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Blood, Thunder, and Elektra
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17479 |
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THE ARTS
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7 / 1990 |
2,076 Words |
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Lawrence O'Toole
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Richard Strauss' Elektra, which burst upon a shocked operatic world in 1909, hurls you immediately into its violent action. Within the House of Atreus, Klytemnestra's maids are busily scrubbing away at the blood from the murder of her husband, Agamemnon, by her lover, Aegisth. Her daughter Elektra, cast out and half-mad with grief for her father, arrives and plots with her ineffectual sister, Chrysothemis, and then her recently returned brother, Oreste, to murder her mother and her mother's lover. Not quite two hours later, the unhappy House of Atreus is dripping blood again, and Elektra, now truly insane, dances herself into a revanchist frenzy and then to death.
Strauss' orchestra is mammoth, and his music - by turns rawly percussive and meltingly lyrical - a model of dramatic cohesion. There isn't a wasted note in this score, nor a wasted word in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's text. The role of Elektra is itself a vocal Everest that few sopranos can climb. Often Strauss' leviathan orchestral forces overwhelm the singers to the point where their voices become swallowed by the sea of sound surrounding them. Most productions of Elektra sorely lack one element or another - propulsive conducting, an interesting concept, an acceptable Elektra - and it is rate to find all the elements coalescing, as they did so magnificently in the Royal Opera's new production at Covent Garden.
In fact, one could go so far as to say that the Gotz Friedrich production, conducted by Sir Georg Solti, is one of the greatest operatic achievements of our time.
Friedrich once said in an interview that he would never produce Elektra on the stage until he found a way for the singers to be heard above the mighty Strauss orchestral forces. With this production, aided by his designer Hans Schavernoch and in collaboration with Solti, he devised an acoustic shell in the form of an ellipsoid tube, with a corrugated aluminum surface (for its sound-absorbent quality), that prevents the singers's voices from escaping into the wings and projects them out over the orchestra. A symbolic shaft-it looks like a silver tree-plunges through the cylinder at stage right.
Schavernoch's set works as many wonders metaphorically as it does acoustically: What better metaphor for the emotional prison of family life than a steel-gray tube that seems to stretch endlessly in either direction? It is also similar in design to the long tube populated by Samuel Beckett's The Lost Ones - and indeed the characters in Elektra, each in his own way, is a lost soul. In this production, Elektra vainly, pathetically tries to gain access into the house, but the doors are closed to her, as they are to Chrysothemis at the end as the curse of unhappy family life is repeated over and over.
Friedrich has set the opera in the indeterminate future in which color is generally absent but occasionally, specifically, florid. Eva Marton's Elektra, with her punk haircut, looks like a modern vagrant, or bag lady. Chrysothemis, the true bourgeois spirit, apathetic and trapped in her own inertia, shows up in a platinum blonde wig and a violet evening gown with a white fur stole wrapped over her bare shoulders. There are plenty of leather and camp (leopard-skin and such) outfits in the rest of Lora Haas' costumes, which borrow from both the Nazi and near (i.e., new wave) past. The air in this Elektra is redolent of the crumbling Weimar Republic and a rather studied decadence. Most of what occurs
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