800 liters of water, two sails, thirty pulleys, sixty hammocks: for the Bicentenary of the Teatro Real of Madrid, Deborah Warner coined a colossal production of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd.

Billy Budd

Brett Dean's multi-award-winning opera received its world premiere at Glyndebourne Festival 2017. The world premiere recording of Brett Deans new opera based on Shakespeares best-known tragedy: To be, or not to be. This is Hamlets dilemma, and the essence of Shakespeares most famous and arguably greatest work, given new life in operatic form in this original Glyndebourne commission. Thoughts of murder and revenge drive Hamlet when he learns that it was his uncle Claudius who killed his father, the King of Denmark, then seized his fathers crown and wife. But Hamlets vengeance vies with the question: is suicide a morally valid deed in an unbearably painful world?

Glyndebourne: Hamlet

Based on a poem published in 1810 with more ethnographic than dramatic focus, Britten constructed a sombre parable about the conflict between the masses and the individual. The maritime atmosphere, the crudity of people’s lives and passions, and the complex, impenetrable personality of the protagonist come together in a tragedy which ferments and explodes in the din of silence and hearsay.  New production of the Teatro Real, in co-production with the Royal Opera House Covent Garden of London, the Opéra national of Paris and the Teatro dell’Opera of Rome