A murdered man’s daughter and son seek revenge on their mother, who conspired with her lover to slaughter him in his bath. The daughter is sexually repressed, a pathological hysteric, who loved her father not wisely but too well. The mother is a bloated, decaying harpy haunted by guilt-ridden nightmares. She and her paramour are axed in a violent orgy of retribution. Her vengeance complete, the daughter exults in a wild dance of triumph before collapsing, dead.
The confessions of a terminally dysfunctional family on “Ricki Lake”? A gory new best seller from Stephen King? A lurid courtroom shocker to set before Judge Ito?
None of the above, actually. The Electra legend was recounted by the Greek dramatists Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus during the 4th Century B.C. It was reworked as a morbid shocker for the age of Sigmund Freud, first as a German-language version of the Sophocles tragedy by the Viennese poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, later as an opera by Hofmannsthal and his most famous collaborator, composer Richard Strauss.
Composed in 1909, “Elektra” lies at the center of the famous “working friendship” between Strauss and Hofmannsthal that would provide the operatic repertoire with a succession of masterpieces, including the earlier “Salome” and later “Der Rosenkavalier,” over a period of 25 years.
“Elektra” (Hofmannsthal reverted to the Greek spelling with a “k”) is hardly the most characteristic opera Strauss ever wrote. Never again in the 40 years that separated its premiere and his death, in 1949, did he venture anything else like it. Nor was it ever destined to be “popular” the way his “Der Rosenkavalier” is popular. (How could it be, given the unrelieved horror and bloody revenge of its libretto?)
But it is a towering masterpiece of its kind, a landmark in modern opera. Even those who disliked Strauss and everything he stood for, like Igor Stravinsky, Kurt Weill and Alban Berg, had to admire it. In fact, it is hard to imagine Berg could have written “Wozzeck” without the example of “Elektra”; it also is the great link between Richard Wagner and Berg in the chain of German, indeed world, opera.
Three-quarters of “Elektra” lies in its orchestra. At times the huge apparatus (111 players) writhes like a wounded dragon, boiling over in angry dissonances that baffled the opera’s early audiences and enraged the critics, who accused the composer of selling out to the modernist camp by making his music needlessly ugly. To which Strauss calmly replied, “When a mother is killed on stage, do they expect me to write a violin concerto?”
Conductors adore “Elektra” because, of all Strauss’ operas, it is a disguised symphony in four movements. Each movement is a confrontation between Elektra and the other principal members of the doomed house of Atreus: her hated mother, Klytemnestra; her timidly suffering sister, Chrysothemis; her exiled brother, Orest; and her mother’s lover, Aegisth. Because stage movement is kept to a minimum (most of the bloody action takes place offstage) the work is well suited to concert performance, as long as there is a virtuoso orchestra on hand to play Strauss’ formidable score.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has ventured “Elektra” in concert on two occasions under two music directors, Artur Rodzinski in 1947 and Fritz Reiner in 1956. Now it is Daniel Barenboim’s turn. In the tradition of his well-received CSO concert performances of the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas here in 1992, Barenboim will present a semistaged concert version of “Elektra,” sung in German, with English supertitles, Wednesday, Saturday and March 21 at Orchestra Hall.
The cast is largely principals from the conductor’s and director Harry Kupfer’s Berlin stage production a year ago at Staatsoper unter den Linden, where Barenboim is music director. Soprano Deborah Polaski is Elektra, with Alessandra Marc as Chrysothemis, Ute Priew as Klytemnestra, Falk Struckmann as Orest and James King as Aegisth.
(Before the concert, local actors directed by Goodman Theatre’s Steve Scott will give readings from Sophocles’ “Electra,” followed by a discussion of the connection between the opera and the play, all in Grainger Ballroom. Box suppers are available but must be reserved in advance; phone 312-435-6666.)
“For me `Elektra’ is the most interesting score Strauss ever wrote,” Barenboim says. “When you realize how early in his career the opera came (Strauss was 45 when he composed it), the modernism of this score is mind-boggling, even today. Of course, Strauss’ craftsmanship was admirable right up to the end of his long career. (But) in `Elektra’ he explored regions of harmony and tonality that were unknown before him. I am sad he didn’t continue along this line.”
Yet beneath the dissonances and fractured vocal lines, “there is a structural classicism in Strauss that is essential,” Barenboim points out. “Even in the big tone poems like `Ein Heldenleben’ and `Also sprach Zarathustra,’ he was a strict classicist, for all the Romantic freedom of his musical idiom.”
Strauss was a devoted disciple of Wagner and learned his lessons well. Just as Wagner’s orchestra functions as the expressive soul of his music dramas, so does the orchestra of “Elektra” reveal the characters’ feelings in ways their agitated vocal lines cannot. To the first hearers of the work, Strauss had composed the first Freudian opera, using the current interest in the subconscious and the irrational to lift the ancient world into the modern.
What makes “Elektra” so un-Wagnerian, however, is its compactness. In one act lasting no more than two hours, Strauss and Hofmannsthal were able to compress a mythic tragedy Wagner would have expanded into an operatic mini-series.
For some listeners, “Elektra” has suffered from being short, like “Salome” before it. “People who understand quantity better than quality, and who go to the opera to be seen, feel gypped by a work that lasts only 100 to 110 minutes and provides no intermission in which to socialize and display oneself,” according to John Simon, theater critic for New York magazine, writing in Opera News.
Perhaps so, but surely a more basic reason why “Elektra” has worked its way into the repertory only gradually (the first performances at Lyric Opera of Chicago were not until 1975) is that the opera is pitiless in its demands on the audience. It rubs their collective nose in human depravity, incestuous fixation and worse. The music contains no easy consolation.
To put it another way, “Elektra” is an opera “in which the relatively conventional confrontation between good and evil is replaced by a study in pure fanaticism,” says Thomas Brown, a professor of music at DePaul University.
Strauss’ score translates this fanaticism into a continuous musical crescendo. “It’s absolutely incredible, the amount of nervous tension that is built up during that single act,” Barenboim observes.
Indeed, nearly every note of the score is driven by the savage, frenzied hatred that burns in the heart of Elektra. Having consigned his disturbed heroine to a psychiatrist’s couch, so to speak, Strauss fit his music to the Expressionist violence of the subject. A narrative that is so obsessively concerned with dark deeds clearly did not warrant an outpouring of lush, radiant Straussian melody.
Only once, in fact, does the composer allow himself to sound like Strauss, and that is in the recognition scene between Elektra and her exiled brother, Orest, that marks the dramatic and musical climax of the opera.
To the expansive melody of the recognition aria the orchestra adds a stream of tender, incandescently scored music as Elektra rejoices in her sibling’s return. And its melodious yearning is an oasis for the ears amid the violent extremes-of vocal line and dramatic mood, of dynamics and orchestration-of the rest of the opera.
It frequently has been said that “Elektra” represents the furthest point of Strauss’ advance, that it was downhill from there on as he beat an inglorious retreat from modernism. That is a misconception. Strauss was not interested in writing the Music of the Future and never took up the cause.
In fact, in his next operatic collaboration with Hofmannsthal, “Der Rosenkavalier” (1911), Strauss reverted to the firmly tonal, diatonic, melodically supple manner that is characteristic of him.
But “Elektra” stands as his most universal, most perfect creation. The opera, according to Simon, “is, happily, not strictly Greek; it is human drama set not in one period but as nearly as possible outside of time, for all times.”
And because its music is so powerful, so overwhelming, so deeply rooted in that timeless drama, it should prove as effective at Orchestra Hall as it would at Lyric Opera or the Met, Barenboim believes.
“I cannot claim that `Elektra’ is better without the staging, certainly not,” he says. “But I think the work can more than stand on its own in the concert hall, especially with forces of the quality of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra playing it. I must say I’m really looking forward to these performances here. I hope the experience will be as positive for the audience as it is for the performers.”
