There's very little narrative in Hoffmanstahl's libretto written as the Germans say frei nach Aischylos., although the Viennese poet intensifies his diction to the breaking point and imparts a rococo sheen to the gruesome imagery of vultures, rotting corpses, and pustulent wounds ornamenting the text. Elektra, the daughter of the murdered Agamemnon, broods and rages -- she is a kind of wild animal obsessed with revenge. Indeed, her very presence at the threshold of the Mycenean royal court is both an outrage and a kind of savage retribution inflicted upon her mother Clytemnestra. With her lover Aegisth, Clytemnestra has killed Agamemnon in his bath and, then, sent Elektra's infant brother into the country, paying a shepherd to strangle the child, who by the vicious axioms of Bronze Age morality is obligated to avenge his father. Needless to say, the shepherd doesn't kill the child and Orestes grows to adulthood, waiting for the moment to murder those responsible for his father's death, foremost his own mother. (Of course, Clytemnestra was understandably indignant that Agamemnon butchered their daughter Iphigenia as an offering to the gods to insure safe passage over the whale-road to Troy.) The maids describe Elektra's ferocity, then, she sings a long aria reminding us of her murderous project. Her little sister, Chrysothemis, desires a Weibschicksal ("a woman's destiny'") -- that is, she wants to marry, have children, and nurture them. But Elektra will have none of this -- she is consumed solely by her desire to avenge her father. Word arrives that Orestes has been trampled to death by his own horses. With Orestes ostensibly unable to murder King Aegisth and his consort, Clytemnestra, Elektra demands that Chrysothemis, who is said to be strong and lithe, a sinewy virgin, help her with consummating the slaughter. Chrysothemis protests and, at the last minute, Orestes appears -- the rumor of his death was only a ruse to let him approach the fortress-palace.without being detected. At first, Elektra doesn't recognize him , but soon enough they are mutually rejoicing in the orgiastic anticipation of the massacre. Orestes enters the palace and kills everyone. Elektra who has vowed to dance for the gods when the slaughter is accomplished, gravely lifts her knees high and stomps around the stage. Curtain.
Strauss ornaments this feral story with wildly cinematic, mostly atonal music -- the violins scream like fiddles in a Bernard Hermann score and there are concussive bangs and thumps, sometimes propulsive rhythms that anticipate Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. The music cleaves so closely and literally to the mayhem on stage that there is nothing memorable -- the arias involve huge intervals that seem to rack the voices of the sopranos singing them. Until the opera's last ten minutes, the singing is all pitched very high, shrieking coloratura sopranos, often singing difficult sounding duets -- this is mostly the byplay between Elektra and Chrysothemis, although there are also notably sinister interludes in which the deranged Elektra taunts her half-deranged and terrified mother. Everything approximates a tremendous and complex howl. There are three emotional registers in the opera -- outraged shrieks in which something unspeakable is said, while the interlocutor looks on in frozen horror, a sort of ferocious ecstasy, and, lastly, cajoling and wheedling usually sexually inflected. Strauss orchestrates the opera for 109 instruments. The Minnesota Opera Company, performing on-stage (since they would not fit in the pit) reduces these musical forces by about 20, but the orchestra was still large enough to include not one but two harps.
I saw the production on opening night, October 5, 2019 at the Ordway Theater. The conceit of this staging is that we are in Berlin in 1927 and a German director is filming Elektra as a silent movie. Before the opera began, we see stagehands looking vaguely like extras in Berlinalexanderplatz milling around, smoking cigarettes, meeting with costumed extras, and tinkering with cameras. The show begins with a silent movie projected above four huge doors bearing bronze bosses, set near the front of the thrust stage -- this stage is built over the pit. The movie, very effectively, shows the backstory because, of course, a 21st century audience can not be counted upon to know much about the Trojan War or the House of Atreus. The silent film is marvelous, somehow interpolating the modern actors into scenes showing huge crowds in ancient forums. At times, the vividness of the acting in the silent film, the ultra-expressionist close-ups staged against intense inky darkness, gives the opera the ambience of a Guy Madden film -- something that I thought admirable. As the opera progresses it becomes clear that the huge although mobile doors are backdrops so that the actresses can be filmed in real time against them, their digital images projected on a trapezoid screen that is periodically dropped down from above. This is a complex staging technique interposing real live performances cinematically magnified and simultaneously projected with intricate shots that show the actresses performing in the elaborately constructed movie-fortress or wandering through arcades thronged with people. To my eye, the synthesis of film and live performance was slightly distracting but, certainly, more or less flawlessly executed. The orchestra sprawled across most of the stage with an narrow aisle through which appearances from behind a backdrop at the rear of the stage could be executed. The backdrop was an elaborate abstract pattern, vaguely Celtic, like something that you might see on a Irish shield or in the Book of Kells. At times, images were projected against that writhing, vaguely gold-colored wall. There were various Brechtian provocations -- that is, disruptions to the fourth wall. At one point, the menacing actor playing Orestes retreats to the side of the thrust stage where he smokes a cigarette during one of Elektra's blaring arias. (This reminded me of the scenes in Bergman's Zauberfloete in which we see the protagonists playing chess backstage or studying the score of Wagner's Parsifal.0
As in all Grand Opera, the line between ridiculous and sublime is exceedingly narrow. All of the female leads were very heavy, buxom women -- Strauss wrote this opera in a Wagnerian mode that sometimes declines into bombast. At one point, Elektra is inveigling her sister Chrysothemis to murder Clytemnestra. Elektra sings "Du windest dich durch jeden Spalt, du hebst dich durch's Fenster!" -- these words were projected as "You can wiggle through the cracks and climb through the window!" Of course, the notion of this very large woman"wiggling through cracks" struck someone in the audience as hilarious and during a gap in Strauss' wall of sound, we heard a woman cackling when these lines were proclaimed on the surtitles. Aegisth is portrayed as an old queen himself -- he comes out smirking like Quentin Crisp with one eyebrow quizzically elevated -- this was also funny and even I laughed out loud. (I think this effect was intended.) Clytemnesta's Vertraute (her confidants) writhed like snakes around the huge queen who inevitably reminded me of Shelley Winters -- the Vertraute made sinister gestures and danced in a salacious way around the fat Queen and the image was undeniably strange, even frightening, a gesture toward the composer's earlier Salome. Strauss' opera is so extreme that when the diction suddenly reverts to something recognizably quotidian, the audience experience a brief shock -- this can also seem risible. At one point, Elektra laments that she is like a "garment devoured by moths" - it's a good image, but sufficiently day-to-day to seem out of place. At another moment, some factotum says that he will saddle a steed or a donkey or "if needs be, a cow." It's a lame attempt at humor that seems a refreshing respite from the agonizing Sturm und Drang but the line seems imported from some other opera.
At the performance that I attended, Elektra was performed by a German soprano, Sabine Hogrefe (an unfortunate name because the leading lady was a tiny bit porcine.) She was actually outsung by the larger, more vibrant Chrysothemis (Marcy Stonikas). The presence of the vast orchestra on-stage was problematic in several scenes, particularly the first confrontation between Clytemnestra (wearing an elaborate gold headdress with radiating rays) and the disheveled Elektra. It took Clytemnestra, in tandem with her unctuous Vertraute, a long time to get through the orchestra and reach the thrust stage. On some occasions, the screeching in the orchestra overwhelmed the screeching on-stage. But, all in all, the show was a spectacle not readily forgotten.
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