Although the vast majority of my time and energy is currently devoted to Mozart’s sparkling comedy “The Marriage of Figaro” (which we’re performing at Carthage this coming Saturday and Sunday) I have also been thinking a lot about an opera that could not be more different from Figaro: a searing, horror-ridden one-act opera by Richard Strauss called Elektra. In fact, if there aren’t too many last minute matters to attend to with Figaro, I am hoping that it will be possible for me to experience Saturday’s 12 noon HD simulcast of Elektra before running to Carthage for our 3:00 performance of Figaro – which will be the operatic equivalent of traveling between two different planets, in the space of a single afternoon. Elektra is one of the most harrowing experiences one can have in an opera house. First of all, it’s a horrific story: Elektra’s father Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphegenia in order to gain the favor of the gods, and in anger, Agamemnon’s wife Klytemestra – with the aid of her lover, Aegisth – murders him. His daughter, Elektra, nearly goes insane with sorrow and anger, and each and every morning relives the horrors of her father’s murder, which she witnessed with her own eyes. Elektra dreams of gaining vengeance, and awaits the return of Orest (who was sent away years earlier for his own safety) – and by opera’s end, Orest has indeed murdered his mother and her lover …. but Elektra’s joy is short-lived, for her frenzied dance of victory ends with her collapsing, presumably dead.
Mighty cheerful, eh?
And with that in mind, here is a rather hilarious story about Elektra. Many, many years ago Kathy and I were spending the day up in Milwaukee with our good friends Lynn and Walter and their two children Shawn and Laura. I’m not sure but I would guess that Shawn was maybe 7 years old at the time. Towards the end of the afternoon, we stopped by Milwaukee’s biggest record store, Radio Doctors, to kill some time- but Shawn was bored to death. So I started pulling out complete opera recordings (on CD) to find interesting pictures that he might find intriguing. At one point, I pulled from the shelf a recording of Elektra with Hildegard Behrens on the cover, looking very menacing.
Shawn wanted to know who that lady was and why she looked so scary- and I obviously wasn’t going to explain such a story to a 7 year old. So I made up something pretty vague that made it sound like a standard ghost story, and finished my little white lie by saying that someday we would have to watch it together. “Can we watch it tonight,” Shawn asked earnestly. I stammered out some kind of answer that did not satisfy him one bit – and all the way home to Racine ….. and I mean ALL the way home to Racine, Shawn kept pleading over and over to his mom and dad, “But I want to watch Elektra!” (Back then, he didn’t really have a knack for taking no as an answer.) It became a running joke for years after – and when Shawn graduated from high school, in addition to our serious gift, we also gave him a VHS recording of …. you guessed it …. Elektra!
I still remember my very first encounter with this unsettling score. It was during my sophomore year at Carthage and Marshall was listening to a Saturday afternoon radio broadcast of the Met’s production of Elektra- and this particular performance was quite a big deal because Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson was back at the Met for the first time in five years. (She had been away because of a squabble with the IRS of all things.) Usually Marshall listened over his headphones, but for some reason he was listening over the speakers on this occasion- and I remember how two or three minutes into the performance he excitedly said to me “hear those footsteps? That’s Birgit!” The character of Elektra had just taken the stage, and so the first thing we heard of Birgit’s return to that stage was the sound of her footsteps. Of course, before too long she was sending forth that brilliant beacon of voice into the vast auditorium of the Met in Elektra’s heart-rending opening soliloquy, “Allein!” I knew next to nothing about the opera or what made it so great- and its highly dissonant score did not exactly win me over in one fell swoop, but had at least a vague sense that I was encountering something quite out of the ordinary.
Early in my junior year, one of those Met performances was televised on PBS, and I knew that it was something I had to watch. My recollection is that Marshall was out of town (maybe on orchestra tour?) so watching it at his house was not really an option- and this was back in the Stone Age when I could count on one hand the number of Luther students I knew who had a TV in their dorm room. Marshall and I were living that year in an on-campus house, Gjerset House (not a frat house- just a house that was available for any group of guys who might apply to live there) and I timidly taped a note to the TV in our living room, saying that I was hoping that the guys wouldn’t mind if I was allowed to watch this special opera program that night. This is back in the day before iPods and smart phones, so watching TV on a TV was what you did, and on most nights there would be at least 7 or 8 guys watching TV. So imagine my gratitude when I walked into the house that evening and found the living room completely deserted- the guys were giving me my chance to watch Elektra! I’m thankful to this day! And it was great- even if Birgit Nilsson was well past her prime, with a voice no longer quite equal to the stern challenges of this role. She could still deliver the goods, and her friend and frequent colleague, Leonie Rysanek, was perhaps even more impressive in the critical role of Elektra’s younger sister.
That being said, I don’t think I really “got” Elektra until the summer of 1985 when I saw a concert performance of it at the Ravinia Festival – and thanks to my friendship with Scott Holmes, a buddy from the Lyric chorus who worked in Ravinia’s box office at the time, I had front row seats – and experiencing the opera and the blowtorch intensity of the cast – Ute Vinzing, Leonie Rysanek, Mignon Dunn, Simon Estes, and James Levine on the podium- was almost more than I could bear. It was also in that performance that I first began to understand how arduous the title role is. Once Elektra enters the fray, she basically never leaves the stage- and the music Strauss wrote for her is brutally taxing- in part because of its fierce range, and in part because she has to sing it over what amounts to the largest orchestra one finds in opera ….. right around 100 instruments. It is the rare voice that can sing over all that. I remember that at one point in that Ravinia performance, Ms. Vinzing – during a brief orchestral interlude – swept one hand across the other and surreptitiously opened her huge ring and grabbed from it some sort of lozenge which she eased into her mouth. I don’t think anyone would have seen it if they weren’t sitting in the front row like I was. That’s when I first got a glimmer of how insanely difficult her music is.
And then a few years later I finally saw a fully staged performance of Elektra in person- a performance at the Lyric Opera with Eva Marton and Leonie Rysanek (having graduated from the role of Chrysothemus, Elektra’s sister, to Klytemnestra, Elektra’s mother) that still counts among the most incredible performances I have ever seen. Eva Marton was exactly the right singer for the role; I don’t know anyone who has conveyed Elektra’s crazed heartache like she did.
I have my favorite Elektra performances, to which I return again and again – either via Youtube or DVD. One of them is a performance that occurred at the Orange Festival in France- which means that the supertitles are in French. But no matter because the cast is truly stupendous. Dame Gwyneth Jones is the Elektra – and she hurls her immense voice with an amazing combination of fearless abandon yet wise savvy. And she is especially incredible in the pivotal scene opposite her mother, who is tortured by nightmares and sleeplessness and asks her estranged daughter for help. In the climax of the scene, Elektra explains that an animal must be sacrificed – but that animal will be Klytemnestra herself! It’s brilliantly written, and when you have two singers like Gwyneth Jones and Leonie Rysanek singing it, it’s just about more than your heart can take!
I also love a video from the Vienna State Opera that preserves the Elektra of Eva Marton, the woman I saw in the role at the Lyric. I love her performance start to finish, but I especially love her in what’s known as the Recognition Scene. This is the point in the opera when a stranger shows up with the news that Elektra’s long-awaited brother has been killed – trampled by his own horses. It is news that sends Elektra plummeting into a pit of utter despair- and the music here is among the most tragic and sorrowful that has ever been written. When played and sung well, it just slashes into you – as though you yourself were caught in the same grief that tears Elektra apart. I especially love the moment when Elektra lashes out at the stranger, so angry that he would be standing there- alive and well- while her noble brother, who was a thousand times more deserving of life, lay trampled in the dirt.
It is only when Elektra makes mention of her father Agamemnon that this stranger finally recognizes who she is. (She has essentially lived among the wild dogs, and looks nothing like she once did.) The stranger then announces that he in fact is Orest (the story of his death a fabrication to allow him to slip back home without detection) ….. and Elektra let’s loose with a blood-curdling scream of joy and disbelief, sung over a riotous chord in the orchestra that makes it seem as though Elektra’s joy might tear her apart. Eventually, the music calms down – as she calms down – and she sings the most tender music of the opera, which begins with her singing her brother’s name over and over …. Orest. It’s not a long scene but it takes us on a truly extraordinary emotional journey.
But in some ways, the performance which for me most clearly confirms the greatness of this work is a concert performance of it from a few years ago at the first night of the Proms at Royal Albert Hall. This is a performance without sets or props – and the women in the cast are in evening gowns rather than the tattered rags in which they would typically be costumed. But somehow it doesn’t matter because these singers – Marilyn Zschau, Deborah Voigt, Eva Randova, and Willard White- are so intensely engaged in their respective roles that we forget all about the fact that we are watching a concert being telecast by the BBC. We are thrust deep into the heart of these characters and the blood-curdling drama playing out between them. And Marilyn Zschau’s performance as Elektra is one of towering greatness. She has all of the notes- no small feat, in and of itself- but beyond that, she is somehow able to convey to us all of the facets of Elektra’s tortured soul.
The Met’s new production of Elektra is essentially the last production created by the legendary Patrice Chareau for the festival at Aix-en-Provence just before he died. I have seen a video of its first performance, and I was blown away by it. In some ways it explores this story with touches of nuance and subtlety that one does not always associate with this story and score- and its ultimate impact is quite remarkable. The Met has assembled a superb cast – with several of the principals from when this production first opened – and the original conductor of the production, Esa-Pekka Salonen, will be on the podium. Of all of the HD simulcasts offered up in this 10th anniversary season, this is the one that has excited me the most – and I plan to be there to drink in this extraordinary opera once again.
And in case I haven’t scared you off, the HD simulcast is this Saturday, April 30th, 12 noon central – at movie theaters across the country and around the world. And if it’s showing anywhere close to where you are, then I hope you will avail yourself of the opportunity to experience Elektra. (Go to metopera.org for more information.)
And then, if you’re in the neighborhood, you can then head over Carthage and shed all of that sorrow and angst as you laugh along with us in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.
If anything testifies to the far-reaching compass of opera – from its darkest to its brightest -it’s the juxtaposition of these two remarkable masterworks in the course of a single day.