Hamlet Music Key Stage 4

The first character we meet in this opera is Hamlet himself. It is not easy to put your finger on the character of Hamlet – he is one of the most enigmatic characters in all literature. However, what is certain is that he is a man on the brink. He is crippled by grief, self-doubt and a belief that he should be doing something, even though he is terrified of what it is that he might have to do.

Listen to perhaps the most famous of Hamlet’s speeches as it occurs in the opera. If you had to reconstruct the score by listening to this soundscape, what would it look like? What can you pick out? Instrumentation? Tempo markings? Time signature? If it’s hard to pick out – why is it hard? Are there particular moments in the texture that stick out? What might these moments signify? What does all of this tell us about the character of Hamlet?

In the second scene of the opera, the stage fills for the wedding celebration of Claudius and Gertrude. It has been a matter of only weeks between the death of the old king – Hamlet’s father – and the marriage of his mother Gertrude to his uncle Claudius. Watch the opening of this scene, and see what you make of the character Claudius.

In the play, we hear a great deal about Claudius before we actually see him. In the opera, Brett Dean and his librettist have had to cut these earlier references, not least because of the time that they would take. Instead, they have had to immediately establish the character. What musical techniques have they used to do this? What strikes you about the orchestration that surrounds Claudius? The way that his vocal line has been written? The way he appears with the chorus? If you were to give the singer one written instruction in the score, what would it be?

Ophelia is Hamlet’s girlfriend, and the daughter of Polonius. She struggles with Hamlet’s mood swings, the expectations of her family and finally with the tragic demise of her father. It sends her mad.

If you were writing a vocal line for a mad character, what sort of things might you ask them to do? (Remember – opera singers have to be very protective of their voices!)

• Write down five specific ideas that you might employ when writing music for a mad character.
• Think about rhythm, orchestration etc. as well as how you would use text and specific vocal effects.
• Watch Ophelia’s mad scene. What has Brett Dean asked his singer to do? How effective is it in defining the nature of her madness?

If a composer is able to establish a particular musical language for particular characters, it means that they can play around with this language. Watch this scene where Hamlet rejects the affections of Ophelia, and famously shouts ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ at her. (An Elizabethan audience would have found this particularly shocking, as ‘nunnery’ was also slang for a brothel.)

• What does Brett Dean do with the musical language of these two characters?
• Can you hear where they adopt each other’s style? Where the style breaks down completely?
• Where in the text do these things happen, and how does this inform our understanding?