Hamlet is currently in production at the Sydney Opera House in Australia to Aug. 9.Keith Saunders/Supplied
Librettist Matthew Jocelyn wrote the text to Brett Dean’s opera Hamlet, which premiered at the Glyndebourne opera festival in England to acclaim in 2017. It is currently in production at the Sydney Opera House in Australia to Aug. 9.
“I’ve never been here,” Jocelyn said, 14 hours ahead of Toronto. “It’s quite a fascinating city to discover.”
No doubt it is, but did the general director of Toronto’s Koffler Centre of the Arts and former director of Canadian Stage absolutely need to be there? To be or not to be in Australia, that is the question (among others) posed to him.
This new Hamlet opera has been mounted a few times now. Were you required to be in Sydney to work on this production?
I don’t have to follow the production wherever it goes. But it’s nice to see each iteration as it evolves, and to be able to comment on the work and to give recommendations to singers about articulation and about meaning, because the singers change. And there’s the presence of the solidarity and the pleasure of reaping the pleasures of one’s toils of labour. Also, it’s Sydney Opera House, one of the most iconic buildings in the world.
The Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman – Lee once joked that she takes gigs based on the weather of the production’s locations.
[Laughs] One should be so lucky and so privileged.
For your libretto, you used 20 per cent of the original play’s text and took inspiration from the first quarto, or unauthorized version. What was your thinking?
When Brett Dean asked me whether I’d consider doing this project with him, in 2013, he said he wanted to write an opera based on Hamlet. I told him there was no such thing as Hamlet.
Come again?
What I meant was that there was no one text that can be considered the Hamlet text. The first folio version, which is considered by many to be the textbook version, was published two years after his death. The first quarto version was published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and there are some great pithy lines. We chose to integrate some of that into the opera.
Canadian librettist Matthew Jocelyn.Supplied
The New York Times’ Zachary Woolfe wrote that this is an adaptation about Hamlet more than it is an adaptation of Hamlet. Accurate?
That’s very kind of him. I’m fine with it. I’m fine with anyone writing anything. But, it is an adaptation. The point of any opera or any play for me is to have a narrative that is clear for somebody who doesn’t know the story. So, my objective in writing this libretto was, first and foremost, for anybody who has neither seen nor read Hamlet to be able to understand this story from the beginning to the end.
Did you succeed? What’s been the feedback?
The thing I’m most proud of is the huge number of audience members who’ve said they could never understand Hamlet, and this was the first time they could understand it. Or people who said they’d never read Hamlet, but they knew exactly what happened in this opera. That’s the prime objective: absolute clarity.
What was the inspiration for the opera?
Brett and I were [asked] to do a small chamber music piece for a string quartet and soprano, based on Ophelia’s songs. There have been endless adaptations of Ophelia’s mad songs and mad scene. I told Brett I didn’t want to do another adaptation for a string quartet. But I had this very strong image of Ophelia, who had drowned because of the weight of the words that people had said to her, and the very injurious things Hamlet had said to her. They were like stones in the pockets of her dress, and when she fell into the water, they submerged her. So, I composed a scene based not on things she said, but on the things that had been said to her or about her. She was unable to unload these terrible things that resounded and resonated within her memory and within her brain.
That really jumps off the page.
It was an emotionally powerful thing for the singer to find herself trying to evacuate this text of injurious things that had been said. It was also a very fascinating light-bulb moment where I understood Ophelia better by hearing her say, ‘Get me to a nunnery,’ rather than having Hamlet say, ‘Get thee to a nunnery.’
Canada’s Barbara Hannigan was Ophelia for the opera’s world premiere at Glyndebourne. Did you write for her in mind?
Absolutely. We were very familiar with her. We were very familiar with her voice. But we met with her beforehand, and the role was shaped very clearly with her in mind.
How did that affect the text?
There’s a famous scene where she’s received letters from Hamlet, and her father takes them and reads them to the King. Instead of that, I had Ophelia being brought in by her father and forced to sing these letters in front of the King. So, we get some textual material, but we get them in her voice. It’s an extraordinary moment because these letters are so intimate, and she is being forced by her father to read them out loud. The humiliation and the dramatic poignancy of that is far stronger than simply having Polonius read them, with Ophelia not even present.
And you also gave Hannigan more to sing.
Yes. You’re led into these moments where you realize ‘this can really work,’ for reasons that might be completely different.
This interview has been condensed and edited.