Liszt: Hamlet

Liszt: Hamlet

Hamlet is the tenth of the twelve symphonic poems Liszt wrote during his tenure as Grand Ducal Director of Music Extraordinary at Weimar. All twelve were dedicated to Liszt's partner, Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein. Liszt was the inventor of the symphonic poem, but note that Liszt's music is not descriptive and does not tell a story - unlike, for example, Mendelssohn's overture The Hebrides. Liszt's goal was to distill the essence of the poetic concept into music, not to recreate or retell it.

[Hamlet by Delacroix]

Hamlet is considered one of Liszt's finest and most tightly executed compositions.
Unlike many of Liszt's compositions (Liszt usually tinkered with his compositions), there is only one version of the symphonic poem Hamlet, that of 1858. The year 1858 was one of great disappointment for Liszt. His constant disagreements with the management of the Hoftheater in Weimar became intolerable, culminating in the taunting of Liszt at the premiere of an opera by his friend Peter Cornelius. As a result of these difficulties, the symphonic poem Hamlet did not receive its intended premiere in Weimar, and it was not until 1878 that Hamlet was first performed, an event that Liszt did not even attend. It was not until 1886 that he attended a performance, two months before his death.

Moreover, neither in mood nor in form does Hamlet belong to the symphonic poems of Liszt's so-called 'Weimar period'. Originally intended as an overture to a performance of Shakespeare's play, Liszt's composition does not anticipate the tragedy of the play, but focuses on the Danish prince himself. The composition seems to have been inspired by the performance of Hamlet by the famous actor Bogomil Dawison, who visited Weimar in 1856. Liszt noted that Dawison "did not portray an insecure dreamer crushed by his mission," as is the usual interpretation of the Danish prince, but an "intelligent, enterprising prince, brimming with viable political ideas, waiting for the right moment to take revenge, wanting to fulfill his ambition to become king in place of his uncle."

Some parts of this short composition - it lasts a maximum of 14 minutes - certainly leave room for this interpretation, but Liszt would not be Liszt if he did not also deal with Hamlet's self-irony and the aura given to him by his fate and his personality. In form, Hamlet, like the other symphonic poems, is based on the principle of variation. The work has a mosaic-like quality with its various atmospheres: exaltation, , maniacal, grotesquerie and fragments of funeral marches. The opening motive, Molto lento e lugubre, was inspired by Hamlet's soliloquy from Act III. We hear the pure and innocent character of Ophelia first in a religious section (inevitable for Liszt) starting from bar 160. Ophelia is related, especially through the instrumentation and melody of the solo violin, to the figure of Marguerita in Liszt's Faust Symphony, and in particular to the "eternally feminine" in it.

Instead of building up tension and then releasing it, Liszt allows the tension to build up in Hamlet, but does not release it. Hamlet can thus be interpreted as an introduction to the later phase of Liszt's orchestral art. He takes up new tonal concepts, the music becomes looser and more fragmentary, also stranger. But the Romantic ideal also resonates in Hamlet, and the dissonant passages can be explained as related to the psychological state in which Hamlet finds himself. Since Liszt only increases the tension, we can associate this with the fact that there is no solution to Hamlet's worries, and therefore there are no resolving harmonies. That is why the work cannot end with a (satisfying) conclusion, but it ends abruptly, with a half-whispering motif in the timpani... The rest is silence.

[Incorporates translated and edited passages from the open-source Dutch Wikipedia article about Liszt's Hamlet]

Symphonic Poems