Review

A marvellous lost Hamlet opera, rediscovered – review

Hamlet at the Bregenz Festival, Austria
Hamlet at the Bregenz Festival, Austria Credit: Bregenzer Festspiele/Karl Forster

To celebrate its 70th anniversary, Austria’s Bregenz Festival opened with a great contribution to Shakespeare 400: a lost Hamlet opera, no less. Created for Genoa in 1865 by Franco Faccio to a libretto by his friend Arrigo Boito, who later adapted Shakespeare for Verdi’s final two operas Otello and Falstaff, Amleto was well acclaimed at the time, and in 1871 was revised  for La Scala in Milan, where Faccio had just become music director.

Then disaster struck: the tenor who sang the title role in Genoa fell ill, and performances were postponed until his recovery. He was then ill again but endeavoured to sing for the new premiere, which the publisher Giulio Ricordi called “Hamlet without Hamlet”. After this fiasco, Faccio gave up composing in favour of conducting, withdrew his opera from performance, and it was not seen again for 143 years until a revival at Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2014. Only the funeral march for Ophelia had managed to survive in regular performance – for the Easter festival in Corfu.

Yet this marvellous opera, anticipating the musical language of later Italian verismo composers, combines lovely musical interludes with superb vocal writing, and under the baton of Paolo Carignani with the Vienna Symphoniker and Prague Philharmonic Choir it carried terrific punch. Olivier Tambosi’s excellent staging served it well, with a clear focus on the high points and a well-judged first scene contrasting Hamlet’s melancholy with the gaiety of the court, before the appearance of the ghost, as a medieval armoured knight in an Arthurian setting.

Musically, Act I is the weakest part, but in Act II Hamlet’s To be or not to be was superbly delivered by tenor Pavel Černoch, followed by a beautifully sung duet with Iulia Maria Dan’s lovely Ophelia. All the while, he and other players prepare their make-up for the play within a play where the vocal writing skilfully brings out the feelings of various characters. By the time of Act III, the emotional temperature has risen enormously with the king’s well-expressed remorse, a terrific duet between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude (Dshamilja Kaiser), and a fabulously sung aria when she admits her guilt.

Iulia Maria Dan as Ophelia
Iulia Maria Dan as Ophelia Credit: Bregenzer Festspiele/Karl Forster

Gravediggers, the duel and final death scene, all are there, as the music drives towards a very effective ending. Unlike Ambroise Thomas’s French grand opera of the same name (based on an adaptation by Alexandre Dumas), this is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Faccio’s opera is the one that should be performed, and if plans are not already afoot to bring it to the land of Shakespeare, they certainly should be.

 

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