MARCH 14

Verdi’s Macbeth: The Most Dangerous Play in the World

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On the night of March 14, 1847, the curtain rose at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence on an opera unlike anything the Italian stage had seen before. There was no tenor hero. There was no love story. There was no heroine to be rescued, no noble sacrifice, no redemptive finale in the accepted Italian operatic tradition. What there was instead was a Scottish general receiving a prophecy from three witches on a battlefield, murdering his king in the dark, and being destroyed—slowly, inexorably, magnificently—by the consequences of having listened.

The composer was Giuseppe Verdi, thirty-three years old, already one of the most celebrated figures in Italian music. The opera was his tenth. And it was, he would later write to the man who had raised him, the work he loved above all others—more than Rigoletto, more than La Traviata, more than Aida, more than any of the towering masterworks that would follow. "Here now is this Macbeth," he wrote in the dedication of the vocal score, "which I love in preference to my other operas, and thus deem more worthy of being presented to you. The heart offers it; may the heart receive it."

The heart offers it. For a man of Verdi's guarded nature, that is an extraordinary declaration. It tells us something important: that for Verdi, Macbeth was not a commission, not a calculated career move, not simply good dramatic material. It was something closer to a calling. And to understand why, we need to spend a moment with the play itself—because Macbeth is not merely the greatest tragedy Shakespeare wrote. It is, by any serious reckoning, the most occult work in the Western theatrical canon.

The Play That Cannot Be Named

Theater people, as a professional tribe, are not generally given to superstition. They work in a world of craft and technique, of blocking and lighting and vocal projection and the management of nerves. And yet there is one superstition so universally observed in theaters around the world that it has the force of iron law: you do not say the name of Shakespeare's Scottish play inside a theater. Not Macbeth. Not "the Scottish play." You say "the Scottish play," or you say "the Bard's tragedy," or you use any of half a dozen circumlocutions that theater people have developed over four centuries of determined avoidance.

If you slip—if the name passes your lips inside the building—the remedies are elaborate and immediate. You must leave the theater, turn around three times, spit, knock on the door, and ask permission to re-enter. Some traditions require you to quote a line from another Shakespeare play—Hamlet is the preferred antidote—before you can safely return. The specific protocols vary by company and country. The avoidance is universal.

Why? The honest answer is that nobody is entirely certain, and the uncertainty is itself part of the point. The most commonly offered explanation is historical: Macbeth was believed to have been cursed from its earliest performances, with a string of disasters attending its productions across the centuries—actors injured or killed during performances, theaters burned, productions plagued by inexplicable misfortune. The more interesting explanation, and the one that holds up better under examination, is textual: the witches' incantations in Macbeth are not theatrical approximations of magic. They are, or were widely believed to be, the real thing.

Shakespeare almost certainly drew on genuine grimoire material for the witches' speeches—the specific ingredients cited in their cauldron scene correspond closely to ingredients listed in actual period magical texts. Whether Shakespeare himself believed the words were operative, or whether he included them for dramatic effect with full awareness of how audiences would receive them, we cannot know. What we do know is that audiences in 1606, when the play was first performed, inhabited a world in which the distinction between theatrical representation and actual magical invocation was considerably blurrier than we might assume. King James I—for whom Macbeth was almost certainly written—had himself authored a treatise on witchcraft, Daemonologie, and had personally presided over witch trials. The witches in Macbeth were not metaphors for that audience. They were the real thing, brought onto the stage.

Verdi knew the play cold. He didn't read it in English—he didn't speak English—but he had read Italian prose translations of Shakespeare's works since his youth, and returned to them throughout his life. "He is one of my favorite poets," he wrote. "I have had him in my hands from my earliest youth, and I read and reread him continually." When the Teatro della Pergola offered him a commission with no subject specified, he knew almost immediately what he wanted to do. Not despite the play's difficulty and strangeness. Because of it.

The Ritual of Rehearsal

What followed, in the months between the commission and the premiere, was one of the most extraordinary rehearsal processes in the history of opera—and one that, viewed through an esoteric lens, looks less like theatrical preparation than like magical working.

Verdi was a notorious perfectionist, but his perfectionism with Macbeth took on a quality that his collaborators found almost frightening in its intensity. He was not, he made clear to everyone involved, trying to produce a beautiful operatic entertainment. He was trying to summon something. "I shall never stop telling you," he wrote to his lead baritone, Felice Varesi, who would create the title role, "to study the words and the dramatic situation. Then the music will come right of its own accord. In a word, I would rather you served the poet better than you serve the composer."

This instruction—serve the poet rather than the composer—is radical in the context of mid-nineteenth century Italian opera, a form in which the singer's vocal display was generally understood to be the primary event and the drama a frame for it. Verdi was demanding something different: the subordination of musical beauty to dramatic truth. He wanted, as he would later write about the casting of Lady Macbeth, a voice that was "rough, hollow, stifled" rather than conventionally beautiful. Something devilish, he said. Not lovely. Devilish.

The soprano who created the role, Marianna Barbieri-Nini, left memoirs describing what Verdi put her through. He made her study the sleepwalking scene for three months. The great duet between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after the murder of Duncan—the scene where the deed is done and the couple begins the long psychological unraveling that will destroy them both—he rehearsed with her and Varesi more than a hundred and fifty times. One hundred and fifty times. And then, on the night of the dress rehearsal, with the overture already playing in the theater, he pulled them both into the lobby and made them do it one hundred and fifty-first time.

Varesi was reportedly furious. Barbieri-Nini was exhausted beyond words. Verdi was unmoved. He needed them, he explained, to stop performing the scene and start inhabiting it. He needed them, in the language of a later century's psychological vocabulary, to have processed the material so completely that it could no longer be contained within the structures of theatrical technique and would simply erupt through them.

This is, recognizably, the logic of initiation. The repetition that breaks down resistance. The sustained pressure that dissolves the boundary between the performer and the role. The insistence, by the one who knows what is required, that the ones being prepared go further than they believe they can. Verdi was not staging an opera. He was conducting a transformation.

The Witches and the Problem of the Strange

No element of Verdi's Macbeth obsessed him more than the witches—and his correspondence about them reveals exactly how seriously he took the occult dimensions of his subject.

In letter after letter to his librettist Francesco Maria Piave, Verdi struggled to articulate what he needed and couldn't get. The witches' poetry, he kept insisting, wasn't strange enough. It needed to be bizarre -- genuinely bizarre, not theatrically bizarre. He wrote: "To have character, the witches' first strophes should be stranger. I can't tell you how to do it, but I do know that they're not good the way they are. Experiment and find a way of writing bizarre poetry."

He couldn't tell Piave how because he didn't know how in ordinary compositional or literary terms. He knew it when he heard it and he knew when it was absent. He was reaching for something that operates below the level of craft—the quality that makes certain magical texts feel genuinely uncanny rather than merely dramatic, the quality that the actual grimoire tradition had and theatrical approximations of it typically lacked.

He eventually brought in a second poet, Andrea Maffei, to supplement Piave's work—not because Piave was incompetent, but because the witches required a different kind of imagination than libretto-writing typically demanded. The result, the witches' choruses that open the opera and return at its turning points, have a quality that no other Verdi opera possesses: they feel genuinely strange, genuinely inhuman, as if something other than theatrical convention is operating in them.

This was not accidental. Verdi understood, as Shakespeare had understood before him, that the witches are not characters in the conventional dramatic sense. They are forces. They don't cause Macbeth's destruction by telling him lies—the prophecies are all technically true. They cause it by telling him a truth he is not prepared to receive, in a way that activates the darkness already present in him. The witches don't make Macbeth evil. They show him what he already is.

That is a profoundly occult conception of prophecy—one that aligns not with the popular image of fortune-telling but with the deeper initiatory understanding of revelation as a mirror. The oracle doesn't create the fate. It reflects it back at you in a form you can no longer pretend you don't recognize.

Florence, 1847: The Night of the Premiere

The Teatro della Pergola was, and remains, one of the oldest and most beautiful opera houses in Italy—built in 1656 under Medici patronage, the first theater in the world constructed with superposed tiers of boxes, a model that every subsequent opera house would follow. It had heard Mozart performed for the first time in Italy within its walls. It had seen premieres that shaped the history of the form. But nothing quite like this had been staged there before.

The premiere on March 14, 1847 was, by contemporary accounts, a triumph. The Florentine audience—largely unfamiliar with Shakespeare, whose plays were not widely known in Italy—responded to the opera's raw dramatic power on its own terms. They did not need to know the source material to feel what Verdi had put into the music: the terror of the witches' opening chorus, the cold seductiveness of Lady Macbeth's entrance aria, the shattering psychological duet after the murder, the sleepwalking scene that Verdi had put Barbieri-Nini through three months of preparation to achieve.

Critics were more divided. Some found the work's deliberate abandonment of operatic convention jarring—where was the tenor? Where was the love story? Where were the set pieces designed to show off the singers' vocal brilliance? Verdi had stripped all of that away, and some observers found the result austere to the point of severity. But the opera played widely across Italy in the years that followed, in some twenty locations, and Verdi's private verdict on it never wavered. Macbeth was the one. Of everything he would produce across a career spanning more than half a century, it was the work to which he gave the dedication: the heart offers it.

What Verdi Understood

There is a tendency, in writing about Verdi and Shakespeare, to frame the relationship as one of artistic admiration—a great composer drawn to great dramatic material. This is true as far as it goes. But I think it understates something that Verdi's correspondence makes clear: he understood, at some level that his analytical mind may not have fully articulated, that Macbeth was operating in a register different from ordinary drama.

The play is about what happens when a person is shown a version of their own future—a future that is also, crucially, a version of their own deepest self—and chooses to make it real through action rather than allowing it to remain potential. The witches don't say: become king by murdering Duncan. They say: you will be king. The murder is Macbeth's interpretation, his method, his choice. And the choice, once made, cannot be unmade. The blood does not wash off. Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking is not madness in the clinical sense. It is the psyche's refusal to be complicit in its own suppression -- the repressed truth rising through the body's movements when the conscious will is suspended.

Verdi recognized all of this and built it into the music. The opera does not explain the witches or rationalize them. It gives them the same musical language as the rest of the drama—and then makes that language strange. It does not comfort the audience by suggesting that the supernatural elements are illusion. It insists, as Shakespeare insists, that the dagger Macbeth sees may be real, that the ghost of Banquo at the feast may be real, that the witches' prophecies are real—and that none of this makes Macbeth any less responsible for what he chooses to do with what he has been shown.

This is, at its core, an occult worldview: one in which the invisible world is genuine, in which forces beyond the purely material are operative, and in which the human will retains full responsibility for how it responds to those forces. The witch does not damn you. The prophecy does not bind you. What you do with what you have been shown—that is entirely yours.

On the night of March 14, 1847, in a Medici theater in Florence, Giuseppe Verdi put all of that onto the stage in four acts and made his audiences feel it in their bodies. He had rehearsed his singers past the point of technique and into something rawer and truer. He had demanded witches strange enough to be actually uncanny. He had insisted that the drama serve the poet and not the composer, that the truth of the thing matter more than its beauty.

One hundred and seventy-nine years later, the opera he loved above all others is still being performed. The play it was drawn from still cannot be named inside a theater without consequences. And the questions it raises—about prophecy, about ambition, about the relationship between what we are shown and what we choose—remain as alive as they were when the first witch opened her mouth on a Scottish heath and told a general what he was about to become.

A Note on This Week's Thread

Those following March's daily entries will have noticed a theme building across the week. From Gutenberg's press making initiatory secrecy structurally impossible, to Banneker reading the stars to fix the boundaries of a republic built on contradictions, to Halley's Comet arriving precisely as a dead man's mathematics predicted and Herschel finding a planet while looking for a comet—each day has circled the same question: what does it mean to be shown something true, and what do we do with that revelation?

Verdi's Macbeth is the darkest answer in the series. It shows us what happens when the revelation is received by someone whose ambition is stronger than their wisdom—when the mirror the witches hold up reflects back a self the recipient is not prepared to integrate, and chooses instead to enact. The modern occultist reads the story as a warning built into the tradition itself: the forces are real, the visions are genuine, the prophecies may be accurate. But the work—always, in every tradition—is internal. You are not what the witches tell you. You are what you choose to do with what they show you.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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