VIENNA — The operatic cabinet of curiosities that is Vienna’s Theater an der Wien came up with a potential beaut this season: the first Hamlet opera, originally performed in Venice in 1705, revived in Naples in 1711, and then in London (imagine!) in 1712, not to surface again until this month. This report follows the second performance, on May 8.
Prospects seemed promising. Though forgotten today, the composer Francesco Gasparini (1661-1727) enjoyed the respect of his contemporaries as a disciple of Arcangelo Corelli and teacher of Domenico Scarlatti — names to conjure with even today. Ambleto is the 19th of 62 operas from Gasparini’s busy quill. The creatives in charge of the Vienna revival were Raffaele Pé, a charismatic countertenor doubling as hero and music director, and the stage director Ilaria Lanzino.
The company made a point of disclosing that Ambleto derives not from Shakespeare’s play, which was unknown to its creators, but rather from Shakespeare’s source material, the medieval chronicle Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus. For a Hamlet junkie, and we are legion, the caveat only added to the anticipation.
Remember Horatio’s promise at the end of the play to inform the yet-unknowing world “of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fall’n on the inventors’ heads”? In my mind’s eye, I conjured up a spectacle of just that description — sensational, maybe even barbaric, staged (of course!) in period and swathed in music to set beside the scores of the towering Georg Frederic Handel (1685-1769), who had launched his London career with the triumphant Rinaldo just a year before Ambleto crossed the Channel.
In preparation, I went online and readily tracked down the Italian libretto by Gasparini’s frequent collaborators Apostolo Zeno and Pietro Pariati, who have no end of surprises up their sleeves. Apart from Ambleto, not a single character’s name rings a bell. As in Shakespeare (and presumably in Saxo), it’s still the case that the brother of the late king of Denmark has married his widowed ex-sister-in-law and snatched the crown, to the revulsion of the new king’s highly volatile, possibly outright insane, stepson. For cat-and-mouse politics and a pervasive aura of paranoia, the text rivals Shakespeare. But did the new king kill his brother? He did not. Does his ghost appear? It does not. A busybody Polonius type leaves spycraft mainly to his boss. Who are those two rival princesses who run around, stirring various pots? And what on earth has become of poor, forlorn, motherless Ophelia?
Rather than explore the discrepancies, Pé and Lanzino retrofit Gasparini to a tendentious feminist gloss on Hamlet, enacted by a Shakespearean sextet consisting of the prince, Ophelia, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, and Laertes. It’s no spoiler to reveal that the curtain rose on Ophelia soaking in a tub filled with blood. From there, we flashed back to the history of violence and rape of which she is the sole survivor.
Inevitably, chaos reigned in the score as well — and not just on dramaturgical grounds. As it turns out, not a note of Gasparini’s recitatives has survived, and in any Baroque opera it’s the recits (read “dialogue”) that drive the action. It’s not impossible in such circumstances to commission new ones in more or (deliberately) less authentic Baroque style, and many have gone that route. Pé and Lanzino chose not to, except in Hamlet’s nuclear face-off with his mother, which proved, by a long chalk, the most crackling episode of the evening.
For the rest, Pé and Lanzino unscrolled a pasticcio of back-to-back arias that varied in affect but were dramatically interchangeable. Have I mentioned that authorship of extant, revised Ambleto materials from London is often uncertain? Gloom (andante) and rage (vivace) predominated, rendered in shapely, frequently florid A-B-A numbers untouched by Handel’s trademark eloquence in no end of moods. Meaningful contrast between the A and B section of an aria was the exception rather than the monotonous rule. For narrative context and continuity, the production relied on prerecorded excerpts from Hamlet, spoken in German.
In short: a musicological can of worms compounding a colossal bait-and-switch. That said, Ambleto might have caught fire on its own musical and theatrical terms had not a plague of contemporary clichés gotten in the way. Martin Hickmann’s constructivist, lazy Susan of a set, with its staircase connecting chambers of various sizes at various levels, scored high for engineering but less so for originality or sense of place. To complete the picture, Vanessa Rust dressed the cast in a come-as-you-are wardrobe from stock, a thrift shop, or a factory outlet.
To an improbable degree, the musicians kept the leaky vessel afloat. Thanks to the period band La Lira di Orfeo, two dozen players strong, and their concertmistress Elisa Citterio for a constant flow of arresting sounds from birdlike flutes, reedy lower winds, blazing trumpets, and tangy strings. The percussion section of one moved neatly from a clip-clop like horses’ hooves in the overture to volleys from tuned kettledrums that boomed like singing thunder. An antique thunder sheet, underscored by the sound designer Rupert Derschmidt’s discreet electronics, added an uncanny, somehow cosmic dimension.
Erika Baikoff sang Ophelia, conceived by the director as a “strong” woman crushed by male brutality; that schizophrenic stereotype is cropping up a lot these days. In Baikoff, a Zerlina and Gretel who in the Theater an der Wien’s 950-seat jewel-box reduced a brace of dueling trumpets to a dulcet background murmur, Ophelia’s power felt real — and her defeat did not. Next stop for Baikoff, Wagner’s Elsa or Elisabeth? (But please, in a much bigger house.) The expressively nuanced Ana Maria Labin, whose credits include Mozart’s Konstanze and Contessa, put her more intimate soprano to excellent use in the role of Gertrude.
It took a while for Miklós Sebestyén’s round, juicy bass to settle into Claudius’ fluent groove, but he made it in the end. Sabotaged by a stringy, ill-fitting bald wig and I-am-a-nerd glasses, the baritone Nikolay Borchev’s Polonius came through with elegant phrasing and his handsome tenorial tone. As Laertes, the budding countertenor Maayan Licht was Ambleto’s Roman Roy, taking naughty liberties with his sister even as his frisky moves, sexy timbre, and fearless vocalism brought down the house.
Singing in rich contralto tones, Pé’s Hamlet embraced his inner psycho, scorned to court the audience’s favor and forfeited it for good with his sexual assault on Ophelia. That said, he acquitted himself with ever-wilder panache. A climactic aria late in the evening, its reams of fioritura repeatedly interrupted by freakish split-second silences, took the breath away.
