Author : Jos Hermans
Ambroise Thomas was the embodiment of the musical establishment of the Second Empire. When he celebrated the premiere of Hamlet in Paris on March 9, 1868, Verdi had only just passed the premiere of Don Carlos. According to director Krzysztof Warlikowski, Don Carlos was a major influence on Thomas' work. To be sure, I am not going to contradict this statement. Thomas' Hamlet became a somewhat sweetened version of Shakespeare's original as it had to fit the template of the Parisian "grand opéra" but it struck a chord with Parisian audiences. That Edouard Manet dedicated a painting to Jean-Baptiste Faure as Hamlet in 1877 gives an idea of the work's impact in its time. Hamlet quickly found its way onto the billboards of the international repertory: five years after its premiere, it had already visited Leipzig, London, Budapest, Brussels, Prague, New York, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna. By this time, the opera received its 100th performance in Paris, where by June 1899 it appeared to have been performed 300 times. Since the 1980s, the work has begun a slow renaissance. Musically, there is enough to enjoy to permanently include Hamlet in the repertoire. This production will certainly contribute to that; after all, the last time the opera was performed at the Paris Opera was in 1938.
Unlike Shakespeare's original, Thomas provides for a happy ending. In radiant E major sounds, Hamlet is crowned as the new ruler of Denmark. Thomas will change this ending when the opera will be performed two years later in London in an Italian version. In that version, Hamlet dies by suicide. Paris sticks to the original but deromanticizes the opera into a study in insanity that comes across as both fascinating and confusing. Once again the Polish wonderboy has turned an opera into a quirky phantasmagoria, populated by eccentric fringe characters from the Warlikowski universe, animated as always with a funny kind of queerness.
Exciting crescendi in the orchestra, with trombone and timpani in a starring role, typify the prelude to the first act. When the curtain opens to reveal the metallic gray outline of a physical and mental cage that could pass for a rest home/psychiatric clinic, we see a shuffling middle-aged Hamlet with his handicapped mother Gertrude, confined to a wheelchair, watching television (Bresson's "Les dames du Bois de Boulogne"). Claudius, Laërtes and Ophelia are visitors indulging in a card game. All of this is seen through the eyes of a Hamlet who is far from being lucid as suggested by the body language of the main character.
Only in retrospect will it become clear that two temporal layers coexist: acts 1 and 5 correspond to the present framing the long flashback of acts 2, 3 and 4. In doing so, the director suggests that the middle section is fantasized and is the reason for Hamlet's stay in the hospital. What is fantasized by a mad Hamlet, arriving in the present, we will never find out exactly. In the end, the director gets trapped in his playing with time, fantasy and reality. This is what costs this splendid performance half a star in the final rating.
A reprise of the orchestral crescendo introduces the interlude (with the delightful trombone solo) that moves the action into the mental space of Hamlet's dialogue with the ghost of his father, a sad white clown with long black claw nails. The rhythmic pattern in the dialogue with the ghost soon develops into an earworm. An eerie-looking moon as in Von Trier's Melancholia dominates the video image on the back wall.
In a time jump back by 20 years, we then see Hamlet as a young man who has never grown up, playing with a remote-controlled toy car and who has not overcome his childhood traumas. He has not been able to deal with the blow of the death of his father, who may not even have died of a criminal cause, any more than he has been able to accept Gertrude's marriage to Claudius. There is certainly a strong oedipal complex toward the mother, and it is suspected that the whole love affair with Ophelia is the result of a distorted view of reality.
The costumes are almost all 1920s. Gertrude now wears a goofy hat with a feather. The drinking song (Ô vin, dissipe la tristesse) featuring glasses of milk, ends in an amusing choreography (Claude Bardouil). Hamlet also features the first-ever saxophone in the opera, and Warlikowski allows the "historic" alto saxophone solo that introduces the pantomime "la tragédie du roi Gonzague et de la reine Genièvre" to "degenerate" on stage into a short free jazz improvisation. Truly vintage Warlikowski!
Both musically and dramatically, the third act is the strongest. Those with little time can limit themselves to it (it starts at 1:33:45). The prelude, loaded with solid brass, shares in Hamlet's agitation and his mother's anger, both the result of the unmasking effect of the pantomime. Ludovic Tézier is now really moving into fullness of voice, and it undoubtedly marks a new high point in his career. "No more extravagance in opera" Tézier had said last year in the Corriera della sera. There he confessed to a certain dissatisfaction with modern directors, quoting his son who no longer recognized la Traviata in Simon Stone's version, a production he himself had cancelled. Tézier who by nature is not a great actor manages to produce one of his best acting performances here. No aspect of his character, tormented by the betrayal of his relatives and driven by a desire for revenge, escapes him. It remains Warlikowski's enormous achievement to bring the utmost out of his actors. Few are capable of the same. You will search in vain for a single conventional gesture throughout the performance.
"To be or not to be" narrowly avoids turning into a suicide attempt. Jean Teitgen, with his rather moderately projecting bass, is at his best in Claudius' aria "Je t'implore, ô mon frère." The tone and the nobility of his phrasing is most beautiful here. Polonius, Ophelia's father, turns out to be an accomplice of Claudius (not so with Shakespeare). With the beautiful trio (Hamlet-Ophelia-Gertrude) and the ensuing Hamlet-Gertrude duet, congenially supported by the orchestra, Eve-Maud Hubeaux also comes into her own with her bright lyrical mezzo-soprano. Her Gertrude is sometimes an unscrupulous vamp, sometimes a concerned mother, sometimes a broken woman. Hubeaux is also very convincing in her acting.
The fourth act's obligatory ballet is not a high-flyer but has sparkling moments. Three of the five parts are deleted. A ballerina in tutu opens before introducing the chorus and six dancers. Lisette Oropesa is the vocal acrobat on duty and the "femme fragile" (in négligé) who so fascinated Parisians of the time, singing Ophelia's madness scene with diva allure. It's a scene that contains quite a few bel canto clichés and I find it overrated. During the waltz, she hands out oranges instead of flowers; her madness is most evident in the faces of the disinterested bystanders with an orange in their hands. The ballad "Pâle et blonde," based in part on a Swedish folk song, spreads a certain melancholy. The seraphic songs that the humming choir raises from the lake are so misty that one might believe not to be on earth anymore. In Paris where the lake is absent, Ophelia steps into her bath and drowns on a rising pianissimo on a high B. Needless to say, the coloratura and trills Lisette Oropesa manages very nicely. In the fifth act, we return to the present. Both gravediggers are doing forensic examinations on a corpse. Hamlet now manifests himself as the counterpart of his father, dressed in the suit of a black clown. During the enigmatic final image, Ophelia blows the ashes from her urn.
Thomas could write for voices and has an eye for balance with the soloists which is never compromised in this performance. It is a generous sound that Pierre Dumoussaud and the ONP orchestra spread over the heads of the grateful Parisian audience, at the same time delicately and with an eye for the colors added by harps, trombone, saxophone and other brass. Throughout the third act he makes the orchestra sound very excited, delivering the dramatic impetus that elevates the work here above mediocrity.
Watch the show on Arte Concert until 31.03.2024