Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet” Opera – With a Happy Ending

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I had a Blu-Ray disc I wanted to run of Ambroise Thomas’s 1868 opera Hamlet in a new production from 2019 featuring the chorus of the Opéra-Comique (do I really need to explain once again that the name of the venue has nothing necessarily to do with the “comic” or non-“comic” nature of the works performed there? Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Bizet’s Carmen, both with famously unhappy endings, were premiered at the Opéra-Comique) and the group Les Éléments along with the Orchestre des Champs-Élysees conducted by Louis Langrée.The stars were baritone Stéphane Degout as Hamlet (Thomas was originally going to compose the role for tenor, but the famous baritone Jean-Baptiste Fauré – best known today as the composer of the song “Les Rameaux” – was “between parts” just then so it became a vehicle for him), coloratura soprano Sabine Deviellhe as Ophelia, bass Laurent Alvaro as Claudius, mezzo-soprano Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo as Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, and tenor Julien Behr as Laertes. Hamlet has got a lot of bad press over the years for being a, shall we say, rather “free” adaptation of Shakespeare’s play – librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré (who also wrote the texts for Thomas’s Mignon and Gounod’s Faust and Roméo et Juliette) didn’t work from the actual Shakespeare play but from an intervening French adaptation by, of all people, Alexandre Dumas père. Just what a French adventure writer whose most famous book these days is The Three Musketeers was doing writing a semi-translation, semi-adaptation of Shakespeare seems like a mystery, but supposedly he was at once taken with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and convinced that the play come scritto, even translated into French, wouldn’t work for French audiences.

The main problems were the sheer number of characters in the original, the use of the Ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father – who appears in Shakespeare’s Act I to tell Hamlet that his brother Claudius murdered him and then married Hamlet’s mother Gertrude and took the Danish throne, and demand Hamlet kill Claudius to avenge him, but never shows up again – and the ending. Accordingly Dumas cut out the subsidiary characters altogether or reduced them to mere walk-ons and had the Ghost reappear twice more, including at the end of the last act as a deus ex machina. Also, instead of the bloodbath that ends Shakespeare’s play – in which Laertes fatally wounds Hamlet as part of a plot by Claudius to eliminate him, the dying Hamlet slays both Claudius and Gertrude and morally wounds Laertes as well, and then Shakespeare’s own deus ex machina, the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras, comes on at the end to take over Denmark now that the Danish royal family has essentially annihilated itself en masse – Hamlet merely kills Claudius, the Ghost reappears to tell the Danish court that Hamlet has now “expiated” the sin of Claudius’s murder of Hamlet’s father, and the court proclaims Hamlet the new King of Denmark. This was the version Barbier and Carré supplied Thomas in their libretto, and Thomas responded with a rather mopey-sounding opera that takes about an act and a half to build up any emotional or dramatic power but becomes surprisingly good for the rest of the evening.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the play is going to miss a lot of people and events that occur in it but don’t in the opera – Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are out completely (though some people producing the play also delete them), Polonius is reduced to a walk-on in one scene (and Hamlet doesn’t kill him by mistake thinking he’s Claudius) and Laertes’ part is shrunk considerably (though he gets a nice early aria and a later duet with Hamlet, the sort of tenor-baritone “buddy duet” that appeared in French operas as early as Jacques Hálevy’s 1840’s The Queen of Cyprus and by 1868 had recently graced French stages in Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers and Verdi’s Don Carlos) while Ophelia’s is greatly expanded. She gets a long coloratura aria in act one, another extended solo in act two, and act four is devoted exclusively to her big mad scene, which along with Hamlet’s drinking song in act two (he sings it before he brings on the players to re-stage Claudius’s murder of Hamlet’s father as a pantomime play and thereby “catch the conscience of the King”, and then reprises it after Claudius immediately shuts down the play once he realizes what it’s about and why Hamlet wanted to put it on). Ophelia’s mad scene has become a favorite of coloratura sopranos – Nellie Melba made a complete record of it in 1910 (even though it stretched over two 78 rpm sides, and in the days before her record label, Victor, released two-sided classical records that meant you had to pay $4 in 1910 dollars to hear the whole thing) and Maria Callas followed suit in 1958 (on an LP called Callas Sings Mad Scenes that also included the finales of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Bellini’s Il Pirata) and Joan Sutherland in 1960 (on her album The Art of the Prima Donna, a series of tributes to the great divas of the 19th century) – though much to my surprise there’s a fascinating five-minute postlude that includes a chorus that was omitted from all these separate recordings that is even lovelier than the main part of the scene.

This Hamlet was staged by Cyril Teste, who had me scared for a moment when I read the blurb on the Blu-Ray box which credited him with “reinstating the powerful original ending.” That made me wonder whether he had actually staged the ending with Hamlet surviving and becoming King of Denmark, or whether he had used the alternate ending Thomas wrote for a proposed production at Covent Garden in London in 1869 in which Hamlet commits suicide, thereby bringing the opera closer to the “powerful original ending” of Shakespeare’s play. According to the Wikipedia page on the opera, the Covent Garden ending wasn’t actually used in the Covent Garden production, or anywhere else until the 1980’s – when Richard Bonynge, Joan Sutherland’s husband, conductor and musical guru, dredged it up and recorded a version with her as Ophelia, Sherrill Milnes as Hamlet, and an ending Bonynge mashed up from both of Thomas’s versions in which Hamlet dies more or less as he does in Shakespeare. Thomas and his librettists seem to have been motivated to create the alternate ending by the fear that a Hamlet with a happy ending could be accepted in France but would be laughed off the stage in Shakespeare’s own country, but in the end the British productions of the 19th century had the same happy ending as the French ones and endured this brickbat from a critic for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1890: “No one but a barbarian or a Frenchman would have dared to make such a lamentable burlesque of so tragic a theme as Hamlet.”

The authors of the Wikipedia page on the opera seem to be arguing that the French had fallen in love with the doomed Ophelia as a character – and especially with the Scottish actress Harriet Smithson, who had come to Paris with a troupe of Scottish actors to perform several Shakespeare plays in the late 1820’s. They were performing in English, which makes me wonder just how much the French audiences got out of it, but critics raved about Smithson’s pantomime of Ophelia’s growing madness. The Frenchman who was most infatuated with her was composer Hector Berlioz, an ardent admirer of Shakespeare in general, who pursued Smithson romantically and eventually got her to marry him even though he knew no English and she knew no French. She reportedly inspired him to compose the Symphonie Fantastique (actually a grim story-telling symphony about a young artist who, under the influence of opium, dreams that he kills his girlfriend, is executed and ends up in hell; director Joseph Ruben used the final movement, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” as the theme for Julia Roberts’ abusive husband, played by Patrick Bergin, in the 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy) and they stayed married for two decades, despite her own life-imitates-art descent into mental illness. (Some of the saddest parts of Berlioz’ autobiography detail the amounts of time and money he had to spend making sure she was taken care of, drawing him away from his own work.)

I have mixed feelings about Thomas’s Hamlet; it’s not the play – not even the play as it would have necessarily had to be shortened for an operatic adaptation – but then I can’t think of many 19th century composers besides Berlioz or Verdi (or Wagner, except he probably wouldn’t have been interested even though he'd written a Shakespeare-based opera early in his career) who could have done it better. (Verdi would have loved the challenge of setting the bloodbath that ends the play; Thomas was probably O.K. with the libretto not containing it.) It’s an oddly talky opera, which led my husband Charles to argue early on that it was in a way a throwback to the all-recitative early operas of Monteverdi and the other creators of the form, which they called dramma per musica and aimed at re-creating the performances of ancient Greek plays (which quite frankly were probably closer to modern-day rap – dialogue declaimed in regular rhythms to percussion accompaniment – than either modern-day drama or modern-day opera). It doesn’t have a lot of big arias (except for Ophelia), though it also doesn’t have the big, churning orchestra Wagner used to carry the emotional weight of his scores. (In 1868, seven years after the legendary failure of Tannhäuser at the Paris Opéra, Wagner’s name was anathema through most of the French musical world; by the 1890’s, well after Wagner’s death, so many French composers were being influenced by him that the Paris Opéra got nicknamed “le petit Bayreuth.”)

Much of it is surprisingly understated, though there are some marvelously theatrical moments, notably the play-within-a-play scene in which Hamlet narrates the action just to drive the dramatic point home both to Claudius and to us. Cyril Teste’s production involved multi-media effects, notably use of a giant TV screen suspended over the stage that could be raised or lowered to give us different perspectives on the action (one of the ways modern directors try to give live stage shows some of the attributes of film), and he also had the actors perform in modern dress – though that’s become common enough in actual Shakespeare productions it didn’t particularly bother me. It’s an intriguing opera and I’m glad both that I finally caught up with it and I got to see a version with the original ending – even though the ending seems rather limp (Hamlet kills Claudius – either that or the Ghost comes back and takes him away à la the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, another opera in which a murder victim returns supernaturally to take revenge against his killer – he orders Gertrude to a convent and the people, who in Act I eagerly proclaimed their joy at having Claudius marry his former sister-in-law and become King, equally eagerly proclaim their joy at having that rather indecisive nerd made King of Denmark). Teste’s staging innovations didn’t (at least for me) cross the line into offensive Regietheater, and he cast the opera well. Degout was a good Hamlet (though he’s suffering male pattern baldness that made him look older than Laurent Alvaro’s Claudius –but he might have looked even sillier if Teste had given him the page-boy blond wig Laurence Olivier wore in his 1948 film of the play), and Devillhe might not be quite as spectacular as Callas or Sutherland but she did Ophelia’s mad scene beautifully, even though at the end, in one of Teste’s sillier staging decisions, he had her sing the postlude through a screen that was supposed to make her look like she was underwater, sort of like the cast of Aquaman.

Thomas composed an aria for “To be, or not to be,” and though I can imagine a stronger setting of this great piece of poetry it worked in the context and Degout did it justice, and he was particularly effective in the play scene and the chilling confrontation between him and his mom. Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo did full justice to the scene and to her role in general, and if anything Barbier and Carré made Gertrude more culpable in her husband’s murder than Shakespeare did (which suggested that Degout and Brunet-Grupposo might be appropriate casting for Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth in Verdi’s opera of that play). Certainly the overall production and Langrée’s conducting (I’ve found him a bit gimmicky in some of his televised Mostly Mozart concerts on PBS, but he was fine here) did justice to the work, even though it’s enough of a fringe opera that when I looked up the 14-CD Bravissimo Records collection Shakespeare at the Opera, it wasn’t included. The works that were were Verdi’s Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff, Bellini’s I Capuleti è I Montecchi – which only has a “cousin” relationship to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet since it was based not on the play but on the original Italian story, the “Daysong,” which was also Shakespeare’s source – Wagner’s Das Liebesverbot (based on Measure for Measure), Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.