United Kingdom R. Strauss, Elektra: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of the Academy of Santa Cecilia / Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor). Livestreamed (directed by Marco Patino) from the Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome, 18.10.2022 and obtainable on Rai Play. (JPr)
I’ll revisit some earlier ideas about Elektra by explaining how ‘Electra complex’ is the psychoanalytic metaphor for daughter–mom psychosexual battle and is called after the fifth-century BCE Greek mythological character who – as recounted by Sophocles and Euripides – plotted with the help of her brother Orest to kill their mom, Klytämnestra, and stepfather, Ägisth, as a result of they murdered their father, Agamemnon.
Sigmund Freud referred to as a woman’s sexual competitors along with her mom for her father, the female Oedipus perspective and the destructive Oedipus advanced. The latter time period was one thing he first utilized in 1910, coincidentally the yr after the primary performances of Richard Strauss’s opera. However it was Freud’s collaborator Carl Jung who truly used the time period ‘Electra complex’ only a few years later, although this was famously rejected by Freud as being psychoanalytically inaccurate: ‘what we have said about the Oedipus complex applies with complete strictness to the male child only, and that we are right in rejecting the term “Electra complex”, which seeks to emphasise the analogy between the attitude of the two sexes’.
Despite Strauss’s opera being based mostly on historical Greek mythology, it’s considered each modernist and expressionist. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Strauss’s adaptation retains Elektra on stage on a regular basis after her first entrance – and most of the time within the highlight. (In reality, the stage director in Rome, Alessandra De Sanctis, has Ausrine Stundyte’s Elektra glowering on the facet of the platform proper from the beginning.)
Elektra explores the eponymous character’s feelings and psychological motivations as she meets, principally one by one, Klytämnestra, Orest, Ägisth, in addition to duelling along with her sister, Chrysothemis, and aside from Elektra none of them get sufficient time on stage for any actual character improvement and are secondary to her cries for vengeance and the opera’s blood-soaked denouement.
Prior to the opera, Elektra’s father has already been murdered with an axe which stays a potent bodily and musical motif throughout the next 100 minutes. A four-note theme begins the opera, recurs throughout it, and brings it to a detailed: it’s to this leitmotif that Elektra will sing ‘A-ga-mem-non’. Elektra, who has suffered abuse by each her mom and Klytämnestra’s lover, Ägisth, is mourning her lifeless father. Elektra is initially cowed and – the libretto’s stage path says – runs again into the palace ‘like an animal to its lair’. Her sister Chrysothemis wanders round like a sufferer of this dysfunctional household and longs to be elsewhere and have a happier life. Their brother, Orest, has escaped into exile solely later to return and grow to be the primary vital male voice within the unfolding occasions (and that’s after about an hour).
The motion, resembling it’s, begins with 5 maids washing Agamemnon’s blood from the mosaic ground. They are stored to their job by the whip of a merciless Overseer and collectively the maids talk about Elektra’s insanity. In a protracted monologue (‘Allein! Weh, ganz allein’) Elektra remembers Agamemnon and divulges how she is set to avenge him and the way along with her sister and brother the deed might be finished, after which she is going to dance ‘a royal dance of victory’ at her father’s grave. It is sort of as if Strauss is revisiting his earlier Salome and after a lot to-ing and fro-ing from the characters each main and minor, Chrysothemis comes out of the palace to announce that the returned Orest is inside and has killed each Klytämnestra and Ägisth; with a bloodbath having begun as his followers have additionally killed those that supported them.
Chrysothemis goes into the palace to be along with her brother, whereas Elektra is ecstatic and begins to bop. The incontrovertible fact that she has achieved what she needed overwhelms her and at climax of her dance, she falls down lifeless. The final we hear is Chrysothemis calling for her brother, Orest, which mirrors Elektra’s earlier cries for Agamemnon. Perhaps Strauss is hinting that the incest will proceed. What else he desires us to expertise is slightly obscure – aside maybe from ‘Beware the angry woman’. This might – or might not – have one thing to do with Strauss’s personal obvious ‘Mommie Dearest’ points!
I’m struggling to recollect a greater Elektra than Ausrine Stundyte in earlier performances I’ve seen and heard. Within the context of a live performance presentation (with everybody in formal live performance gown), even when she sat on a chair, Stundyte was absolutely engaged all through. She sang with none trace of vocal pressure, and with appreciable energy and vocal depth, Stundyte’s Elektra was undoubtedly indignant, bitter, vindictive, although additionally surprisingly female, particularly within the Recognition Scene the place her affection for Orest was palpable.
It is often Elektra’s extra standard sister, Chrysothemis, who has all the female feelings she retains in test. The tender-hearted Chrysothemis is due to this fact extra human, but she continues to be weak and Elisabet Strid acted all her character’s hopes and fears to perfection. Strid sang with commendable lyricism, and pure tone, hardly ever can the 2 sisters have appeared so well-matched, so associated. As the depraved queen, Petra Lang’s mom from hell was a monstrous creation and it was unattainable to consider this was her function debut as Klytämnestra. Lang was the personification of Strauss’s murderous harridan due to her outstanding singing and dramatic appearing and her cackling laughter as she left the platform can not simply be forgotten.
In the 2 main male roles, the all the time spectacular Kostas Smoriginas was a dark-toned, implacable Orest, and Neal Cooper’s Ägisth simply focused on singing this quick, however fiendishly troublesome, function together with his standard accomplishment and prevented displaying how grotesque the character is. The remainder of the small components had been usually well-taken by an ensemble of gifted singers, though I assumed the maids initially a quite uneven quintet.
Strauss’s rating is raucous and relentless, and you’ll hear Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries again and again, and musical repose – what there’s of it – comes from the massive chunks additionally, you will recognise from Strauss’s subsequent opera Der Rosenkavalier. Sir Antonio Pappano visibly expended quite a lot of his vitality in main the Orchestra of the Academy of Santa Cecilia (of which he’s music director) in supporting the supercharged singing we heard with their account of Elektra which had symphonic sweep and a variety of Straussian tone colors.
Jim Pritchard
Ausrine Stundyte – Elektra
Elisabet Strid – Chrysothemis
Petra Lang – Klytämnestra
Neal Cooper – Ägisth
Kostas Smoriginas – Orest
Nicolò Donini – Orest’s tutor
Ariana Lucas – Handmaid I
Anne Schuldt – Handmaid II
Monika-Evelin Liiv – Handmaid III
Katrin Adel – Handmaid IV
Alexandra Lowe – Handmaid V
Leonardo Cortellazzi – A younger servant
Andrea D’Amelio – An previous servant
Maura Menghini – The overseer
Marta Vulpi – The confidante
Bruna Tredicine – The trainbearer
Cristina Cappellini, Sara Fiorentini, Antonella Capurso, Roberta De Nicola, Federica Paganini, Tiziana Pizzi – Six servants
Alessandra De Sanctis – Director