The Ghosts of Hamlet

The Concert de l’Hostel Dieu, under the direction of Franck-Emmanuel Comte, joins forces with soprano Roberta Mameli to revive fragments of early 18th-century Italian operas inspired by the Scandinavian legend of Hamlet. Their album, Ghosts of Hamlet, offers a fresh perspective on forgotten arias by Scarlatti, Gasparini, Carcani and Vignati, through the lens of characters such as Veremonda (Ophelia) and Gerilda (Gertrude).

How did this project come about?

Franck-Emmanuel Comte: I’ve been working on a series of recordings, each centred around a specific singer and a thematic thread—with a strong focus on uncovering lesser-known material. The first was La Francesina, dedicated to the French soprano Elisabeth Duparc, one of Handel’s last muses, with Sophie Junker. This time, Roberta Mameli proposed the idea of exploring Hamlet, which she had developed with musicologist Paolo Montanari, focusing on four Italian operas from the early 1700s. 

Tell us about the rediscovery of these operas.

F.-E. C.: Over a span of nearly 40 years, four composers wrote operas based on the Hamlet story. However, all of them were lost, for reasons we still don’t quite understand. What we have today are fragments, pieced together by Paolo Montanari. The first Ambleto was staged in 1705, with music by Francesco Gasparini and the famous castrato Nicolò Grimaldi in the title role. Interestingly, these works are based not on Shakespeare’s play, but on the earlier medieval source: Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus, written around the 13th century. That’s why we have names like Horwendillus, Fengo, Gerutha and Amlethus—not the familiar Shakespearean ones. In 1712, a pastiche version of Gasparini’s opera was performed at the Queen’s Theatre in London, featuring only 26 of the original 41 arias. A bilingual libretto and the scores of nearly all the arias were published at the time. After another Ambleto in 1719 in Milan (by Vignati, Baliani and Cozzi—now completely lost), the story was neglected for two decades, until Giuseppe Carcani composed a new version in 1741, performed at the Teatro Sant’Angelo in Venice.

What challenges did you face in bringing this material back to life?

F.-E. C.: First of all, the manuscripts themselves were quite rough—riddled with copyist errors, making reconstruction a real challenge. Secondly, the four operas span three decades, and each reflects a different musical language and vocal style. It was hard to maintain interpretative consistency. That’s why we focused on the librettos and the characters—especially the female characters, which are much more prominent and powerful in these Italian versions than in Shakespeare’s play.

Why the English title “The Ghosts of Hamlet“?

F.-E. C.: From the start, Roberta and I were both drawn to this collection of previously unrecorded arias from four versions of Ambleto. We felt that using the name Hamlet would resonate more internationally—thanks, of course, to Shakespeare’s global fame. Hence the English album title. It also helped us launch a North American tour this March 2025 with five dates across the United States and Canada. We’re also planning a fully staged operatic version in 2025, directed by Pierre-Emmanuel Rousseau.