‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’: A comparison of three operatic adaptations of Macbeth by Lawrance Collingwood, Paul McIntyre, and Luke Styles

Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Macbeth (1865), based on Shakespeare’s play of the same name, is
considered one of the prime nineteenth century adaptations of a Shakespeare text. With its
high degree of fidelity to the source text, as well as the rich and intense score that exemplifies
his musical language, Verdi’s Macbeth set a benchmark of what a ‘successful’ operatic
adaptation of Macbeth might look like. The degree of success of later adaptations of Macbeth
is often compared – fairly or unfairly – retrospectively with Verdi’s Macbeth. This thesis is
an investigation into three post-Verdi adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth by Lawrance
Collingwood, Paul McIntyre, and Luke Styles, aiming to show how each composer has
adapted the story of Macbeth for the musical-dramatic stage, and how they have utilised the
twentieth century resources available to them, thus setting them apart from Verdi’s opera.
Through analysis of some aspects of the operas, three perspectives on adapting Macbeth into
opera will be explored, with further discussion of the composers’ individual approaches to
text-setting that show how such approaches give the story new meaning.