Amleto

Amleto is an opera in four acts by Franco Faccio set to a libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare's play Hamlet. It premiered on 30 May 1865 at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa and was revised for a La Scala production given on 12 February 1871.

The collaboration and friendship between librettist and composer was to last throughout Faccio's lifetime. In addition (as musicologist William Ashbrook states): "Amleto marks an effort of two prominent members of the Scapigliatura (a late Romantic reform movement in northern Italy in the 1860s and 70s) to renew the tradition of Italian opera."

After the La Scala revival in 1871, the opera disappeared for almost 130 years. However, in recent years, copies of the score and libretto have reappeared and conductor Anthony Barrese created a critical edition which was presented in a fully staged version by Opera Southwest in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and by Baltimore Concert Opera in concert form in Baltimore, Maryland, in October 2014.

The history of Amleto, from a libretto which Italian musicologist Rafaello DeRensis states was written specifically for Faccio by Arrigo Boito, is somewhat unclear as to how the choice of Hamlet as a subject came about, but the librettist completed his "innovatory libretto" on 2 July 1862 while in Poland, well ahead of Faccio's first opera.

However, Faccio's first collaboration with Boito had been in writing a patriotic cantata, Il quattro giugno in 1860 when Boito also wrote some of the music as well as the text, and this was followed by a sequel, La sorelle d'Italia, also in the spirit of the movement towards Italian unification. Ashbrook notes that one aspect of this opera's importance lies in the fact that, "as the first of Boito's librettos derived from Shakespeare, it reveals the future poet of Otello and Falstaff collaborating with a far less experienced and gifted composer than Verdi."

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Wikipedia