Music: Verdi: In His Own Write

Posthumous but prescient comments on the Met's new Macbeth

Giuseppe Verdi did not have to meet the press much; he made his comments about opera in his letters, not interviews. Some of those observations are still valid today, and if Verdi were alive, he wouldn 't have to change a word:

Interviewer: Maestro, the Metropolitan Opera has unveiled Sir Peter Hall's new production of your opera Macbeth, starring Baritone Sherrill Milnes and Soprano Renata Scotto. When the revised version of Macbeth flopped in Paris in 1865, you were criticized for your treatment of Shakespeare. What attracted you to the play?

Verdi: This tragedy...