manifestation of Jesus’ way, that is not a king’s way, nor a way that can fruitfully be compared to kingship. Rather, it is a way we learn by being fully awake and attentive to his voice.
