Ernest Bloch, the 20th century Swiss-American composer, has long been celebrated as one of the greats, but his only opera, “Macbeth,” first performed in Paris in 1910, has rarely been heard since. Blame that on timing (it was banned in its second production, in Rome in 1938, because Bloch was Jewish).
Since then, it has had a few performances, but it took Long Beach Opera and its innovative artistic and general director Andreas Mitisek to give Bloch’s lovely and provocative work its first American professional production.
The opera premiered last Saturday at the World Cruise Center in San Pedro, 103 years (give or take a few weeks) since the work opened at the Opera Comique in Paris to generally rave reviews. The World Cruise Center, usually home to cruise passengers, was reduced in size and curtained off for this production, typical of LBO.
The production was minimalist, which didn’t quite serve the production best, but the music, performed by an orchestra augmented by the Camerata Singers of Long Beach as chorus, and the principals, the striking and forceful bass-baritone Nmon Ford as Macbeth and the powerful and dramatic Suzan Hanson as his wife and co-conspirator, were a revelation.
Critics have praised this opera, including one who called it the best of any operatic interpretation, and while that may or may not be hyperbole there was, from the first bars of music from the orchestra conducted by Benjamin Makino, a delicious prospect of a dramatic gem rediscovered.
The work, 150 minutes long without an intermission in this production, was performed in the center of two ranks of seats, a very long plank table with hidden lighting making up the center of the performance space, with bloody rags and chairs at both ends. The audience had to walk on stage (it was only 10 feet or so wide), but that gave the performance an eerie familiarity. The orchestra was behind a scrim at the far end of the stage with the chorus. That suits Bloch’s opera, which, in the English translation of Edmond Fleg’s libretto (projected on both sides of the stage), is much more about the torments that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth experience as they descend the spiral of ambition and murder and much less about the external action that Shakespeare included in the original play.
The action begins with the three witches (Ariel Pisturino, Danielle Marcelle Bond and Nandani Sinha) writhing and curling around the long table, their faces eerily lit and their bodies wrapped in rags. Macbeth and Banquo (Doug Jones, who was also Duncan, Malcolm, a servant and a murderer) approach them to hear their prediction: Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor and then king. From there to the death of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, it is all fate.
The three witches are frightening, Banquo even more so as the ghost who haunts Macbeth. Robin Buck is dangerously menacing as Macduff, for no one in this production is free from a little ambition. But the opera is all about Macbeth and his lady.
They celebrate at first, as they realize that the king will be in their castle and they can kill him with impunity. Macbeth is exultant in his celebration, as is Lady Macbeth, and they end up making violent love on the table. But soon the murders go wrong. Lady Macbeth slowly descends into guilt, and Macbeth, haunted by Banquo, is torn between his certainty of invulnerability and his growing doubts.
All this is told in music that is lush and effective and remarkable in its deep expressiveness. There is a hint of Wagner and Mussorgsky, something critics have found before. It is a notable fact that this work has, for one reason or another, been so long neglected.
John Farrell is a Long Beach-based freelance writer.
