Author: Johan Uytterschaut
Following the world premiere of Brett Dean’s Hamlet in Glyndebourne in 2017, The Guardian wrote: “New opera doesn’t often get to sound this good”. Allow me to find this a problematic statement. In a sense even gratuitous. Even if it could be true. Let me explain myself.
First: there’s no doubt about the fact that Brett Dean’s score is a carny for the orchestra and the conductor: challenging, complex, rendering a cornucopia of colours, an unedited percussion section (good for a few additions in the orchestration manual), “Fernorchester” in both front boxes. 21st century music is allowed to sound like this. No question. And the rendering by the Met orchestra (Nicholas Carter conducting) is, as usual, of superior quality.
Somewhat less convincing: the vocal writing. Competing with the orchestral forces just mentioned is no simple matter. Even Richard Wagner always took care not to suffocate the voices in his operas. Something Richard Strauss did allow himself to do at first, but turned away from eventually. And then there’s the shape of Dean’s melodies. The much appraised “lyricism” mentioned in the interviews? I didn’t notice that; well, hardly a few times, I did. In that respect, the Met’s trailer was deceptive. There are some less crowded pages in the score, allowing the voice to deliver an enjoyable phrase, as there was the pageant of Gonzago’s murder, or Gertrud’s soliloquy near the end. But those pages are far too scarce. In opera, one expects a musical counterpart of the lyrics. And there are a hundred thousand interesting ways of realising as much. Take Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, for example, or Thomas Ades’ Exterminating Angel. Not in this score. The vocal lines are almost always jittery, angular, working against the prosody, sometimes absurdly eccentric in tessitura. The obvious examples are (mainly) to be found in the Music Manchester Group of Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle. I thought we left that kind of destructive aesthetics far behind us. Evidently, it is Dean’s right to write like this, but it doesn’t make me happy in any way. For the record, not a bad word about the singers who cleared this job, tenor Allan Clayton’s Hamlet leading, with a very honourable mention for bass John Relyea (the ghost, the comedians’ leader, and the grave digger).
This brings me to my most important objection to this opera. No matter how confronting Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy is, the piece has been developed along a solid musical dramaturgy. It’s message is a garish 1960’s kind of rebellion against anything and everything, but there is a clear dramatic view behind it. In this Hamlet, it seams to me Shakespeare is left to handle it; the soundtrack is delivered for free. Well, it doesn’t work like that. However much drama there is in the play, as little music drama there is in the opera. I experience squalor of musical material mostly as an ordeal. As I tend to say: “Minimal music is of minimal interest”. But Brett Dean’s score flips towards the opposite. This piece is suffering from a disease of our time: an overload of information, without anything being done with it. To quote Claude Shannon’s information theory: where is the redundancy? What can the audience of a universal drama as Hamlet cling to, if the musical added value supposed to be projected on it appears to have nothing to do with it? Let me turn things around: should opera today keep turning to old days’ recipes? Absolutely not, but there are timeless principles steering the art of music drama towards a message that sticks. None of those principles to be found here.
Same problem with Neil Armfield’s production. The sober elegance of Ralph Myers’ sets definitely offers some possibilities. But the images got carried away by the chaotical sounding hustle and bustle, adding to the overstraining of the whole. It is remarkable that most acting achievements held their own.
After one audition, I can’t determine how much Matthew Jocelyn’s libretto is co-responsible for all that. He certainly offers workable solutions to avoid the all too obvious traps of the play’s quotes. But I didn’t acquire a clear view on the libretto’s structure. Hardly possible when being engulfed by a musical tsunami.
Luckily, the rest is silence.