Faccio - Amleto

[BerlinExpat]

Franco Faccio's rediscovered opera Amleto was performed in Europe for the first time in over 130 years at the Bregenz Festival last week. I attended the last performace and IMHO it's a hitherto lost masterpiece that I can't stop listening to. Pavel Černoch as Amleto is a joy to watch and listen to.

Apparently the funeral march for Ofelia in Act 3 is performed by a brass band every Easter Saturday on Corfu!

Franco Faccio
(* 8 March 1840 in Verona; † 21 July 1891 in Monza)

Amleto
Opera in four acts
Libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare's play Hamlet.
Première: Teatro Carlo Fenice, Genoa, 30 May 1865

Amleto    Pavel Černoch
Claudio   Claudio Sgura
Polonio   Eduard Tsanga
Orazio   Sébastien Soules
Marcello   Bartosz Urbanowicz
Laerte   Paul Schweinester
Ofelia   Iulia Maria Dan
Gertrude   Dshamilja Kaiser
Der Geist | Ein PriesterGianluca Buratto
Ein Herold | Der König Gonzaga   Jonathan Winell
Die Königin   Sabine Winter
Luciano | Erster Totengräber   Yasushi Hirano
Prager Philharmonischer Chor
Wiener Symphoniker
Paolo Carignani, conductor

The following link to a video of the performance on the German/French Arte Channel may only be available for a short time. Enjoy while you can:

http://www.swr.de/swr2/musik/video-mitschnitt-der-premiere-hamlet-oper-von-franco-faccio/-/id=661124/did=17831130/nid=661124/1tzah0r/index.html

For anyone who would like a sound only copy I have recorded it in wave format. Just let me know.

[adriano]

Hi BerlinExpat
I missed this ORF broacast, unfortunately - which means that I would be very much interested in your audio version :-)
Any news about a CD release?
I am sure this production is much better than that Opera Southwest Production of 2014.
Maestro Carignani is the best for such repertoire. I know him very well and worked with him at the Zurich Opera during quite a few years. Among others, I was his assistant in an adventurous Traviata which was performed live at the Zurich train station in 2008...

[Mark Thomas]

BerlinExpat has now very kindly uploaded here his sound recording of the video stream, which is not available to watch in the UK, and probably elsewhere. Thank you!

[adriano]

Thanks very much, BerlinExpat, just listening - wonderful music, a real discovery!
I intended listening today's RAI 3 broadcast from Salzburg, Thomas Adès' new opera "The Exterminating Angel", but I had enough already after the first scene: just an ensemble of singers yelling at eachother unorganically. One more of those new works, needing high academic study to find out what's behind, but that is not the purpose of opera! Of course, Adès is in fashion, and there will be enthusiastic reviews - but I believe, most of those who say they find this great and super are snobbish intellectuals who want to impress. Fortunately, there still are very few "modern" or "atonal" operas who are more accessible to human ears...

[Mark Thomas]

My word, this is grand stuff. I have only listened to Act 1 so far, but already the quality of both the performances and the music itself shine through. Stylistically it's interesting: I am reminded most not of Verdi, but of the brooding sonorities of Ponchielli's La Gioconda. The drama of Shakespeare's original couldn't be more vividly portrayed, either. All in all, it's a great listen. Time is short today, but I'm avidly looking forward to hearing the rest of Amleto. Thanks once again to BerlinExpat for the opportunity to hear it.

[adriano]

You are right Mark :-)
Towards the end of Scene 1, I hear some of Sparafucile's cello music and, later on some storm chromaticism à la Rigoletto...
But, still, Boito was more daring, muscially!

[Alan Howe]

Well, this is quite a find - a proper attempt at an opera measuring up to the great Shakespeare play. As I listened just two minutes or so into Act 1 I thought I heard the Grand Inquisitor from Don Carlos about to enter, but Faccio's opera predates Verdi's great opera by a couple of years...

All that's missing so far (in Act 1, as I listen) is a fetching melody, but then comes an inspired passage (at approx. 8 mins) which proves otherwise.

This may be one of the operatic discoveries of recent years.

[Alan Howe]

Hamlet  Comes  Back to Life in Albuquerque
by Charles Jernigan (October 26, 2014)
http://donizettisociety.com/Articles/articlefaccioamleto.htm

The melancholy Dane's last words in Shakespeare's Hamlet are "The rest is silence."  Franco Faccio might have had the same thought after his opera Amleto failed on opening night at La Scala in 1871.  After that disastrous performance it sank into almost total oblivion until this afternoon, and then, after almost 150 years of silence, Amleto roared back to life in a most unlikely venue: the Albuquerque Journal Theater of the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a fine production by Opera Southwest. 

As a title, Amleto has been known to musicologists and Verdi lovers for a long time as a significant work in an odd corner of Verdi's biography and in Italian operatic history, but until today, the opera itself has been unknown and unstaged since 1871.  Amleto was an important work in the nineteenth century movement in Italian arts known as Scapigliatura: Faccio was ascapigliato and so was Arrigo Boito, librettist of Amleto  -- and of Verdi's Otello and Falstaff, as well as being the composer/librettist of Mefistofele.  But until yesterday, no one could judge the quality of the work itself or assess it as a rare representative of Scapigliatura.

The good news, no, the great news, is that Amleto is a major work, a beautiful and eminently stage-worthy work, and also a work that Opera Southwest staged and performed with great élan and competence.  Boito's libretto for Amleto strikes me as truly remarkable, not least for his ability to cut a long and complex drama to manageable lengths for opera.  Gone are some secondary characters like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but many others are kept, including Horatio, Laertes, Polonius and the gravediggers.  The opera cuts Shakespeare's opening scene on the battlements where the Ghost of Hamlet's late father appears to Horatio and Marcellus, and instead opens with a party where the new King Claudius is celebrating his coronation.  When Ophelia enters in that first scene, Boito pulls Hamlet's memorable poem for her from Act II of the play ("Doubt that the stars are fire") and gives it to Ophelia herself as a lovely lyrical aria (instead of having Polonius read it as in the play).  And yet we have all the essential scenes of the play--the encounter with the Ghost, the play within the play, Claudius' attempt at prayer, Hamlet's encounter with Ophelia when he pretends to have lost his reason ("Get thee to a nunnery"),Hamlet's killing of Polonius and furious argument with his mother, Ophelia's mad scene, the gravediggers' scene, the funeral and the duel with Laertes and final tragedy.

Boito is extremely faithful to Shakespeare.  And several of the great soliloquies are there--"To be or not to be" of course, but also "O that this too, too solid flesh would melt."  Whenever Boito can stick close to Shakespeare's words, he does.  This is not the place to get into it, but he also uses a much greater variety of verse forms and unusual vocabulary than one finds in the repetitious and formulaic "librettese" that all opera lovers are used to.

One of the few places that the poetry sounds like a traditional Italian operatic libretto is in the play within the play.  In Shakespeare, the players enact an old play called The Murder of Gonzago in order "to catch the conscience of the King," a play which Hamlet calls "The Mousetrap" ("La trappola" in Boito).  Here Boito uses a meter that would be right at home in a libretto by Cammarano (Lucia) or Romani (Norma, La sonnambula), or  Piave (Traviata)--fine librettists of an earlier time, but much more restricted in their poetic meters and word choice than what one finds in Amleto.  Boito even has a little fun with his critics when he adds a few lines not in Shakespeare in choral reactions to the play within the play. "Young spectators" say, "This music bores us./The singers are putting us to sleep," while the "Old spectators" say, "What enchantment!  Bravi, bravi,/Long live the art of our ancestors!"  The old spectators applaud the play done in the old way with the old poetic meters; the young avant-garde finds it boring!  That's a kind of metatheater that you don't often find in nineteenth century opera.

It is abundantly clear that Boito's libretto is a minor masterpiece in translating Shakespeare for the operatic stage, and an example of Scapigliatura because it partially moves away from traditional operatic language and forms.  It is an obvious forecast of Boito's other great Shakespeare libretti, Otello and Falstaff, probably the two best libretti in Italian. 

Faccio's music is "new" too, in the sense that it is constantly trying, usually successfully, to paint scenes and moods in the orchestra.  Mood setting in the cellos or horns or a cor anglais solo paint each scene before the singing begins.  In the opening scene Faccio composes dialogue about the Ghost between Hamlet and Marcello and Horatio to something vaguely reminiscent of the scene between Sparafucile and Rigoletto while most of the courtiers are celebrating in a catchy waltz.  The contrast is stunning.  Mood painting in the orchestra is everywhere, such as the spooky music when the Ghost speaks to Hamlet, or the ethereal music for Ophelia's mad scene, which reminds  me a little of the final scene from Meyerbeer's L'Africaine (1865).  There are also daring harmonies for the time.

That is not to say that there are not arias or trios or large ensemble pieces such as one might have in a Verdi opera of about the same time.  Act II ends when King Claudius runs horrified from the play within the play and there is a great concertato finale such as one finds at the end of many a second act in Italian opera, and it is very exciting.  Ophelia gets that formal and very beautiful mad scene, less florid than Lucia's or the mad scene in Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet, but more modern in the coloring and mood painting.  There is even a flute accompaniment, as one finds in Lucia, but more subtle.  Geltrude (Gertrude) gets an aria after her scene with Hamlet, which is a tour de force.  The only bit of longeur I felt in the opera was in the Ghost's long recounting of his murder to Hamlet ("Tu dei sapere ch'io son l'anima lesa").

The score builds too; Acts III and IV are even better than the first two acts.  Musically, there is one striking and dramatic scene after another including Claudius' attempt to pray, the encounter with Geltrude and Polonius' murder, Geltrude's aria, and Ophelia's mad scene.  Tension mounts almost unbearably to the gravedigger's scene where there is a moment of respite and a bit of black comedy, but that leads into Ophelia's funeral.  This stunning scene begins with the Funeral March, which is the only part of the opera to have had at least a little life after the fiasco in 1871.  The theme from the march becomes the basis of a large ensemble with the grief-stricken Hamlet and the furious Laertes expressing their feelings as the chorus laments the dead Ophelia.  It is surely the highlight of the score, but the final scene does not let us down, musically or dramatically.

Opera can do only so much with the philosophical aspects of Hamlet the play, and Boito and Faccio leave out the political themes, but that leaves a lot, and we have several very complex characters (Ophelia is much more important than she is in Shakespeare).  Faccio's music often reveals their feelings in a way that goes beyond words.

When we came to Albuquerque, I suspected and hoped that we might find a worthy resurrection in Faccio's score, but I have to confess that I did not expect much more than a competent performance from a small, local company.  How wrong I was.  Alex Richardson, a tenor from Las Cruces, New Mexico, surpassed all my expectations as Amleto.  Much of the vocal writing for Hamlet is declamatory; it is not florid in the bel  canto sense, and occasionally it seems in listening to him that we are listening to Turridu in Cavalleria or Cavaradossi in Tosca.  Richardson started strong vocally if a little stolidly in his acting, but before long he was flinging himself into the part.  By the time he got to the scene with his mother, he was just superb.  The wicked King Claudio was Shannon De Vine, a fine baritone who has sung (and will sing) verismo roles in Andrea Chenier, Bohème, Adriana Lecouvreur and Tosca.  His acting was sometimes chilling.  Abla Lynn Hamza sang Ophelia with beauty of tone and a powerful reach.  I have to confess that in the mad scene she almost brought me to tears.  Caroline Worra as Hamlet's mother Geltrude, was powerful and more than rose to the occasion in her duet with Hamlet which becomes a trio when the Ghost intervenes, and in her aria.  In fact everyone in the large cast was first rate, and they threw themselves into their roles in a way that made the whole  experience very gripping.

The stage director, David Bartholomew, set the opera around the turn of the twentieth century.  There was a unit set of a two story Victorian iron structure with a spiral staircase that served for rooms in the Danish court, the battlements and the graveyard.  It was simple and effective, and the singers and large chorus were moved around effectively too.  Occasionally there were projections of painted scenes like Elsinore Castle from the first production in the nineteenth century.  Costumes by Virginia Anna Constantz were late Victorian more or less and perhaps a bit provincial; for the play within a play, the "actors" were in Renaissance style.  That play-within-the-play, by the way, was really a mini-opera-within-the-opera, and Opera Southwest brought a string quartet and a harp onstage to accompany it.  It was impossible for me not to think of the little play-within-the-play in I pagliacci in watching and listening to this crucial part.  In fact it is hard to imagine that the score of Amleto was totally unknown to the verismo composers who would come along in a couple of decades, buried as that score presumably was.

Most impressive were the large chorus under Paul Bower and the orchestra under Maestro Anthony Barrese.  Without Barrese, there would have been no Amleto for us to see, and he had whipped his forces into a superb ensemble.  There is a lot of exposed horn writing in Amleto, and I did not hear one mistake, always the sign of good playing.

At the end, the sold out audience rose as one, and for once the standing ovation was well deserved.  When Amleto failed at La Scala in 1871, Faccio or perhaps one of his students, hung a sign on a door at the Milan Conservatory: "Closed for the death of Amleto."  If Faccio's ghost is watching  from somewhere, I think he would be pleased.  And for me at least, the standing ovation, which went on and on, was certainly for the company and Maestro Barrese, but it was also for him.

The Importance of Amleto

In 1865, when Amleto first saw the light of day in Genoa, Giuseppe Verdi was 52 and the best known exponent of Italian culture by far.  That year the revised version of Macbeth had its debut in Paris, and Verdi was starting to think about Don Carlos, which would be premiered in Paris in 1867.  Verdi stood so much taller than other Italian composers of the time that, with the exception of Ponchielli, today the work of his rivals is hardly known, but he was not unchallenged: a group of young avant-gardists made it their goal to take on the status quo.  They adopted the term scapagliati for themselves, the 'disheveled ones'; we might translate the term as 'bohemians', or as one wag has called them, 'the slobs'.  At the head of this movement in literature, art and music were Faccio, Boito and the writer Emilio Praga, and Faccio's Amleto was hailed as an attempt to conceptualize the movement's ideas in opera, the most important of the musical arts in nineteenth century Italy.

To define exactly what Scapigliatura meant in terms of art is not easy because the members produced no definitive manifesto and not many works of art, but they embraced foreign influences, especially Poe and Baudelaire in literature, and they welcomed Wagner in music.  They rebelled against Catholic clericalism and traditional or academic art of any kind.  Fascination with German culture was one aspect of Scapigliatura, and Boito got into an actual duel with a man who decried the influence of German music (Wagner) on traditional Italian melody.  An argument in a bar escalated into a duel with pistols, and Boito was wounded in the hand.  (I don't know what happened to the defender of Italian melody.) 

At one point during those years, Boito wrote an article on aesthetics, full of generalities and ambiguities, in which he tried to differentiate the "sublime" from the "beautiful."  The sublime, wrote Boito, was simple and "spherical" (whatever that means; it is ambiguous, and the scapigliati like ambiguity): the sun is sublime, Dante is sublime, Shakespeare is sublime.  The merely beautiful was very fine, like a perfect carnation (don't ask); some Mozart is "beautiful" (but not sublime).

Such aesthetic ambiguity was open to jest and ridicule, and Boito got it from several quarters, including Verdi, who hoped in one of his letters that he was not a "spherical."  In music, the scapagliati thought that opera was the noblest form for their time, but they denigrated much of the popular opera, generally without naming composer's names.  But in 1863, to celebrate the debut of Faccio's first opera, I profughi fiamminghi (The Flemish Refugees), with text by Praga, Boito composed a poem which he read at a celebration for the opera's first performance.  The ode, a toast to Italian Art, recalled the greatness of the past and the decadence of the present, and in the process of complimenting Faccio, Boito wrote some lines that he would have cause to regret:

Forse già nacque chi sovra l'altare

Rizzerà l'arte, verecondo e puro,

Su quell'altar bruttato come un muro

Di lupinare.

[Perhaps one is already born who will raise up

art, modest and pure, above the altar,

that altar, fouled like the wall

Of a whorehouse.]

This poetic toast to Franco Faccio got around to Giuseppe Verdi because Boito, proud of what he had written, promptly had it published, and Verdi, as the most famous exponent of Italian culture, took it to mean that Boito was referring to him as someone who had turned Italian Art into a whorehouse--or at least had pissed on the wall.  It irritated Verdi, to say the least, and for many years he did not forget what he thought of as a slight; he referred to it often in his letters.  From everything we know, Boito and Faccio admired Verdi, and Boito did not intend to slander him in the ode, but when the music publisher Ricordi suggested that Boito work on the revised libretto of La forza del destino, Verdi rejected the idea.  It took many years before Verdi was reconciled with Boito and Faccio, and only then through the slow and careful ministrations of his music publisher, Tito Ricordi.  But when reconciliation finally came, it produced one of the greatest alliances in music history.

Faccio's first opera, I profughi fiamminghi was a failure in 1863, but two years later, in 1865,Amleto was successful in Genoa.  The story is of course taken from Shakespeare, who, in Boito's words, was a "spherical."  In promoting Amleto, Boito wrote, "Today music is all opera....immense activity is concentrated around opera; all the fervid believers in art, all the brave supporters of progress cooperate in this solemn activity. [...] Opera is the greatest thing in music; Shakespeare is the greatest in musical drama.  Impressive sign! ...  Good, then art is uplifted.  ...  If today musical drama ventures to touch Shakespeare, it is a sure sign that today musical drama is worthy of Shakespeare...."    Boito seems to have meant that the most prominent art form of the time (opera) should have great models for the musical drama and not the kind of lesser melodrama and popular novels and plays so often used as the basis for nineteenth century opera libretti.  Shakespeare, in other words, is worthy of treatment in the noblest of musical arts--opera.  Boito himself was continuously working on his own opera Mefistofele in those years, and it is based on another great literary work, Goethe's Faust, but when it premiered at La Scala in 1868, it was a complete fiasco--too Wagnerian, many claimed.  The scapigliati were no doubt discouraged by the reception of a major work by a leader of the movement, but they regrouped and determined to have Amleto mounted at La Scala as an example of the operatic reforms they wanted to achieve.

Faccio and Boito both worked to revise the libretto and the music.  In Genoa, one criticism had been that the work was not melodic enough.  Boito cut the libretto here and there and Faccio strove to introduce more traditional Italian melody to the work.  Finally, it was introduced at La Scala on February 12, 1871.  The premiere had been postponed because the tenor (Hamlet) got sick and just before the new date of the premiere, he got sick again.  It was a Hamlet without a Hamlet; in parts, the tenor simply did not sing.  Amleto was a fiasco, and was withdrawn after a single performance.  Discouraged, Faccio withdrew the score, and no printed score was ever made.  From that day on, Amleto has not been seen or heard--until now.

Faccio never wrote another opera, but went in the direction of conducting instead, which turned out to be a true calling.  Before long he was La Scala's principal conductor, and gradually Verdi reconciled with him.  He conducted the first performances of Simon Boccanegra in Italy and the Italian premiere of Aida.  Later, he would conduct the world premiere of Otello.  He also conducted the first Italian performances of Wagner's Die Meistersinger.  Boito made extensive revisions to Mefistofele, and the revised version premiered in Bologna in 1875 to acclaim; he continued to tinker with it until a definitive edition was reached in 1881.  But composing was difficult for him; his only other surviving opera is the unfinished Nerone.  When it was premiered posthumously in 1924, it had been completed by Toscanini and others.  Boito's greatest fame lies in his literary work for Verdi's last two operas, both based on Shakespeare.  Franco Faccio would have probably conducted the world premiere of Verdi's Falstaff too, but by that time his mental capacity was failing.  Like Donizetti before him, he went mad, possibly the final effect of syphilis; he died in 1891 in Monza, his hometown, today a suburb of Milan.

So Faccio's score with Boito's libretto languished for well over 130 years until Anthony Barrese got interested in it because he had read about it in relation to Verdi and to the Scaplgliatura movement.  He discovered that the only existing score was the crumbling original manuscript in the archives of the Ricordi publishing house in Milan. Painstakingly he copied the score, note by note, and created a performing edition, and thus Amleto has come to Albuquerque.  It was undoubtedly a work of love on Barrese's part, but the question has always been, 'was the opera worth it?'  Now we can answer with a resounding "yes!"  This is not just a work of interest to academics which increases our knowledge of Verdi's competitors and colleagues, but a work which is fully worthy on its own, an exciting work of musical theater.  In Albuquerque it is likely that it will play to three sold out houses, and this is an opera no one alive had ever heard.  I trust that for this Amleto, the rest will not be silence.

[Alan Howe]

"The Amleto Project"
The Discovery and Reconstruction of Faccio's Hamlet
by Anthony Barrese
http://www.operade.org/amleto-project

In the Spring of 2003 I began researching and preparing a critical edition of Franco Faccio's little known opera Amleto ( libretto by Arrigo Boito). The opera was written in 1865 and premiered in Genova. A La Scala revival in 1871 was a complete disaster and the opera has not been performed since.

I first became aware of an Italian Hamlet opera with a Boito libretto during my first season on the music staff of Sarasota Opera in the winter/spring of 2002. At that time I began trying to locate a piano vocal score or some other source material. I was living in New York City, and took advantage of the inter-library loan program to locate what seemed to be a piano vocal score at the University of California at Berkeley library. I put in an order and waited months, but the score was never delivered. Meanwhile, I sent an e-mail to my friend Vito Lo Re, an accomplished composer and conductor living in Milan, and asked him if he could uncover a score of Amleto. Around Christmas 2002, he sent me photocopies of some extraced, published scenes from the opera and said that he was unable to find anything else.

During my second season at Sarasota Opera (2003), I got in touch with David Lawton who had very generously lent me his score for a production of L'incoronazione di Poppea that I conducted the previous summer. David Lawton is a musicologist and conductor who has worked with the Verdi Critical Edition series for a number of years. He encouraged me to contact Gabriel Dotto, another accomplished musicologist living in Milan who had formely worked with Ricordi. I had heard that many of the archives were destroyed during the war, and I wasn't sure whether Ricordi would still have the autograph from Amleto. He replied:

As luck (and some rather heroic effort on the part of Ricordi management sixty years ago ) would have it, no autographs of the historical archive were destroyed in the war, as the collection was secretly taken to a safe location.  (Though the "production copies" of scores, most of the performing material, the hire and editorial libraries, etc, were lost during the bombings).

That, he said, was the end of the good news. The bad news was that Ricordi was at the present moment moving into a new home at the Biblioteca Brera in the heart of Milan. Formerly the archives were located on the far outskirts of town. He said there might be some hope of obtaining a copy of the score if it had been copied onto a microfilm , which could then be loaned to me. He sent my letter off to Maria Pia Ferraris of the Ricordi Archives to check and see if such a microfilm existed. Otherwise I would be out of luck for at least another year while Ricordi completed its move.

After some time had passed, the New York Public Library finally contacted me and informed me that the "piano vocal score" of Amleto was in fact available at the U.C. Berkeley library and that they could not get it themselves, but that I might be able to get a copy of it by contacting the head of Rare Books at Berkeley. This department was very helpful and after a small transaction sent me a microfilm of the "piano vocal score" which turned out to be the same few extraced scenes that my friend Vito had just sent me at Christmas.

Again months went by and I heard nothing from Ricordi. I was on my way to Opera North in the summer of 2003 when I was contacted by Maria Pia Ferraris who said that Ricordi did indeed have a microfilm of the autograph and that I could order it.

The microfilm arrived in at my home in Chicago and was forwarded to me in New Hampshire where I began the painstaking task of transcribing the manuscript note by note. At the same time a friend of mine found a copy (again a microfilm) of Boito's libretto at the Performing Arts Library in New York. She made a photocopy of it and brought it to New Hampshire. The libretto was especially important since Faccio's handwriting was difficult to decipher, and the quality of the autograph manuscript was poor. Little by little pieces of the puzzle were coming together.

The problems with the autograph were numerous. First of all, since it probably had not been touched in almost a century, the staff lines were faded so badly that on many pages they were not visible at all. I found that if I could at least identify the bass line and vocal lines, everything else fell into place logically according to standard rules of harmony and counterpoint. It was extremely exciting to be in the midst of this, in effect bringing it back into life.

I finished the process of transcribing every note from the manuscript a few days before Christmas 2003. After that I began writing the piano vocal score and engraving the full and piano vocal scores. Phillip Gossett was incredibly generous in helping me figure out a lot of the handwriting idiosyncracies in the score.

That winter at Sarasota Opera (2004) the Apprentice Artist's scenes program performed an excerpt from Act III of Amleto. The scene we did was a trio in which Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius and, while confronting his mother, the ghost of his father returns to warn him not to waver in his purpose (Act III scene iv in the Shakespeare play).

Sarasota Opera Apprentice Artists sang the following roles: Emily Ezzie – la Regina, John Tirrano – Amleto, John Taylor – lo Spettro, Aaron Silverman – Polonio, and I accompanied on the piano.

It was very interesting to put the scene together and everyone had a wonderful time doing it. There was definitely a sense that we were doing something unique, and the singers gave an impassioned performance.

That summer, while I was in Milan teaching a class on the Italian Futurist movement in music, I met with Cristiano Ostinelli of the Casa Ricordi (the vice direttore generale) and he granted me exclusive rights for the first performance of the piece. After the first performance Ricordi has the right to buy me out of the rights. I also met in person Maria Pia Ferraris, the head archivist of the newly opened Ricordi Archives in the biblioteca brera. She allowed me to peruse the original manuscript as well as the only piano vocal score in existence: an autograph manuscript of Faccio's own arrangement. This had a number of differences from the score (most notably an enormous 2nd act cabaletta for Amleto that was cut after the premiere).

There were many interesting people working in the Archives that summer, and I spent hours looking at both autograph manuscripts. I also went to the Milan conservatory library and made a photocopy of the only existing book written on the opera. It's a little volume by the Fascist musicologist Rafaello DeRensis called Amleto di A. Boito and was written in the 1920s. It provided more interesting information, and I returned to the United States to begin writing the critical notes. I soon discovered that as much as I thought the transcription of the piece was painstaking, compiling and editing the critical notes was more so. I completed the work in late December 2004.

Since then Philip Gossett has brought to my attention yet another complete libretto which reflects the text used in the 1871 La Scala revival:

Arrigo Boito, Tutti gli scritti a cura di Piero Nardi, A. Mondadori editore, Milano 1942. This libretto reflects numerous changes between the 1865 and 1871 versions.

I conducted the American premiere of Ofelia's Marcia Funebre with the Dallas Opera Orchestra in a concert on February 17, 2007.

In early October 2014, a concert preview performance with piano will took place at Baltimore Concert Opera.  Opera Southwest performed the American staged premiere of the work in October and November 2014.

[Gareth Vaughan]

Thank you very much indeed, Alan, for that very long and hugely informative post. One detail niggles: who are these gravediggerS (plural). There is only one gravedigger in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Has Boito introduced a chorus of them?!!

[Alan Howe]

I have no hesitation in dubbing Amleto a masterpiece. It's an astonishing piece, using but advancing the operatic conventions of the day in a quite individual manner. The orchestration is often masterly, the mood-setting appropriate, the vocal writing both beautiful and dramatic. In a word: fabulous.

[Mark Thomas]

I've listened to it three times in just a few days, and I agree 100%. The element of Faccio's writing which strikes me most strongly is his use of the orchestra in the drama - many scenes are preceded by or include passages of just a few bars for the orchestra alone which are perfectly judged to set the mood for what's to come. His writing is consistently atmospheric and highly inventive, often verging on the Wagnerian in its power and expressiveness. Although they're different composers in many other ways, it strikes me that a good parallel would be the way Massenet uses the orchestra in his own mature works. That's not to denigrate Faccio's other strengths, of course. What a shame that the failure of Amleto led to him abandoning his composing career.

[eschiss1]

Besides operas Worldcat lists a "quartetto in solo" (or in sol- G or G minor?) for strings by Faccio ; published by Ricordi ca.1864; a scherzo for orchestra too...

[Alan Howe]

The more I listen to Amleto, the less I hear of other composers. Of course, he's a generation younger than Verdi, i.e. a contemporary of Ponchielli and Boito, which is an important consideration in assessing him. It would be fascinating to know exactly what other operas he'd encountered by the mid-1860s.

[Alan Howe]

Incidentally, I must take issue with the singing of Pavel Černoch as Amleto. His lower to mid-registers are burnished, steady and powerful, but anything above the stave finds him strained and flapping alarmingly. I was hoping for better and he doesn't spoil the performance, but I fear for his career if he carries on forcing his voice.