With its relentless dramatic continuum, Macbeth, Verdi's early masterpiece
and his tenth opera (premiered in Florence on 14 March 1847) rescued the
composer from a creative crisis. In Macbeth Verdi created a successful
synthesis of music and drama on which he was to guide himself from now on.
Director Claude d'Anna and conductor Riccardo Chailly chose the version
which Verdi prepared for Paris and was premiered there on 21 April 1865. As
to the apparitions and supernatural aspects of the work, d'Anna says that
he always "tried to find theatrical rather than cinematic solutions. ...
Solutions had to result from the work's own symbolic logic, not simply from
technology."