It wasn’t exactly a ghost that appeared to Brett Dean and told him that it was a good idea to write an opera of Hamlet. Four years ago, though, the composer’s wife did deliver a message from William Shakespeare to her husband, as he chewed over whether his second stage work would be or not be.
“She said, ‘What would Will think? He’d say go for it,’ ” Dean recalls, as we sit in the sunshine in the garden of Glyndebourne’s on-site pub, with the sounds of the Hamlet — the opera — filtering out of the nearby rehearsal studios.
I’ve just suggested to Dean, a plain-speaking Aussie, and his Hamlet, the equally unflappable English tenor Allan Clayton, that adapting Shakespeare’s most celebrated tragedy — the tragedy of all tragedies? — requires a certain audacity. “Perhaps foolhardiness more than audacity,” Dean replies, but it’s clear that a composer who spent 15 years playing viola for the Berlin Philharmonic is on an accelerated second career curve. Championed by his former boss in Berlin, Simon Rattle, and artist in association with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Dean has big ambitions and wants to see them through. As he mulled over the Hamlet idea that refused to go away, “there was a sense of not wanting to die not knowing what it would be like”, he says.
Aside from informing her husband what Shakespeare would think about a Hamlet opera, Dean’s wife, Heather Betts, an artist, had already started her own cycle of paintings based on Hamlet — some of which are being put on display at Glyndebourne this summer too. “I was seeing her delving into just single lines of text and working through a series of drawings and paintings . . .” As Dean has worked on Hamlet, which opens at the Sussex festival on June 11, he has found himself reacting in the same way to the merest slivers of the drama. “It’s like the opposite of a Russian doll; you take off one layer of text, and the next layer is even bigger.”
But let’s face facts. Shakespeare operas that get close to the nuances of their source material can be counted in single figures. There are Verdi’s mature masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff (based on The Merry Wives of Windsor), and Berlioz’s whimsical take on Much Ado, Béatrice et Bénédict. In the 20th century, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has an elfin beauty and Lear by the composer Aribert Reimann is admired in Germany. More recently, Thomas Adès found rough magic in 2004’s The Tempest, but Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale was found wanting at English National Opera earlier this year.
Advertisement
As for Hamlet . . . Dean notes that Verdi apparently toyed with adapting it and so did Berlioz. Other lesser composers have had a crack at it. “There are at least 14 Hamlet operas; mine brings it up to 15,” Dean says. “But they didn’t enter the rep,” Clayton notes.
The Hamlet opera that gets occasional airings is the French composer Ambroise Thomas’s 1868 adaptation, first premiered with a different, happy ending in which Hamlet survives his duel and becomes king of Denmark after all. Vive le prince! Dean seems unthreatened by comparison with this Hamlet and has not followed Thomas’s optimistic detour from the usual plot. In fact, the body count is even higher in his opera than in a normal Hamlet production. “There are more deaths on stage than people might be expecting,” Clayton says, before Dean tells him to stop giving away the best bits.
Dean is not making light of the challenge. The first day he sat down face to face with his Canadian librettist, Matthew Jocelyn, they read the full Hamlet text (or at least the longest standard version) out loud to each other. “It took five hours with a short lunch break, so it made it clear what the nature of the task was.”
Yet by trawling through every line of the play, Dean and Jocelyn also felt liberated. “There are so many ways of approaching this text. In every Hamlet you see, a huge decision-making process has gone into bringing the so-called standard Hamlet to the stage.” With three versions to choose from — the First Folio, the Second Quarto and the so-called Bad Quarto — directors always pick and choose between them, and cut swathes of text, even whole characters. The process had to be even more brutal for the opera, because it takes so much longer to sing lines than to speak them.
Dean and Jocelyn were drawn to the Bad Quarto, the earliest surviving version but the last to be discovered. Although the text has been maligned by some Shakespeare experts as the mangled recollections of an actor, Dean defends it. “It’s a lot pithier and shorter, familiar yet different.” Working on this version allowed him to “bypass the burden-of-expectation factor”, helping him to reassess “the big and famous moments”. One of those is “To be, or not to be”, a proposition bluntly answered in the Bad Quarto and now in the Glyndebourne Hamlet as, “Aye, there’s the point.” The whole soliloquy, says Clayton, has been “deconstructed, reconstructed”.
“There are at least 14 Hamlet operas — mine brings that up to 15
Advertisement
The wider political ramifications of the play have also been expunged: there’s no Fortinbras ready to invade Denmark, and poor old Osric has been shown the exit. Perhaps most radically, some lines have been “swapped” from characters in the play to other characters in the opera. To give Ophelia (sung by the fearless soprano Barbara Hannigan) more of a sense of definition, the character is forced by Polonius to read to Claudius and Gertrude the love letters Hamlet sent her, thus splicing two scenes together.
Clayton describes his Prince of Denmark as “a complete gift of a role — it’s been written so brilliantly, it lies in a good range. It has dramatic moments, moments of reflection. You don’t get the sense that this is a ‘singer’. You get the sense that this is someone vocalising their thoughts.”
The tenor’s research has taken him to various Hamlets, live and on screen. He went to see Andrew Scott’s performance at the Almeida in north London — “stunning” — but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard’s romp, left him with as much to think about. “There’s a great scene when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sitting there, waiting in the wings yet again, and one says, ‘So this Hamlet guy, his mum has married his uncle, his girlfriend has dumped him because her dad said to, then she’s been spying on him and people are trying to kill him . . . and they think he’s mad?’
“And yes, there are these awful things about him, but it’s within the realm of reason. There’s never a single moment where I’ve had to pretend to do anything, or where I imagine the character would have to feign madness. It’s so straightforward to me that he behaves in a completely rational way.”
Last month Glyndebourne hosted a panel discussion at the Globe, which included a distinguished stage Hamlet in Simon Russell Beale. His words also stuck with Clayton. “He said you can’t help but make Hamlet a very personal performance, because he is this everyman. He addresses the questions that we all wake up with in the morning or lie awake in the middle of the night thinking about — about death, about the afterlife, about love, about betrayal. It’s why it’s so easy to give freely to it.”
Advertisement
Previous Hamlets have sometimes got the spooks: Daniel Day-Lewis supposedly saw his father’s ghost when playing the Dane at the National Theatre in 1989 and quit the production mid-performance. Clayton, whose father died in 2004, admits that the role “has brought a lot of things to the surface”. And he has had onstage moments that have taken him to the brink before, notably when singing the role of the Male Chorus in Glyndebourne’s production of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia. “I saw Matthew Rose walking on as Collatinus with his and Lucretia’s daughter . . . they were coming in to find out that Lucretia had been the subject of this rape, and I just remember having a proper breakdown on stage, which had never happened to me before. Vocally I can’t allow that to happen to me in this show.”
Dean then reveals that he and Jocelyn have lost their fathers within the past three months, Dean’s father dying immediately before rehearsals for Hamlet began. “Coincidence, of course, but it makes you wonder.”
In the relatively short space of time since Dean left the Berlin Philharmonic, audiences and conductors alike have acclaimed his music as ingeniously crafted and brazenly colourful. The last piece I heard by him was his cheeky Pastoral Symphony — Beethoven given a 21st-century, Antipodean twist, with the orchestra aping tropical birds in all their alarming hue and cry.
Audiences at the Barbican last year got a taster of Hamlet in the short concert work A Hamlet Diffraction, which Anna Picard singled out in The Times for the haunting “weightlessness” of the detailed orchestral writing and its pregnant transformations of the text. Dean, long used to playing uninteresting parts for the viola, says he never wants to write a part that won’t excite every instrumentalist. “I want the players to feel satisfied. The physical act of making music is paramount to actually getting the message across — and the more you tap into that energy, the more chance you have of getting those emotions out there, even to those [in the audience] that don’t really want to hear a new piece at all.”
Fiddly new music is fine, he says, but only if it’s not so fiddly that players will just give up. “Even the most dedicated orchestral musician imaginable will get to a point where they think, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if it’s going to make any difference whether I practise this or not.’ It’s about finding a balance, giving challenges that are actually manageable.” You might say, with a nod to Will Shakespeare, that for this most practical of composers, the playing’s the thing.
Hamlet opens at the Glyndebourne Festival (01273 815000) on June 11 and is broadcast live in cinemas on July 6