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The Queen, My Lord, Is Dead: An origin story: Commissioning, producing, and performing a one-act chamber opera revealing the fate of Lady Macbeth

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth is enrobed in mystery. She is a complex character, very present and real in the world of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but her astonishing words and actions are left unelucidated by the play’s text. Her offstage death near the play’s conclusion, communicated with no supporting detail, only serves to encase her inscrutability in an aura of permanence. Actors and audiences alike have been forced to make substantial assumptions about her motivations and her fate for more than four centuries. Lady Macbeth is typically construed as being motivated by an ambitious desire to be queen, as passionately committed to supporting her husband’s desire to be king, or as having some innate savagery or an allegiance to evil forces that drives her to pursue evil deeds. These possible bases for her choices seem hollow, insufficient to explain the obsessional intensity of her words and the lighting-quick surety of her actions. To explore and hopefully reveal more of the origin and object of her enigmatic drive, and to attempt to uncover the end of her story, a new opera about Lady Macbeth was commissioned and serves as the basis for this dissertation.

The Queen, My Lord, Is Dead is a one-act opera for chamber ensemble and soprano about the character of Lady Macbeth, with music composed by Tom�s Peire Serrate and a libretto written by Alejandra Villarreal Martinez. The action of this opera, conceived as taking place within the world of the play, is an extended scene for Lady Macbeth that would occur between the sleepwalking scene in Act V, scene 1, and Seyton’s announcement to King Macbeth that, “The queen, my lord, is dead” in Act V, scene 5. This work was commissioned in 2021, developed and produced over a sixteen-month period, and performed in June of 2022.

This dissertation will discuss: the genesis of the idea for the opera; the opera’s premise and content of its story; the collaborative process between the composer, the librettist, and myself (as the commissioner of the work); the experience of producing and production-managing the premiere of the opera; the experience of musically and dramatically creating and performing the Lady Macbeth revealed by this composition; the performance considerations for those interested in producing or performing this opera; and the work’s inherent value, as a recommendation for its continued life.

Video of the world premiere performance and more information about the collaborators who created the score and the premiere production can be found on the opera’s website: https://www.thequeenopera.com/.

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