Two weighty forebears — Shakespeare and Verdi — loom over the material like the proverbial sword of Damocles, warding off anyone else curious to try their hand. Salvatore Sciarrino avoids the trap of classicism, however, and retells the story in a fresh and highly suspenseful manner. When crafting the libretto, he stuck closely to Shakespeare’s original, albeit condensed to the minimum. The portrait of the homicidal upstart and his scheming wife in Verdi’s four-act Macbeth, premiered in 1847 in Florence and regarded as one of his darkest musical dramas, illuminates the deepest crevices of the human soul with an intensity that seems to render any further interpretation superfluous.

For another composer to take up Shakespeare’s drama anew some one and a half centuries later is no small act of courage, and it is all the more courageous that it should be a composer like Salvatore Sciarrino, whose sparse musical language and tendency to favour the quiet registers stands in stark contrast to Verdi’s dramatic power. However, when his new Macbeth was given its world premiere in 2002 in Schwetzingen, Sciarrino demonstrated that reducing the grand rhetorical gestures to an intimate chamber atmosphere offers untold possibilities for a new perspective on the material and its monstrous events. Just as in Verdi, this work does not provide a clear answer to the roots of evil, since this ultimately lies beyond rational understanding. What Sciarrino does show, with striking clarity, is how it can take hold of individuals and turn them into ruthless criminals who will stop at nothing in their pursuit of power. The arena of conflict is not the battlefield or the murder chamber; it lies within the two main characters themselves. They are not defeated by external enemies, but by their own consciences. Macbeth’s whispered admission of guilt resounds as powerfully as the trumpets of Jericho, ultimately bringing down the walls of his criminal ego. Yet evil is not banished from the world.