It was primarily as a composer of opera that Sándor Szokolay (1921-2013) established his international reputation. His dramatic works invariably made use of demanding literary source material, and his three-act opera Hamlet was no exception: the libretto was compiled by the composer himself from János Arany's masterful translation of Shakespeare. The work is characterised by a classical simplicity periodically enriched by ritualistic passages. Szokolay makes his Hamlet one for the ages by merely abridging, rather than altering, Shakespeare and Arany's text, thus preserving the philosophical message of the world's best-known drama.
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