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| Images: BBC/Chris Christodoulou Dame Felicity Palmer as Klytemnestra |
Royal Albert Hall
Elektra
– Christine Goerke
Chrysothemis
– Gun-Brit Barkmin
Klytemnestra
– Dame Felicity Palmer
Orest
– Johan Reuter
First
Maid – Katarina Bradić
Second
Maid – Zoryana Kushpler
Third
Maid – Hanna Hipp
Fourth
Maid – Marie-Eve Munger
Fifth
Maid – Iris Kupke
Overseer
– Miranda Keys
Young
Servant – Ivan Turšić
Orest’s tutor – Jongmin Park
Aegisth – Robert Künzli
Justin Way (stage director)
Anti-Strauss sentiment,
Strauss-scepticism, call it what you will: it still runs high. In some ways,
that is not a bad thing: the ‘case of Strauss’, which I
have written about before and which I shall discuss further in a chapter of
my
new book, to be published next month, is complex and fascinating, and is
certainly not to be resolved with a one-liner here or an affirmation or
otherwise there. Strauss’s æstheticism, perhaps ironically, given its
insistence upon the value of art as art, leads us to greater consideration of
æsthetic questions than the work of many other composers. That holds even when,
perhaps particularly when, one is not of a prosecuting party ranging from Karl
Kraus (‘certainly more of a stock company [Aktiengesellschaft]
than a genius’) to Stravinsky (‘I would
like to admit all Strauss’s operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant
vulgarity. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a
musician today.’) However, even those who disdain much of Strauss’s later work –
often, to my mind, for less than convincing reasons – will admit their
admiration for Elektra. It may not be
many people’s ‘favourite’ Strauss opera, but most, I suspect, will consider it
his greatest. Adorno, who went to the extreme of claiming that ‘everything that
follows Rosenkavalier is either applied or commercial art,’ and who,
in my view, quite wrongly, even took Strauss to task for the ‘entire final
section of Elektra, [in which]
banality is dominant,’ admitted the opera to a line of development ‘from Tristan to Elektra to Schoenberg’s Erwartung’.
And so, whilst in principle
it was somewhat depressing that the Proms elected to perform the three most
popular of Strauss’s operas for his anniversary season – surely if we were to
hear, for instance, Friedenstag
anywhere in this country, it would be here – it was difficult, both in
principle, and certainly in practice, with so fine a performance, to object too
strongly, or indeed at all. Justin Way’s semi-staging worked as well as it had for
the Proms Ring last year. Often,
though not slavishly, following Hofmannsthal’s explicit directions – Elektra
and Klytemnestra did ‘stand eye to eye’, and to very good effect – it permitted
the work to ‘speak for itself’, although in any case it generally does in full
stagings, which tend perhaps more strongly to resemble one another than do
those of any other opera that springs to my mind.
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| Semyon Bychkov, the Maids, and the Overseer |
As with that Ring, the orchestra took centre stage,
the BBC Symphony Orchestra on excellent form throughout. (The occasional moment
of tiredness towards the end can readily be forgiven for any orchestra.) And likewise,
we were fortunate indeed in the choice of conductor: Daniel Barenboim for the Ring; for Elektra, Semyon Bychkov, who was, if memory serves me correctly,
the first conductor I heard in this work. Yet that should not be taken, any
more than it had with a Ring that
included Nina Stemme and Andreas Schager, to imply a downgrading of the vocal
element. In proper Wagnerian style – and in this, if avowedly not with respect
to metaphysics, or the lack thereof, Strauss remained a Wagnerian through and
through – the various elements of the performance, even in a minimal staging,
strengthened one another.
That could be heard in the
first scene, in which a very nicely differentiated group of maids interacted
with flickering intensity with conducting which really did emphasise that clichéd
taking after Mendelssohn’s fairy music. The foresight of the Fifth Maid, Iris
Kupke, was experienced as much in performance as in work. Miranda Keys’s
Overseer was again well differentiated, though not exaggeratedly so, from the ‘mere’
maids. And then, in what might call the ‘interlude’ in which Elektra emerges
from the house, Bychkov ensured that Strauss’s waltz writing disconcertingly reared
its head and pointed ahead.
Christine Goerke’s Elektra
announced herself in deeper voice than one often hears: more feminine, less
harpy, though so certainly not lacking in volume where necessary. Sepulchral
trombones complemented her lament, intensifying those baleful calls of ‘Agamemnon’
that were to follow. Throughout her lengthy soliloquy, Bychkov conjured up –
and the BBC SO delivered – a truly Straussian orchestral phantasmagoria, in
colour and in harmony. ‘Agamemnon!
Vater!’: the orchestra sent shivers down the spine. But equally compelling was
the tenderness from Goerke and orchestra alike, never more so than after ‘zeig
dich deinem Kind!’ A daughter’s affection may have been twisted but, on one
level, it remained childishly simple. Rhythmic and melodic details, for
instance the baying of the dogs, both made their point in themselves and, when
it came to material to be developed later on, sowed their musico-dramatic seeds
with both mystery and expectant, Fatal clarity.
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| Gun-Brit Barkmin as Chrysothemis |
The following scene, with Chrysothemis,
was interesting. Elektra’s blood-curdling ‘spaltete dein Fleisch’ stood at one
extreme. The flowering, in more than one sense, of Gun-Brit Barkmin’s Chrysothemis
intrigued, if anything, more still. During her first lines, I wondered whether
Barkmin would prove a little underpowered, even anonymous. But, as a panoply of
woodwind colour to rival the composer’s ‘Indian summer’ worked its queasy magic,
it became clear that this was a sister who would grow into her role at the
crucial point: the voicing of what, in context, seems her very weird – or is it
very ‘normal’? who knows any more? – obsession with child-bearing. Thereafter
this was a woman indeed.
A woman indeed of a different
nature is Klytemnestra. Her orchestrally-voiced arrival sent shivers down the
spine, enhanced or perhaps ‘realised’ by Felicity Palmer’s splendidly grande-dame procession. If Palmer’s
voice is vocally not what it was, it frankly mattered not a jot. But whilst
this extraordinary confrontation worked itself out in words and singing, the
orchestra broadened our terms of musical reference. You, yourself are a
goddess, Elektra told her mother. What, then, did it mean to hear apparent
echoes of Siegfried’s ‘Forest Murmurs’?
Well, there is honesty in the German forest, but there is also redress, as Mime
would find to his cost. The malevolent replanting of those Wagnerian seeds was
suggestive, whether coincidental or otherwise. Fafner-like brass deepened the
very real agony and sickness we heard from Palmer’s magnificently attentive
outlining of that ‘Etwas’ which had fallen upon her. As for the intensity and
sheer volume with which Goerke despatched ‘ich steh’ da und seh’ dich endlich
sterben’ and likewise ‘der jauchzt und kann sich seines Lebens freun!’ What can
one say other than superlative? Perfectly matched, by the way, by the orchestra
as they stood, in that aforementioned scene, ‘eye to eye’.
Brittle, sardonic, orchestral
mock-heroism ‘accompanied’ the appearance of the Young Servant. Sheer
orchestral depravity ‘beautifully’ captured, in all its bizarre mixture of
sincerity and insincerity, Elektra’s hymn to her sister’s female form. And
finally, the relief of Orest’s arrival: not quite the first male voice but, my
goodness, it sounded as if it were! Johan Reuter’s delivery of this difficult
role brought bluff anger rather than the more ‘intellectual’ approach of a
Matthias Goerne. There is room for both, but here, Reuter felt ‘right’. The
final recognition hit as it should: a truly shattering dissonance on Elektra’s ‘Orest’
would be followed up by too beautiful
remembrance of her former self, bathed in a narcissism that seemed almost
literally, or at least verbally, skin-deep.
I do not know whether Palmer
delivered her own off-stage scream. Whoever did it deserves mention in her own
right, for it vied with the orchestral response – and Goerke’s truly terrifying
steely response: Triff noch einmal!’ No compassion here, thank you. Again,
Strauss’s insidious waltzing proved thematically, dramatically pregnant in the
scene with Aegisth (a competent but less than exciting Robert Künzli). Rosenkavalier seemed less around the
corner than already present as, following Elektra’s strange courtesies, he
entered the house.
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| Christine Goerke as Elektra |
Somehow, the voices of the BBC Singers seemed more than usually akin to Elektra’s
‘voices’ in a psychological sense. It was
probably partly a matter of not seeing the singers, perhaps also a matter of
the acoustic. Whatever the reason, it added an interesting, appropriately
psychoanalytical deadliness to the final events. The insincerity, in context,
of C major may here have been Strauss’s – and Bychkov’s, and the orchestra’s –
crowning achievement. To
speak, as Adorno did, of the discontinuity ‘between the wildness of most of
Strauss’s music in Elektra and its
blissfully triadic conclusion’ seems at the best of times wilful. Blissful?
About as much as Handel’s use of the major mode in the ‘Dead March’ from Saul. After a brief period of ‘release’
with a ‘true’ operatic duet between the sisters, there came the final dramatic bludgeoning.
And Elektra fell as shatteringly on stage as she did in the orchestra.
