27 March 2010: Thomas, Hamlet
Opera by Ambroise Thomas, Libretto by Michel Carré and Jules Barbier, based on the play by Shakespeare. Metropolitan Opera HD Broadcast, seen at the West Springfield multiplex. Conducted by Louis Langrée. Production: Patrice Caurier and Moshe Meiser. Ophélie: Marlis Petersen; Gertrude: Jennifer Larmore; Laërte: Toby Spence; Hamlet: Simon Keenlyside; Claudius: James Morris. 3 hrs. 15 mins. including one intermission
In an interview with Renée Fleming at intermission, Simon Keenlyside, the Hamlet in this production, offered a common-sense observation about Thomas’s opera: “It is text-driven, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but it is not Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Truer words were never spoken. Composed in an age when Shakespeare was still in the ascendent, his play, like all his other plays, had by this time become the coinage of common discourse. People could quote Shakespeare without even realizing they were quoting him; his words had seeped into the language and become part of civilized speech. In the same way, Shakespeare’s plots seem to have made their way into contemporary drama and comedy and to have become thoroughly assimilated into the kinds of plays being written and produced for contemporary audiences.
What kind of plays? In a word, melodramas. Thomas’s librettists, Michael Carré and Jules Barbier, have taken the story told by Shakespeare’s play and adapted it to the exigencies of melodramatic action — while at the same time doing those things that all good librettists do to allow the composer to exploit the musical and operatic opportunities it affords. As the opera played out, I couldn’t help thinking of Honoré Daumier’s famous painting, Le Drame, in which we see, in a non-descript room, a corpse on the floor, a woman in long flowing dress in a heightened state of shock and alarm, her hands and arms thrown up to her head, and a third figure, perhaps the murderer, opposite her in a threatening stance: a kind of generic melodramatic situation, distilled to its essence. Carré and Barbier have simplified and changed the story in various ways: there are the beginnings of two Hamlet soliloquies, but essentially there are no soliloquies; Polonius is reduced to a nondescript chancellor who exchanges not a single word with Hamlet, is not murdered by him, and survives to the end of the opera, where, in the burial scene, he draws back the cloth covering Ophelia’s face; Horatio is not much more than a bit part; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are gone.
Of the characters that remain, it turns out three of them were evidently in cahoots to murder the old king: Claudius worked it out with Gertrude and, yes, with Polonius as well, conspiring together to get rid of the old king. As for the Ghost, he does appear on the battlements and in no uncertain terms tells Hamlet that Claudius killed him and demands vengeance on the treacherous brother; he reappears, as in Shakespeare, in a version of the closet scene, reprimanding Hamlet for hi