cycleSongs of Joy, so too he’s tried out ideas withHamlet,
but if anything even more so. His Second String Quartet,
subtitled‘And once I played Ophelia’, riffs with various texts
from the play. “That was our first communal putting of toes
in the water, as it were,”he explains.“I had this commission
for a quartet, and I quickly got in touch with all the partners
for the piece and said,‘Look, would it be okay if it were a
quartet with soprano, like the Schoenberg Second?’“
“The obvious thing [with the quartet] was to examine
Ophelia, but it gave Matthew an opportunity to explore
something that has been part of the whole writing process:
taking text from different characters and putting it into
other peoples’mouths. Every word is either from, but also
about or said to Ophelia. Importantly, we get quite a feisty
and strong character who is then broken, rather than being
wafty and uber-feminine as she’s often portrayed.”
Gertrude Fragments– a gift for his daughter, mezzo
soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and guitarist Andrey Lebedev –
involved stripping back the music in the operatic sketches
to return it to the world of Elizabethan lute song.Rooms
of Elsinore, for the composer as violist and pianist Juho
Pohjonen, uses the idea of sonic snapshots of Elsinore
Castle, describing what happens in each various location.
A more substantial tryout wasFrom Melodious Lay,
a 20-minute scena focussing on Hamlet and Ophelia,
composed after the opera itself was largely written.“It gave
me a chance to try out some of the orchestration ideas,
including the size of the orchestra itself, which is slightly
smaller than a standard symphony orchestra,”explains
Dean.“Different tunings too. In the opera we will have two
distant groups placed just below the roof of the theatre.
There’s a clarinet player that has two instruments, one
tuned a quarter tone lower. It gave us an important first
bite at that particular fruit. We also looked specifically at the
nature of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia.
Was there love there? What was the nature of that love?
And how did it come about that it soured so badly?”
Once they were comfortable transferring lines from
character to character, incorporating the 40-strong
Glyndebourne chorus was the next step.“Matthew has
cannily peopled the piece and given them some very
chunky stuff to sing. Only 32 of them are onstage, eight
are actually in the pit using extended vocal techniques and
adding to the soundworld of the piece. In one instance, in
the final suicide scene, they sing words (it’s the only bit not
from Shakespeare) taken from a treatise on the art of self-
defence, by a guy called Joseph Swetnam from about 1612.”
Dean attended every rehearsal forBliss, which he
described as a crash course on the art form and a crucial
appreciation of what a singer brings into the rehearsal
room everyday of their professional lives.“The great joy
of working with somebody like Peter Coleman-Wright,
who aside from sheer vocal skill brought the character of
Harry to life with such panache and humour, was a very
important learning curve for me creatingHamlet,”he says.
Glyndebourne has an enviable track record for operatic
premieres. Britten’sThe Rape of LucretiaandAlbert Herring
opened there in 1946 and 1947, while more recent
commissions have included Jonathan Dove’sFlight(1998),Birtwistle’sThe Last Supper(2000) and Péter Eötvös’sLove
and Other Demons(2008). For Dean’s opening they’ve
recruited an all-Australian creative team headed by Neil
Armfield as director with set by Ralph Myers and costumes
by Alice Babidge. Armfield, of course, is an old hand whose
1995 SydneyHamletstarred Richard Roxburgh with Cate
Blanchett as Ophelia and Geoffrey Rush as Horatio.
“Once Neil was in the mix, Matthew and I had several
three-way conversations,”says Dean.“I was wary of the
very male dominant colouring of the cast, because there are
only two female characters in the play. I’d been toying with
Rosencrantz and Guildernsten being a female/male couple
of old‘uni friends’, but it was Neil’s suggestion, I think, that
we use two countertenors for what he described as‘the
syncopated sycophants of Claudius’realm’.”
They’ve also assembled a cast of some of the world’s
finest singing actors, headed by British tenor Allan Clayton
in the title role.The distinguished British mezzo Sarah
Connolly will play Gertrude while contemporary music’s
golden girl, Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, will sing
Ophelia. Rod Gilfry sings Claudius, Kim Begley is Polonius
and Christopher Lowrey as Guildenstern will be one of the
two countertenors.They even have legendary bass Sir John
Tomlinson playing the Ghost of Old Hamlet.
Writing for familiar voices is always a pleasure for
Dean. His oratorio,The Last Days of Socrates, was written
for Tomlinson, so that was a voice he knew well, but the
collaboration with Clayton who attended both sets of
workshops has been a special treat.“Getting to know
Allan really well was an incredible stepping stone,”he says,OPHELIAISQUITEAFEISTYANDSTRONG
CHARACTER WHO IS THEN BROKEN, RATHER
THAN BEING WAFTY AND UBER-FEMININE
46 LIMELIGHT MAY 2017 http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au
O HAMLET
River(Mixed materials on Etching paper) © Heather Betts