Verdi and Le Sueur: A Note on the Final Chorus in Macbeth

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, in response to the localizing tendency of Romanticism, the librettists of the primo ottocento transferred many of their stories from Olympus to the Alps and to the mountains of Scotland; it is equally true that the composers who set them made little effort to assimilate the music of those locales. One is hard-pressed to find anything specifically Alpine in La sonnambula or any Caledonian inflections in Lucia di Lammermoor. The exotic dimension of these works remained the province of the metteur en scène. By contrast, sensing the proximity of Scotland in a way that his Italian contemporaries failed to sense when they wrote for Milan and Naples, John Barnett made sure that his excursion into Scotland—The Mountain Sylph (London, 1834)—bore at least some of the rhythmic and melodic thumbprints of its milieu. So it is that we encounter the "Scotch snap" a mere ten measures into the Sylph's overture (see ex. 1).

An ethos different from that of the Italian stage likewise obtained at the Paris Opéra. Since such works as La muette de Portici and Guillaume Tell foregrounded their choruses as national participants in the events, it comes as no surprise to find a tarantella and barcarolle in one and a tyrolienne and ranz des vaches in the other. Ballet music at the Opéra, on the other hand, was not as responsive to national color: since most scores before Giselle were pasticcios of popular operatic tunes, they must all have been inflected, to a greater or lesser extent, by the generalized idiom of the bel canto stage. Not so in Denmark, though, for there Auguste Bournonville did incorporate genuine folk dances into his ballets. In his version of La sylphide (Sylfiden, 1836), the sylphs might dance to a facelessly pretty idiom (derived, like most contemporary ballet scores, from the cantilenas of Bellini, Pacini, and Donizetti), but there can be no

Example 1.

The opening andante of the overture to John Barnett's opera The Mountain Sylph, showing the use of the "Scotch snap" in bar 10

Example 2.

The reel from act I of Løvenskjold's Sylfiden (La Sylphide), showing the flicking rhythm that typifies a strathspey

doubting the peasant vigor of the Scotch reel (more properly a strathspey) in act 1 (see ex. 2). (Although I have never seen the Schneitzhöffer score for the Paris La sylphide [1832] I should be surprised if it contained anything of comparably authentic élan.) Here Herman Løvenskjold, Bournonville's composer, has caught that characteristic flick of the strathspey, the contour of which breaks up into brackets of unequal value that could easily be notated as grace notes (see ex. 3). And indeed some versions of the écossaise, a ballroom dance of the nineteenth century, sought to approximate this design, not least the ècossaise (wrongly called a danse anglaise) in Adam's Le corsaire and that in Delibes's Coppèlia. (On the other hand, Tchaikovsky made no effort to replicate this rhythmic profile in the ècossaise he wrote for Eugene Onegin, which reads for all the world like a galop.)

Example 3.

An actual strathspey ("Lord Seaforth") collected in The Dance Music of Scotland: A Collection of All the Best Reels and Strathspey Both of the Highlands and Lowlands (Edinburgh, 1854)

Turning to Macbeth, we can observe that, true to the conventions of the primo ottocento, Verdi introduced no Gaelicisms in the 1847 version, and we will look in vain for replications of the strathspey's ligne brisèe. With one exception, the revisions of 1865 also did nothing to "Scottify" the opera's tinta. Even the ballet music, which might be thought to have beckoned in that direction, begins with a tarantella and ends with a valse infernale. The final chorus, on the other hand, does suggest that, here at least, Verdi attempted a splash of local color. Julian Budden has...