Australian composer, conductor and violist Brett Dean wanted audiences to get into Hamlet's mind with his music, in his operatic adaptation of William Shakespeare's tragedy.To achieve this, he used an orchestration that included a choir with the musicians in the pit, stones, aluminum foil, an accordion, plastic bottles, and more musicians on the balconies on both sides of the stage."My goal was to achieve a surround sound experience with the score, with the orchestration," explains Dean in a telephone interview from England, where he will see and hear in the cinema, on Saturday June 4, those atmospheres created with his Hamlet, as you can people from some 70 countries in two thousand theaters, including the National Auditorium in Mexico, through the live transmission of its penultimate performance from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, where it had its American premiere on May 13.Premiered in 2017 at the Glyndebourne Festival, an hour from London and the Globe Theatre, Hamlet is the second opera written by Dean (Brisbane, 1961) in his half-century long career, after Bliss (2010), based on the novel by two-time Booker Prize winner Australian Peter Carey.The success of Brett Dean with his Hamlet was immediate, both at Glyndebourne and now at the MetOpera, the reviews and critics on both sides of the Atlantic showed that it is an opera that is here to stay, unlike the many that have been composed for throughout the story about the tormented prince of Denmark, of which the French one by Ambrose Thomas barely survives, from 1868, which was reassembled in New York in 2010 after a century.Not even the previous version of Dean, by the British Humphrey Searle, from 1968, has survived the cruelty of time.—How do you feel about writing opera in the 21st century?—Many people criticize the opera as irrelevant, as well as being very expensive.But, it's just a wonderful art form.And what I particularly love about it is the collaborative human effort, because it's not just the composer, there are a lot of people involved, of course.On Saturday (June 4) I will see the MetOpera performance in a cinema in the UK, but, even without being in the theater, there is the collaboration with my librettist, the production team, the stage manager and the orchestral.It's wonderful to bring our skills and enthusiasm together.I love this art form for that.Dean admits that The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark was not part of his student readings, or attracted much attention, until he received the opera commission last decade.“Honestly, Hamlet was not a play that we studied in detail in school;I remember analyzing King Lear when he was in high school, for example.Sure, I was familiar with many famous quotes from Hamlet, I knew what it was about, the messages from it… But, until I was confronted with the proposal to put it in the opera, I took the work seriously and realized how extraordinary it is.I began to know the different versions of her, something I had no idea about;getting deeper and deeper into Hamlet, it was fascinating to even look at the chronological history of the evolution of this quintessential work of art, the very interesting journey that she herself had, ”he comments.For the former violist of the Berlin Philharmonic, the works of Shakespeare, and Hamlet more than any other, are totally timeless and so important that their relevance lives on.“It really is a seminal work on the nature of being human,” says Dean, noting that even people who have never read it or seen it performed on stage know its most famous lines.And he just says that a problem was the famous monologue of "To be or not to be", which in the end opens his Hamlet.“When Jocelyn and I were discussing the play, from the beginning he intelligently decided to address it—what we call in English 'the elephant in the room';something that everyone knows is there, but no one wants to talk about it—, to somehow get it out of the way and make a Hamlet that is perhaps not the one that people expect;we suppressed dialogues or they were attributed to other characters ”, he exposes.An example is the reassignment and readaptation of "to be or not to be", which appears from the first line and later, but only murmured, transformed into "...or not to be..." in the voice of tenor Allan Clayton .In that humble sense, Dean describes his collaboration with Jocelyn as “rewarding and enriching”.“I feel like I learned a lot not only from Shakespeare's Hamlet, but also about the history of that time, the history of how a work of art evolves.That two-way collaboration was very interesting, because we supported each other a lot in various ways to build this work.It's what I mentioned before: something wonderful about opera as an art form is how it collaborates.Two heads are always better than one.It was a very inspiring time for me”, says the composer.He alludes to the fact that with the Canadian opera and theater director he also knew the history of the versions of Hamlet published during Shakespeare's lifetime, called Primer Quarto, Segundo Quarto and Primer Folio.The Australian artist highlights the character's philosophical nature, but also his humor."He's a very funny character and that's an aspect that stage manager Neil Armfeild picks up on, though somehow, because of the funny, the more you sympathize with him, the more tragic his downfall."Being in the head of the Prince of Denmark became the leitmotif of Dean's work.The surround sound (surround) of his score and orchestration so that the music had the effect of the cinemas was achieved by incorporating two trios of clarinet, trumpet and percussion on side balconies, a choir of eight singers in the pit with the orchestra , and —as in other of his orchestral works— unorthodox instruments: aluminum foil, plastic bottles and or hitting stones, which links him to another contemporary composer, Thomas Adès, and his opera on The Exterminating Angel.“There is a moment when Ophelia sings from a balcony, another in which a group of singers is with the orchestra in the pit;sometimes there are very delicate and muffled sounds, like hitting stones or a sheet of aluminum.He sought to capture being inside Hamlet's head, to get the audience into Hamlet's mind.“The music is very lyrical and written with the thought that it will be for fantastic singers, and there are certainly fantastic singers in the cast.It is written for them, not against them, if you know what I mean.And it's the same for the orchestra, the music is very difficult to play”, explains the composer, alluding to the cast of this staging led by Allan Clayton (Hamlet), who makes his debut at the MetOpera;Brenda Rae (Ophelia), Sarah Connolly (Gertrude), Rod Gilfry (Claudio), John Relyea, the ghost of the father, David Butt Philip (Laertes), among others, directed by Australian director Nicholas Carter.Dean laments that he won't be able to see his play live on stage at the MetOpera, a theater with around four thousand seats, as opposed to just over a thousand at Glyndebourne.“Certainly the size of the orchestra and the choir are larger;there is something miraculous about that space, even though it is ridiculously huge, almost four Glyndebournes fit in it.People tell me that the work is growing in that space;unfortunately I will not be able to judge the change on Saturday from the theater where I will see it”.Structured in two acts, with a duration of 3 hours 15 minutes and a half-hour intermission, perhaps one of the most sublime moments according to reviews is the scene of Ophelia's madness, performed by the soprano Brenda Rae, who sings it muddied , half-naked and with a man's sack.“For us it was very important from the beginning to give Ophelia as a character a space and the importance of her story.From the beginning Matthew Jocelyn and I were committed to it.In many montages, Ophelia remains somewhat of a peripheral character, if she is not that weak;however, you can see that she is not an easy person, but a fascinating, strong character.Among all the female characters in Shakespeare, she is one of those who shows the most personality.“We tried to capture the fact that she is a very vibrant and strong and loving person whose life is fractured by everything that happens around her.The destruction of her mind was one of the most dramatic aspects of the play, but it is something of a reflection that goes beyond the nature of madness.We don't know if Hamlet is crazy, sometimes it seems that he is just playing at being crazy;but certainly the fracture in Ofelia's mind is real, and that's why she needed that particular scene.I just saw a video of Brenda Rae's rehearsal, and she did a wonderful, fabulous job as Ophelia.She brought enormous passion and sensitivity to the role.I can't wait to see her at the show this Saturday."—Allan Clayton reprises the role at the MetOpera as in the world premiere at Glyndebourne.What does the music demand of him when he plays Hamlet?"It's a gigantic piece of paper."Allan will also sing the role of Peter Grimes (in Benjamin Britten's opera of the same name) at the MetOpera and recently did so in the UK at Covent Garden.The first thing a singer needs to be Hamlet is remarkable stamina.But what Allan brings to the role, in addition to fantastic vocal technique, a beautiful voice and remarkable stamina, is an extraordinary stage presence as an actor.He magically captures the vulnerability, but also the humor, the wisdom and the intelligence of Hamlet, who is a character with a privileged education, he seems to know a lot about the world even though he is very young… And Allan somehow captures all those aspects that make a great Hamlet on stage.We were extremely fortunate to have had him in this production, first at the Glyndebourne Festival and now in New York.—On June 4th his Hamlet will be able to be seen in a good part of the world, over which the ghost of war now walks, as in the time of Shakespeare and in the context of the history of the drama in Elsinore.What would you say to this global audience to give them hope in a world at war?-It is a timely question, but also very difficult to answer, because Hamlet is not necessarily a work that gives much hope.But, I suppose something has to be said about the fact that after 400 years the work is here, we are all here, the people are here, it is not necessarily the most hopeful, but I feel that the capacity and strength of the human spirit will prevail. .There is something in great works of art that makes us reflect on life on Earth;they don't always give us answers, but they certainly do give us a lot of questions.I think that Hamlet, like any work of art, will contribute to people's understanding of human nature.In this Hamlet there is violence perpetrated, there are questions about what are the motivations for these acts of violence;and a play like Hamlet puts all that violence under the microscope.So I hope the audience finds a purpose and a meaning.But Hamlet is not necessarily a story with a happy ending.