Hamlet (Glyndebourne Opera Festival) ★★★★★
Three ‘new’ operatic versions of Hamlet in two years: the time is certainly not ‘out of joint’ for Shakespeare. Italian composer and conductor Franco Faccio’s Amleto was successfully premièred in Genoa in 1865, but then had a disastrous performance at La Scala in Milan in 1871. An indisposed tenor playing the murderously challenging title role effectively sabotaged the performance, which went ahead against the desires of the composer: a performance with a ‘voiceless Hamlet’, as the critics noted. A devastated Faccio destroyed most of his music, except the autograph score of the opera, and did not compose another note of music, but established a career as an outstanding conductor.
The opera then completely disappeared for well over a hundred years, until American scholar and conductor Anthony Barrese, whose interest in Verdi led him to Faccio, discovered the crumbling original manuscript score in the publishing firm Casa Ricordi’s archives in Milan. He created a performing edition, which was premièred in Albuquerque by Opera Southwest in 2014. However, the opera finally triumphantly resurfaced in its European homeland in Bregenz, Austria, in 2016.
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