Madness, perhaps, yet there is method in it
Acclaimed composer Brett Dean tells Ben Lawrence why he can succeed where Verdi failed – and turn ‘Hamlet’ into a great opera
How do you turn the greatest play in the world into an opera? It’s a question that troubled composer Brett Dean when he decided to tackle Hamlet for this year’s Glyndebourne Festival. “When I saw this huge mountain in front of me, I have to admit I was vaguely perturbed. People would say things like ‘ Hamlet, eh? That’s rather… big’.”
Luckily, Dean’s wife Heather proved to be the voice of reason. “She asked me what Will Shakespeare’s reaction would have been, and it’s clear that he would have said: ‘Go for it!’”
The task is, nevertheless, a daunting one. Dean and the librettist Matthew Jocelyn pored over all three extant versions of Shakespeare’s play – the first folio and the second quarto, as well as the “bad” first quarto. They read each text out loud to each other, a process which took about five hours, before both coming up with their top five moments. It was then that the concision – at 29, 551 words, Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play – began.
They have expunged Fortinbras, the nephew of the King of Norway who, famously, utters the hopeful redemptive final words of the play while knee-deep in dead bodies. Out went the subplot concerning Hamlet’s banishment to England, and so, too, did the foppish courtier Osric. Intriguingly, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom Dean refers to as the “syncopated sycophants of the glorious regime of Denmark” remain part of the action throughout.
Dean’s vision suddenly became clear: “It had to remain a domestic drama and not be geopolitical – everything had to be expressed through the dysfunction and the trauma that is heated up through Hamlet’s family.”
Hamlet, of course, provides terrifically fertile ground for opera. Madness, revenge and mortality are all themes that resonate loudly throughout the course of the play and it is no surprise that attempts to turn the tale of the great Dane into an operatic extravaganza number over a dozen. What is more surprising is that there is no truly successful version, with only Ambroise Thomas’s grandiose 1868 venture getting any sort of shelf life which, considering its repeated critical mauling, is extraordinary. (Verdi apparently was considering his own version but abandoned the project after reading Thomas’s libretto, commenting: “Poor Shakespeare”.)
Dean has never seen the Thomas or listened to it, and admits to being relieved that there’s no “definitive Hamlet opera on my shoulder all the time”. He has stuck to the emotional core of the play and, in smart young British tenor Allan Clayton, he believes he has found someone “with a great deal of humour and empathy”.
He says: “What people forget about Hamlet is that it is actually a very funny play, and the sense of tragedy is heightened by the fact that you have this young man who is full of life and wit – which makes his downfall all the more unbearable.”
The descent into madness of Hamlet and, indeed, Ophelia, poses a significant problem for modern sensibilities. While opera – from Lucia di Lammermoor to Peter Grimes – has tackled the theme with gusto, it is clear that the genre rarely offers sensitive or psychologically authentic representations of mental illness.
“Nothing can be more clichéd than depictions of madness on stage,” says Dean. “So often, Ophelia is this weak and wavering character in a long white shift, but when you look at the text, she is actually a strong personality who gives as good as she gets. The key, for me, was to get to the core of her collapse, rather than to show her as this weak girl who has no resistance. There is a firmness to her which suddenly snaps.”
Shakespeare afforded Ophelia no heightened death scene: her tragic demise by drowning happens offstage. It’s a non-image that has inspired artists from John Everett Millais to Waterhouse. Did Dean resist the temptation to give her one big final aria?
“Um, there is nothing gratuitously un-Shakespearean in what we have done,” he says, wary that he is giving too much away. “Let’s just say you won’t see a huge brook floating across the stage.” Dean, 56, is a pragmatic, unpretentious sort of chap who seems too laid-back to have produced such an extraordinary body of intellectually challenging, often hauntingly beautiful work. He has composed scores of orchestral works, concertos, chamber music and choral music.
Hamlet is his second opera, following Bliss (2010) which also had a literary inspiration – the darkly comic novel by Peter Carey, a fellow Australian and arguably the nation’s greatest living writer. Is Dean’s prolific output down to workaholism, abundant creative energy or a reluctance to turn down work? He concedes that it is probably a combination of all three.
Brought up in Brisbane, Dean trained initially as a viola player – he still plays professionally – and came to composing at the relatively late age of 27, learning his craft through improvisation with friends rather than formal training. He says that his time with the Australian Youth Orchestra (where he met his wife and the mother of his two children, Heather) gave him a great sense of purpose, and bemoans the fact that cuts to governmentfunded arts institutions are denying future generations the same experience.
“I felt a great sense of community in the orchestra,” he says. “It wasn’t just about growing up to be a viola player. It was about the life skills it gave me. Those skills, that sense of bonding, will be lost if these institutions disappear.”
Talking of institutions, I wonder if Dean has factored in the Glyndebourne tradition of a picnic dinner that will punctuate every performance of Hamlet.
“One of the first things Simon Rattle said to me was: ‘Just remember the long break and that the second act is shorter than the first’. I found that a huge help, because it gave the opera a shape. The last thing I want is for audiences to nod off after they’ve had a glass of wine during the interval.”
He chuckles at the image. “And then there’s the fact that Hamlet is being presented to them by a bunch of colonials [Jocelyn is Canadian]. We are tampering with the most sacred English text of all time and that’s a really delicious irony.”