Tobias Kratzer's „Macbeth" at the Hamburg State Opera, premiere 12 September 2026
There is no production still with this piece. Instead there is a photograph I took years ago in Venice: Thomas Schütte's Efficiency Men, three bald figures in heavy cloaks, handless, standing on coiled springs where their legs should be. They occupy the right of the frame. Far away on the left, a woman leans at a round-arched window and looks out. She knows nothing about them. Between them lies an empty, reflecting floor that nobody crosses.
I wasn't thinking about Verdi when I made the picture. After this premiere it is the image the evening brings to mind, and more precisely than any production photograph could. Kratzer's staging is about exactly this arrangement: there are those who know, and there are those who act, and they never meet.
The man who staged the Munich Ring and the Bayreuth Tannhäuser has done without machinery here. A carpet rolled out, a mirror, a wooden chair, and around it a dark wooden staircase construction that closes the space into a circle. The royal living room stands inside an amphitheatre. The contradiction is deliberate: chamber play means proximity, amphitheatre means being watched. A couple ruins itself in front of an audience.
The real interpretive decision is the chorus. It is always present. When it has nothing to sing it sits on the tiers and watches. It knows how this ends, from the first minute. That is the Greek chorus, not the Elizabethan one and certainly not Verdi's. In Verdi the chorus is always a party to the action — witches, courtiers, murderers, refugees — never above it. Kratzer returns the tragedy to tragedy, to an order in which the ending is fixed and everyone knows it except the two people it happens to.
The thought is coherent. It also has a price, and the price comes due over the course of the evening.
If the truth is seated in the room from the beginning, there is no development left, only the catching-up with what was always the case. The descent into madness is therefore not traceable. How much of that belongs to the director is arguable. Between „La luce langue" and the sleepwalking scene Verdi gives Lady Macbeth two acts with no interior life at all; the score shows states there, not processes. This is the Verdi of 1847, who could not yet compose psychology continuously, and no staging repairs it. But a staging that promises a chamber play promises the very curve the work withholds.
Kratzer's most interesting solution comes at the point where the work offers least: the ballet music of the 1865 Paris version in Act Three, cut almost everywhere. Here it becomes a counter-world. The same scene as in Act One, the same family on the same carpet, told differently: Banquo and his son are there, the King comes to visit, and the paper crown placed on the child in Act One is now placed on Duncan. A dream of dynasty turns into an image of legitimacy. Macbeth and his wife climb up into the amphitheatre to watch — that is, as I read it, into the truth.
The idea is strong; the effect falls short of it. A counterfactual is an elegiac form. It shows an alternative, it does not produce one. And Verdi's ballet music was written for Paris as divertissement, with no psychological assignment whatsoever. The scene has to work against the music, and six minutes of mime cannot carry that alone. In Macbeth the counter-image visibly does something. In his wife it does not — she breaks only when she sees Macduff's murdered family. Psychologically plausible, musically questionable: Verdi does not break her through compassion but compulsively, in her sleep, without insight. Guilt without recognition. As acting, too, the transformation never became legible to me.
About the pit I claim no authority. My impression was a steady pulse that smoothed the arcs rather than tensing them. Others have put it more sharply.
The chorus, by contrast, is at its best, and „Patria oppressa" was the most striking passage of the evening. Verdi's second setting is austere enough that any impurity shows; here it held. And anyone who spends an evening watching motionlessly without letting the tension drop is doing more than they are usually credited for.
Then it rains — real rain from the flies, backlit, and for a long time. It is the only expense the evening permits itself, and it is well placed. Rain falls on everyone without regard to person. Wet clothing strips away representation: the route to exposure the controversial poster campaign talks about, without anyone having to undress.
At the end Macbeth and his wife rise and disappear into the chorus. The 1865 version gives the last word to the community rather than to the dying man; Kratzer takes this literally and lets the two dissolve into what has been watching them all evening. The observer becomes an archive.
Then the witches point at Banquo's son, who walks on in a yellow oilskin — a Friesennerz, the North German fisherman's raincoat, which in Hamburg carries a whole set of associations of its own. One can read this as the prophecy fulfilled. I read it as the eternal recurrence of the same with new protagonists.
Except that the coat carries a second meaning, and it contradicts the first. Banquo put it on the boy shortly before he was murdered. It is a father's gesture, the only act of care in the evening, and it sets the two fathers against each other: in the counter-world Macbeth provides a paper crown, Banquo a raincoat. One withstands no weather at all, the other does. If the recurrence were genuinely identical, that gesture would have to be meaningless. It isn't.