What young girl would not have dreamed of loving and being loved by the handsome Prince of Denmark? Ophelia wants to believe in her happiness, even though she feels that the worm is already in the fruit. Inspired by Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas was created at the Opéra de Paris in 1868. If the music was able to confuse the public and critics, the protagonists of the time received strong praise: “It was the admirable interpretation of Faure and Nilsson that saved everything”, wrote a few years later Henri Moreno in The Minstrel, as reported in the show’s (remarkable) program booklet.
We would be tempted to use the same words today, as the couple formed by Stéphane Degout and Sabine Devieilhe manages if not to completely “save”, at least to defend a score which contains, of course, some magnificent scenes but, let’s face it, many heavy moments. The bold and sensual instrumentation fails to enliven them or lighten them with their pasty solemnity.
A racy musical direction
The elegant, racy and subtle direction of Louis Langrée nevertheless reveals the best facets of the score, at the head of a poetic Orchester des Champs-Élysées and the singers of the Elements, also without reproach. The soloists have an unequal vocal and dramatic charisma, the low voices in particular (the king, the spectrum) taking some involuntary liberties with the accuracy. We must salute the theatrical commitment of the mezzo-soprano Géraldine Chauvet, called at the last minute or almost to replace her colleague Lucile Richardot (suffering from Covid) in the tortured role of the mother of Hamlet. The very demanding vocal writing sometimes abuses her, but she confronts it with courage and the public is grateful to her.
lose your mind, lose your life
Their expressive and sensitive faces filmed up close (sometimes too much) and projected onto the stage, Hamlet and Ophelia struggle in their existential torments. She will lose her reason and her life, he will escape the fatal fate that Shakespeare had in store for him, but for a future no doubt as painful as it is glorious.
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Navigating the full range of psychological and musical nuances, the role of the Prince of Denmark finds in Stéphane Degout an interpreter combining two seemingly antinomic qualities, courage and fragility. Dressed hastily in a crumpled shirt and corkscrew pants, the baritone draws its nobility and grace from the sole (and vast) resources of its song.
But it is with Sabine Devieilhe that the most intense emotion invades the theater. Ambroise Thomas offers his Ophelia a deeply touching, whimsical and desperate scene of madness and suicide. Already lost, the abandoned young woman goes from lucidity to dreams, from feverish joy to melancholy and tears. Sometimes a little covered in very sonorous ensembles, the winged, fluid and radiant voice of the soprano touches the ear and the heart of each spectator when it is, as here, in majesty, supported by the delicate palpitations of the orchestra. to which Louis Langrée then asks to make a velvet paw. In a whisper, Ophelia leaves the earth to drown among the “water nymphs”, recalling one last time the immensity and the eternity of his love for Hamlet. The curtain falls at the end of the fourth and penultimate act on the image of her body covered by the waves and her loose hair, similar to blond seaweed.