42 LIMELIGHT MAY 2017 http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au
OHAMLETComposersfromBerlioztoVerdi
haveshiedawayfromHamlet,but
notBrettDean.TheAustralian
composer talks toClive Paget
about bringing Shakespeare’s most
complex character to operatic life
N
o one could accuse Brett Dean of being
predictable. His first opera, an adaptation
of Peter Carey’s 1981, award-winning novel
Bliss, couldn’t have been a more up-to-date
affair. A darkly comic tale of modern families,
midlife crisis and the pointlessness of the rat race, it told its
tale over a leisurely three hours and was roundly applauded
at its 2010 Sydney premiere and subsequent transfers to
Hamburg and Edinburgh. It’s perhaps surprising then
that for an intended two-hour follow up, Australia’s
apostle of the new should turn to perhaps
Shakespeare’s wordiest challenge:Hamlet.
“I was daunted by the idea at first,”admits
Dean, chatting at length over the phone
from his home in Germany where he’s lived
since he left Brisbane in 1984 to join the
viola desks of Herbert von Karajan’s Berlin
Philharmonic. But in fact, the idea to do a
Hamletopera wasn’t Dean’s at all.
Glyndebourne, Britain’s musical powerhouse set
on the Sussex Downs, had already sounded him out, but
despite drawing up a long list of options, nothing seemed
to fit. It was Danish tenor, Gert Henning-Jensen who
offered the idea – or rather it was his elderly vocal coach,
whose opinion was casually sought at a concert an hour
out of Copenhagen where Magdalena Kožená was singing
some of Dean’s songs.“Gert asked what, in her opinion, is
the opera that most needs to be written,”says Dean,“and
she, without a moment’s hesitation, said although there
have been many attempts, there still isn’t aHamletopera.”
Actually,Hamletis only topped byRomeo and Julietas
the Shakespeare play to have inspired the most operatic
adaptations, yet none of them hold the stage today.Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Respighi, Bizet and even Verdi
contemplated the attempt but never followed through.
The closest anyone came to cracking the code was
Ambroise Thomas whose 1868 grand opera occasionally
sees the light of day. But people can be sniffy about it:
“Poor Shakespeare! How they have mistreated him!”
said Verdi on reading the score. The road to operatic hell,
it would seem, is paved with well-intentionedHamlets.
“When I first outed myself as a potentialHamlet
composer writing an opera for Glyndebourne, the
initial responses I got were ‘Ooh,Hamlet, eh?
That’s big!’And that didn’t help,”says Dean.
It was his wife, the painter Heather Betts
who picked up on the idea and ran with it.
“Heather started on a formidable cycle of
paintings based onHamlet, which is still
going on,”he explains.“She started poring
over the text, and it was Heather who said: ‘Put
aside the whole, Oh my God,Hamletthing, and
think what Will would say? He’d say, yes, go for it.’”
Going to see Lars Eidinger’sHamletat the Shaubühne
Theatre in Berlin three times clinched it. Dean found
Thomas Ostermeier’s edited down version“absolutely
mesmeric and unforgettable”and revelled in its “Young
Ones”sense of humour.“It brought it to life in a way that
wasn’t mothballs, and it wasn’t daunting,”he says.
The final ingredient was the arrival on the scene of
Canadian director and adaptor Matthew Jocelyn as a
potential librettist, a colleague from whom Dean admits
he’s learnt a great deal. Jocelyn had worked as assistant
to the great director Patrice Chereau on a French
production ofHamlet28 years previously, and
has been intimate with the text ever since.PERCHANCE
opera
Yorick(Oiloncanvas)©HeatherBetts.ImagesfromtheexhibitionBut for this, the joyful hope of thisat lindbergcontemporary.com.au