Hamlet mad scene natalie dessay biography

  • Natalie Dessay is a French soprano, best known as an opera singer before her retirement from the opera stage in 2013.
  • Both voices were at their superb best but Natalie gets my vote.
  • Soprano Natalie Dessay was likely one of the greatest opera actors that the world has ever known.

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    ‘Hamlet’ made in haste

    The skådespel of Ambroise Thomas’ “Hamlet” pales beside the behind- the-scenes maneuvering that got it to the Met on Tuesday.

    After Natalie Dessay called in sick two weeks ago, the Met scrambled to book another Ophélie — Marlis Petersen — but the German soprano was singing in Europe until a few days before the premiere.

    And so, while a standby rehearsed with the “Hamlet” cast, the company flew a music coach to Vienna to help Petersen cram. It then whisked the singer to New York where, barely 24 hours before curtain time, she jumped into a dress rehearsal.

    After all that, it would be gratifying to declare Petersen’s debut a “star is born” moment. But, even given the last-minute fireworks, she was pretty much a nonstarter, her Ophélie hovering on the cusp of inaudibility in midrange and shrill on the highest notes.

    Happily, Shakespeare’s tragic hero was in the kunnig hand

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    Hamlet

    A hit, a very palpable hit

    The name Ambroise Thomas spells anathema in Anglo-Saxon circles. Not only did he write an opera in French based on the greatest play in the English language, he also had the temerity to change the ending. The rumour I heard was that he has Hamlet surviving the duel and living happily ever after with Ophelia but that turns out to be an exaggeration.

    If there had been an Oscar in 1868 for best adapted screenplay, I would have awarded it to his librettists, Michel Carré and Jules Barbier for this cheeky adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. To turn a 4-hour play into a 3-hour opera is quite a feat of condensation. In the process they dispense with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern entirely; Laertes and Fortinbras are rolled into one. Polonius only has a walk-on part and is not killed by Hamlet. Most surprising of all, Hamlet does not die at the end. In fact his closing line, gazing down at Ophelia's grave is: "my soul is in the grave,

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    On Wednesday, I celebrated Shakespeare's birthday, and my own, by finishing watching this opera with my best friend, Deborah.  It's a filmed version of the Barcelona Opera's production from 2004.  We'd started it last week, but... it's three hours long.  Takes a while to get through when I only have between forty-five minutes and an hour of watching time one or two nights a week.

    I should mention that I haven't seen that many operas.  I went to see three of them performed live while in college (La Boheme, Otello, and Tosca), but those are the only others I've ever seen in their entirety.  I've seen bits and pieces of various operas on YouTube and so on, but I didn't grow up watching or listening to opera.  We listened to a lot of classical music, but not much opera, other than an aria here and there on some compilation CD or other.  However, Deborah was raised on opera the way I was raised on westerns, and she is very passionate about it. &
  • hamlet mad scene natalie dessay biography