The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (24 page)

A production flamboyantly designed by Salvador Dalí and directed by the young Peter Brook, with the voluptuous Ljuba Welitsch in the title-role, caused a great stir at Covent Garden in 1949, introducing London audiences to the modern concept of staging opera.

Among successful recent productions are those by Peter Hall (seen in Los Angeles and at Covent Garden and the Met), in which Maria Ewing strikingly finished the Dance of the Seven Veils stark naked; Luc Bondy (Salzburg and Covent Garden), who presented Herod’s palace as a bombed-out den in a city ravaged by war; and André Engel (WNO and Scottish Opera), who evoked the Arab harem paintings of Delacroix.
Others striving to avoid the obvious Hollywood biblical kitsch have taken the symbolist paintings of Odilon Redon or the Secessionist eroticism of Gustav Klimt as their inspiration.

Recordings

CD: Cheryl Studer (Salome); Giuseppe Sinopoli (cond.).
DG 431 8102

Video: Catherine Malfitano (Salome); Christoph von Dohnanyi (cond.).
Covent Garden production.
Decca 074 105 3

Teresa Stratas (Salome); Karl Böhm (cond.).
German television film.
DG 072 109 3

Elektra

One act. First performed Dresden, 1909.

Libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

In 1903 Strauss saw a production of Sophocles’
Elektra,
rewritten (under the influence of a reading of Freud) by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and staged by the revolutionary director Max Reinhardt.
Struck by its operatic potential, he approached Hofmannsthal for permission to set the text to music – and thus began one of the great composer–librettist partnerships.
Strauss nevertheless worried that
Elektra
might seem too similar in scope (one act, lasting about 110 minutes) and subject-matter (a neurotic woman driven to an extreme act) to its predecessor,
Salome.
The result is that
Elektra
was scored for an unprecedentedly large orchestra – including eight clarinets, eight horns and four Wagner tubas – and broke new boundaries of fortissimo.

Plot

Banished outside the walls of the palace of Mycenae, Elektra squats in rags, mourning her dead father King Agamemnon, murdered by his wife, Elektra’s mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus.
Elektra is obsessed with desire for revenge.
Her emollient sister Chrysothemis, desperate for a normal existence, begs her to be more circumspect.

Clytemnestra is haunted by nightmares.
She comes out of the palace to ask her daughter Elektra – whom she believes to have magical powers – for help.
Elektra taunts her aggressively.
News comes that Elektra’s exiled brother Orestes is dead.
Clytemnestra is delighted, but Elektra despairs: she always hoped that he would return and be the agent of her revenge.
Elektra fails to persuade the timorous Chrysothemis to join with her in a murderous plot, and sets to work alone, digging up a buried axe.

A stranger enters.
He questions Elektra, and once he is sure of her identity and loyalty, reveals himself to be Orestes – news of his death was false.
Elektra is blissfully reunited with her brother, who has returned to do his duty.
In disguise, he enters the palace, where he soon kills Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.
Elektra’s joy at the long-awaited slaughter drives her demented.
She dances deliriously and falls dead, as the distraught Chrysothemis hammers on the palace door.

What to listen for

After the opening scene, in which five servants and their overseer discuss the situation, Elektra does not leave the stage (although Birgit Nilsson, one of the greatest Elektras, found an opportunity during the digging-up of the buried axe to creep into the wings and swallow a fortifying pint of beer).
The role is the ultimate
tour
de
force
for a dramatic soprano, exhausting not only vocally but emotionally too.
Elektra is a woman of high intelligence and wit teetering on the edge of insanity, and her music persistently rises to high-lying climaxes indicative of her hysteria.
The soprano also has to master a long, complex and sophisticated text, flavoured with the Freudian theory of the unconscious, and sustain an intensity which can embrace both the tendresse of the reunion with Orestes and the final explosive mad dance of fury.
Chrysothemis is in contrast a more conventionally lyrical soprano role, and Clytemnestra provides a gift to an older contralto with crisp enunciation and a touch of ham.
The male roles, Orestes and Aegisthus, are comparatively small and uninteresting.

Compared to the overripe, lip-smacking sensuality of
Salome,
the idiom of
Elektra
is cold, hard, and brazen – qualities
appropriate to the depiction of a society ruled by a primitive blood-feud.
There are moments when its harmonic dissonance is extreme and minutes when it descends into plain bombast, but after all the sound and fury, the score comes defiantly home in the basic key of C major – one of the little jokes which pepper Strauss’s scores.

In performance

It’s no longer enough to present an approximation of Ancient Mycenae – contemporary productions envisage
Elektra
as taking place in a bunker, a prison, a mental hospital, or any location evocative of the brutality and psychosis of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
How to keep the acting style clear of melodrama and do any sort of justice to the subtleties of Hofmannsthal’s fascinating text is more of a problem.

Recordings

CD: Birgit Nilsson (Elektra); Georg Solid (cond.).
Decca 417 345 2

Video: Leonie Rysanek (Elektra); Karl Böhm (cond.).
Decca 071 400 3

Der
Rosenkavalier
(
The Knight of the Rose
)

Three acts. First performed Dresden, 1911.

Libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

After
Salome
and
Elektra,
Strauss was desperate to write a comedy.
Hofmannsthal obliged with the delicious confection of
Der
Rosenkavalier,
a pastiche of rococo intrigue, combining ingredients drawn from Beaumarchais, Molière, Hogarth, Verdi’s
Falstaff
and the
commedia
dell’arte,
as well as the authentic social history of Maria Theresa’s Vienna in the 1740s.
With its sophisticated balance of farce, romance and
world-weary wisdom, the result has been consistently admired and beloved since its first performance.

Plot

While her husband, the Feldmarschall (Field-Marshal) is away, the aristocratic Marschallin Marie Therese is conducting a passionate affair with a much younger man, Count Octavian.
Their love-making is interrupted by the arrival of Marie Therese’s boorish and lecherous country cousin Baron Ochs, who has come to Vienna to solve his financial problems by marrying Sophie, the pretty teenage daughter of the
nouveau-riche
Herr von Faninal.
Octavian disguises himself as Mariandel, a maidservant, and Ochs takes a misguided fancy to ‘her’.

Ochs solicits the Marschallin’s help – he needs someone to present Sophie with the silver rose which customarily accompanies a marriage proposal.
The Marschallin mischievously suggests her ‘cousin’ Octavian for the task.

After her levee, the Marschallin bids farewell to Octavian, conscious that she is getting old and that he will soon be looking for women elsewhere.
Octavian is appalled at the suggestion, but the Marschallin knows better, reflecting that one must accept the passage of time without sinking into self-pity.

In Faninal’s house, there is great excitement as the bearer of the silver rose approaches.
When Octavian appears to make the presentation, he and Sophie fall instantly in love.
But Sophie is disgusted by Ochs’s coarseness and immediately determines to reject him.
Ochs’s spies, Valzacchi and Annina, inform Ochs what is going on between Sophie and Octavian, and Ochs and Octavian fight an inconsequential duel.
Sophie is taken away by her father Faninal and Octavian is shown the door.
But Octavian now buys up the services of Valzacchi and Annina, and hatches his own little plot.
He tells Annina to deliver Ochs a note from ‘Mariandel’, proposing an assignation in a suburban inn.
Ochs cannot resist.