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SYNOPSIS
Act I
Elsinore Castle, Denmark
A celebration is underway as King Claudius crowns
Gertrude, the wife of the recently deceased King of
Denmark, queen. Hamlet, the Queen’s son, is noticeably
absent from the festivities, but he arrives once the royal
party departs to privately condemn his mother for
remarrying barely two months since his father’s death.
Ophelia enters. She is the daughter of Lord Chamberlain
Polonius and Hamlet’s fiancée. She is upset by rumors that
he will leave the court soon, but Hamlet assures her that
he loves her (“Doute de la lumière”). Laertes, Ophelia’s
brother, arrives, announces that the King is sending him
to Norway, and entrusts Ophelia to Hamlet’s care and
protection. As Ophelia and Laertes go to join the lords and
ladies for the coronation banquet, Hamlet refuses to join
them and leaves. Horatio and Marcellus rush in looking for
Hamlet. They have come to tell him that they have seen the
Ghost of his father on the castle’s ramparts.
Castle Ramparts
Hamlet, having heard that Horatio and Marcellus were
looking for him, arrives at the ramparts. They tell him that
his father’s ghost passed there at midnight and disappeared
as the cock crowed. Hamlet is seized by fear at the idea.
As midnight strikes, the Ghost appears again and Hamlet
asks why he has come. He signals for Hamlet’s companions
to leave, but they do not go until Hamlet orders them gone.
Now alone, the Ghost tells Hamlet that it is his duty to
avenge his murder. Hamlet learns that Claudius, the dead
king’s brother and newly-crowned king, together with
Queen Gertrude, poisoned him. Hamlet’s father demands
he kill the King but spare the Queen so that heaven can
punish her. Hamlet swears to obey.
Act II
Castle Gardens
Ophelia is troubled by Hamlet’s recent behavior. He
has become cold towards her, fleeing at her approach.
Hamlet enters the gardens and Ophelia pretends not to
see him while lamenting the falseness of men. The Queen
approaches Ophelia and asks if she knows why Hamlet
is troubled. Ophelia claims that Hamlet has fallen out of
love with her and asks permission to leave court. Hamlet’s
mother insists that he still loves Ophelia and that Ophelia
must stay to help cure his madness. Ophelia agrees and
leaves once King Claudius enters. The Queen asks the
King if perhaps her son has learned the truth, but the King
believes Hamlet’s madness stems only from a feeble mind.
Approaching Hamlet, the King asks the prince to call him
father, but Hamlet refuses. Hamlet also refuses to come to
the ongoing feast, but he promises to provide a theatrical
presentation especially for their entertainment that evening.
The royal couple departs as Horatio and Marcellus lead the
troupe of actors to Hamlet. The prince tells them to prepare
“The Murder of Gonzague” and to wait for his signal to
pour the poison during the play. Putting on the guise of a
madman again, Hamlet encourages the actors to enjoy
themselves and sings a drinking song (“Ô vin, dissipe la
tristesse”).
The Great Hall
The court has assembled to watch the play. Hamlet takes a
seat at Ophelia’s feet and tells Marcellus to watch the King
closely. The play begins and Hamlet begins a commentary
on the action. The king in the play falls asleep in the arms
of the queen. A traitor appears and poisons the king. When
the traitor grabs the king’s crown and places it on his head,
in the audience King Claudius reacts sharply and orders
the actors gone. The Ghost’s accusations of his brother
confirmed for him, Hamlet feigns madness, and accusing
the King of betrayal, snatches the crown off his head. The
court reacts with horror to Hamlet’s rage and rushes to get
away from him.
Act III
Castle Chapel
Hamlet reflects on his hesitation to kill the King (“Être ou ne
pas être”) and hides as the King enters. A guilty Claudius
pleads with his brother’s soul to intercede for him with God.
Hamlet decides that he should not kill the King right now
since his soul could be saved in this moment of repentance.
Polonius enters and reminds the King as they are leaving
to control his fear so that no one will suspect them for the
murder. Alone, Hamlet is sickened to learn that Ophelia’s
father had a part in the death of his own father. Just then,
the Queen leads Ophelia into the chapel so that Hamlet
can marry her. He violently rejects the girl and tells her to
go join the convent. Broken, Ophelia returns his ring and
leaves. The Queen warns Hamlet that he has offended the
King, and Hamlet confronts his mother on her role in the
murder. She pleads with Hamlet to show her mercy, and
the ghost of his father appears, unseen by the Queen,
reminding Hamlet that he promised to spare her. Seeing
Hamlet talking to no one, the Queen is again convinced her
son has gone mad.
Act IV
The lake
A group of peasants celebrate spring’s arrival and Ophelia,
having gone mad from grief, joins them. She claims to be
Hamlet’s wife and tells them the story of a Willis: the spirit
of a girl that died from heartbreak and lies in wait to kill
faithless men (“Pâle et blonde dort sous l’eau profonde”).
This particular one is a water nymph hiding in the lake. The
peasants realize that Ophelia is mad, and watch as she
drowns herself trying to hide in the reeds with the nymph.
ACT V
The Cemetery
Gravediggers are digging a hole as they discuss death’s
unavoidable nature. Hamlet overhears them and asks about
the grave’s soon-to-be occupant, but the gravediggers
cannot remember the name. Hamlet, returning after two
days’ absence, does not know of Ophelia’s death, and he
wrestles with guilt over his treatment of her (“Comme une
pâle fleur”). Laertes finds Hamlet, having returned to bury
his sister, and challenges the prince to a duel. Hamlet is
wounded as Ophelia’s funeral procession with the King,
the Queen, Polonius, and the entire court appears. Hamlet
mournfully grasps that Ophelia is dead. The Ghost of
Hamlet’s father appears to all, and commands Hamlet to
fulfill his duty. The Prince rushes at King Claudius and kills
him before succumbing to death himself.
PROGRAM NOTES
Thomas’ very first opera was a comic opera produced at
the Opéra Comique in 1837. The opera La double échelle
eventually received 247 performances, but his second comic
opera, a Rossini-inspired piece called Le caïd (1849), was
an unprecedented success, having over 362 performances
and proving the bel canto (“beautiful singing”) style was
moving beyond Italy. Eventually, Thomas composed roughly
20 operas, but most of them have fallen out of the repertory.
Critics blame the low quality of his librettos for that fact, since
it was noted that the music he composed was lyrical and fit
very well into the tastes of the time.
Like his other operas, Mignon (1866) also premiered at the
Opéra Comique, but it was the first opera that garnered him
critical attention outside of France. Within the next 28 years,
in Paris alone, the opera received over 1,000 performances,
but it was produced and well received all over Europe.
Mignon is rarely produced today, and the reason for that,
according to Julius Rudel, conductor and well-known general
director of New York City Opera from 1957 to 1979, was
that Thomas bowed too much to the compositional rules of the
day and made the music and libretto too sentimental, which
did not fit with the original tragic story by Goethe.
Hamlet
Thomas’ next opera was Hamlet (1868), a strategic choice
for the composer for several reasons. Thomas had a strong
affinity for Shakespeare. The bard’s work first appeared in
1850 in Thomas’ Le songe d’une nuit d’été (A Midsummer
Night’s Dream), a rather odd grab bag of a work that had
little to do with the original play. The opera included Falstaff
(the character in three of Shakespeare’s plays), Elizabeth I,
and the bard himself. Mignon, which came along a number
of years after Thomas became a composition professor at
the Paris Conservatory in the late 1850s, also included a
Shakespearean reference to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In
the first act of the opera, a group of actors is preparing for
a performance of the play, not unlike the play-within-a-play
found in Hamlet.
The composer’s initial strategy lay in the selection of Hamlet
for his base material. Setting great literary works was
exceedingly popular in 19th century France, and Hamlet,
a tragedy about revenge – a topic well-suited to opera – is
credited as being unsurpassed in all of Western literature.
The chosen librettists were also part of the composer’s plan.
Jules Barbier and Michel Carré worked together first in 1852,
and rather quickly, they became the go-to duo for adapting
literary works. Their lasting works are Faust (1859) and
Roméo et Juliette (1867) both for Charles-François Gounod
and The Tales of Hoffman (1881) for Jacques Offenbach.
No strangers to Thomas, the duo had previously written the
librettos for the composer’s Psyché (1857) and Mignon,
and after Hamlet, they wrote Françoise de Rimini (1882) for
Thomas too.
Naturally, adapting a Shakespearian play into an operatic
format offered the librettists certain challenges, but they
succeeded in condensing it into a workable and still dramatic
libretto. Certain familiar elements, characters, and subtleties
of the story had to be omitted (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
for example, never appear, and Hamlet does not kill
Polonius). Other elements of the opera were either changed
or added to the original play in order to give Thomas
some intensely dramatic moments to score. The moment
that Claudius is accused in public of murdering the king
happens at the end of the play, but it occurs in the second
act of the opera, giving Thomas the opportunity to unleash a
powerful and passionate ensemble scene. However, it was
the librettists’ additions in two other areas that gained them
praise and criticism in equal measure.
Ophelia’s death, for Shakespeare, is relayed by Queen
Gertrude to Laertes. The audience does not witness the girl’s
final moments, and the question is left to interpretation if her
death was, in fact, an accident generated by madness or
suicide. For Thomas, Barbier, and Carré though, Ophelia’s
death was too delicious a morsel to leave off the stage.
The “Mad Scene” certainly had roots in the bel canto style
that Thomas appreciated so much. Donizetti’s Lucia di
Lammermoor and Bellini’s I Puritani have similar mad scenes
that include the heroine succumbing to the idea of her
lover’s betrayal. For the opera’s Ophelia and her descent
into complete madness and death, Thomas generated a true
tour-de-force scene, requiring not only a soprano capable of
incredible lyrical brilliance and stamina, but also its own act.
One change the librettists made in their adaption of the
play, a change that reflected the tastes of the opera-going
public in Paris at the time, is what ultimately caused the
biggest criticism of the piece – Hamlet lives and is crowned
king. Those days, all operas done at the Opéra Comique
had happy endings, so Barbier and Carré decided to use
Alexandre Dumas’ 1847 translation of the play to provide the
ending they needed. However, by the time the opera was to
be performed in 1870 at London’s Convent Garden, a much
more English version of the ending had been adapted in
which Hamlet is killed by Laertes, as Shakespeare intended.
This is the ending Fort Worth Opera’s production uses.
Synopsis & Program Notes by Hannah Guinn, Director of the Fort
Worth Opera Studio & Education
17
Hamlet
Ambroise Thomas
French composer Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas (18111896) is best known now for two operas: Mignon (1866)
and Hamlet (1868). He is also remembered for being
the director of the Paris Conservatory from 1871 until his
death, during a time of increasing focus on national styles
in composition and the beginnings of Wagner’s influence
across Europe. Being born to musical parents, Thomas and
his older brother were both destined to become musicians
themselves. Their father played in theater orchestras and
became a well-respected music teacher later in life. Their
mother was also a music teacher and an accomplished
singer. Of the brothers, the elder Charles played cello for the
orchestra of the Opéra Comique in Paris, where the younger
Ambroise joined him to study at the Paris Conservatory
in 1828. Entering the school as a pianist, Thomas began
studying composition, and in 1832, he won the Grand Prix
de Rome, a prestigious competition held by the Conservatory
that financed the winning composer’s travel and study in
Rome for three years. Thomas discovered a love for Italian
melody during his time there, which can be heard in some of
the songs, piano pieces, and chamber works he composed
during his sojourn. The composer traveled briefly to Germany
from Rome, but then returned to Paris and set his sights on the
Opéra Comique.