Almost exactly 100 years after Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, composer Francesco Gasparini in Venice turned the revenge story into an opera titled Ambleto. Gasparini had likely never heard of the Bard. Instead, he based his 1705 work on a Venetian poet’s translation of the same source Shakespeare had used: an early 12th-century history of the Danish people by Saxo Grammaticus.
More Italian composers would soon follow suit — including Domenico Scarlatti with his own Ambleto in 1715 and Giuseppe Carcani in 1741 — but none of their scores has survived in its entirety. Recently, Italian musicologist Paolo Montanari pieced together a new “Ambleto” from surviving fragments of all these Hamlet operas, with a few additions from other Baroque-era music to round things out. Called The Ghosts of Hamlet, the work will receive a single performance this Friday, March 21, at the University of Vermont Recital Hall, as part of the Lane Series.
This unique offering, in Italian with English supertitles, is a traveling performance by European specialists in the Baroque repertoire — the Italian opera star Roberta Mameli and the orchestra Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu of Lyon, France, led by Franck-Emmanuel Comte, who directs from the harpsichord. Le Concert’s other period instruments include a theorbo — a kind of 18th-century guitar on steroids, recognizable from its giant bowl and 14-string neck extending almost three feet in the air.
Mameli sings all three roles: Ambleto (Hamlet), his mother Gerilda (Gertrude) and his fiancée Veremonda (Ophelia). The part of Ambleto was originally sung by a castrato — a male singer castrated before puberty to prevent his voice from deepening — so the higher register is perfectly accessible for the soprano. She can also sing much higher notes.
“I’m an atypical soprano. My range is really long,” said Mameli, who is from a town outside Milan and has sung for 20 years around Europe as well as in Japan and Australia. She spoke with Seven Days during the North American tour of the opera.
Mameli said Montanari, a longtime acquaintance, proposed the project to her, and she in turn proposed it to Comte. What interested her about The Ghosts of Hamlet was its take on the women characters, who are central to the story — something librettist Apostolo Zeno, the poet-translator, and his collaborator Pietro Pariati drew out from the source material.
“What I like is, if I compare to Shakespeare, the women are really strong,” Mameli said. “Hamlet is more delicate. He has a kind of sweetness, a female side.”
Unlike Ophelia, Veremonda displays true agency: She helps her fiancé, Ambleto, by pretending to appease Fengone (Claudius), who lusts for her, before immobilizing the murderous uncle with a sleeping potion. The fiery Gerilda, meanwhile, detests her new husband and laments her attraction to him.
Mameli said she has not previously sung multiple roles as the sole singer of an opera but is enjoying the challenge. To switch characters, she explained, she alters her delivery and shifts her vocal range, dynamics and color. (As a concert opera, the performance will have few costumes or props.)
The aria “Tu indegno sei dell’allor” (“You are unworthy of the laurel”), for example, originally from George Frideric Handel’s opera Agrippina — one of the add-ins — demands a certain forcefulness. Sung by Gerilda, it expresses her hatred of Fengone. The song is one of only two pieces from The Ghosts of Hamlet with which Mameli was already familiar, she said. Montanari dug up the others, all unpublished, in music archives around Italy.
The soprano said she recognizes the “tension” of performing historical music as a modern singer.
“It’s important to be Roberta as much as the other roles,” Mameli said. “So when I sing Gerilda or Veremonda or Ambleto, there’s also the hand of Roberta. It’s a link that I make between the older period and modern period.
“This program is really intense,” Mameli added. “I need a lot of energy and to be concentrated as much as I can. It’s really dramatic.”
Lane Series director Natalie Neuert was thrilled to land The Ghosts of Hamlet. After six performances in France, Mameli and Le Concert are bringing it to Montréal; Michigan State University in East Lansing; New York City; Washington, D.C.; and Burlington.
“When this came across my desk, I thought, Wow, Roberta Mameli — what an opportunity. She’s an incredible acting singer, and the voice is very rich,” Neuert said. “People are in for a world-class opera singer, beautiful Baroque music and a different take on the Hamlet story.”