Fantasy Overture: Hamlet Op.67

“Hamlet is very much to my taste but it’s devilishly difficult.” Tchaikovsky’s comment to his brother when considering the subject for his next tone poem after The Tempest was prophetic. After diverting his attention to the more accessible subject of Francesca da Rimini and writing several other major orchestral works, including the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, he returned to Hamlet in earnest as long as 12 years later, finishing the score in 1888. He had been thinking about it intermittently in the meantime and at one point had got as far as noting a theme to go with the words “To be or not to be” (which he later discarded).    What set him to work in earnest was a request for a Hamlet overture from the French actor Lucien Guitry who was hoping to perform a selection of scenes from the play in St Petersburg. In fact, Guitry’s production fell through but the composer was by now so involved in the project that he went on and completed it as a concert piece, designating it as a “Fantasy Overture” like his first Shakespearian tone poem Romeo and Juliet. It was first performed, under the composer’s direction and with mixed success, at a concert of the Russian Musical Society in St Petersburg in November 1888.

A strategy that might have eased the difficulties Tchaikovsky had anticipated in creating a Hamlet tone poem is his interpolation of a factor absent as a theme in Shakespeare’s tragedy but present as an all-powerful force in such recent scores as Manfred and the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies: in all of those works Fate, which has its own distinctive musical identity in each case, exercises a decisive influence on the course of events. In Hamlet Fate makes its first entry on violas and cellos in the emphatic Lento lugubre opening bars. It is only after a dramatically developed introduction, based on the Fate theme and ending in an acceleration, a huge crescendo and a sudden silence, that Tchaikovsky makes a direct allusion to Hamlet the play. Eerie midnight harmonies on woodwind and horns, another crescendo and a massive stroke of the tam-tam announce the entry of Hamlet’s father’s ghost – which, as fff brass and woodwind make unmistakably clear is a fateful event.

Rather than attempting to illustrate the story of the tragedy in detail, Tchaikovsky chooses in the main section of the work to concentrate on just a few prominent characters. As the tempo changes after another silence to Allegro vivace he introduces Hamlet himself striving upwards in F minor on flutes and violins at first, creating much hectic and sustained activity in every part of the orchestra until subsiding into another silence. This is where, with a change of tempo to Andante and a change of of key to B minor, Ophelia makes her first entry in a lovely oboe solo. If the shape of the melody identifies her as Russian rather than Danish she is no less appealing for that. Another pause and another change of tempo precede what, because of the amorous nature of the melody introduced by lower woodwind and its passionate development, can only be called a love scene, even though Shakespeare offers no precedent for it. Whatever the best way to describe it, that scene is rudely interrupted by the fate theme before a hint of march heralds the distant approach of Fortinbras.

Most of the second half of the overture is recapitulation, recalling earlier themes from the frenzied entry of Hamlet onwards but omitting most of the pauses which punctuated the material first time round. Ophelia returns, still on oboe but somewhat varied in B flat minor. The one surviving silence precedes the renewal of the love scene, which is now rudely interrupted by the Fate theme on woodwind and horns. The near approach of Fortinbras comes too late to be of any help to Hamlet, whose imminent death, preceded by another proclamation of the Fate theme on brass and a frenzied struggle, is signalled by an ffff stroke of the tam-tam and a fffff dissonance on the brass. A short Grave coda recalls the Fate theme for the last time before it dies away leaving only F minor harmonies on wind and a throbbing, ever quieter rhythmic ostinato on timpani. The rest is silence.

Gerald Larner ©2010