On Wednesday evening Andris Nelsons conducted the Boston Symphony in a concert performance of Elektra at Carnegie Hall. This was not first time I'd seen Nelsons at work. I posted in April my enthusiastic comments regarding his interpretation of the Shostakovich #10 at another concert at this same venue. I had been impressed by the vitality Nelsons had brought to that performance as well as his handling of the orchestra. It had been a long time since I had heard the BSO play so well, and I was looking forward to hearing how the music director would fare with Strauss's opera, especially as I had just heard on Friday evening a performance by the American Symphony Orchestra of the composer's Also sprach Zarathustra.
Elektra, which premiered at the Dresden State Opera, in 1909 was the first collaboration between Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, author of the 1903 play from which the libretto was adapted. As one would expect of a work written in Freud's fin de siècle Vienna, the libretto emphasized the dark psychological elements that underlay the drama. As Elektra descends into madness and as the story approaches its bloodsoaked climax, both play and opera grow ever more disturbing. No doubt it was precisely this lurid aspect that attracted Strauss in the first place. He wanted to shock listeners just as he had done in his recent Salome, the notorious work that had earned him his greatest renown. He may have succeeded better than he intended. As one critic wrote:
"The whole thing impresses one as a sexual aberration. The blood mania appears as a terrible deformation of sexual perversity. This applies all the more because not only Elektra, but all the women are sexually tainted."
Others have suggested that Strauss abruptly ceased work on Elektra's composition in 1907 not because, as is usually claimed, he was worried that the plot too closely resembled that of Salome but because it raised in the composer's mind unpleasant associations from his childhood when he had been in constant conflict with his father. Whether this is true or not, the opera probed far more deeply into the protagonist's psyche than audiences were at that time accustomed to hearing. In so doing, it anticipated many of the trends, particularly those pioneered by Antonin Artaud, that were later to dominate twentieth century theater.
The great advantage to hearing an opera in a concert performance is that it allows the listener to concentrate fully on the music and singing without being distracted by the staging. This is especially important when hearing Elektra, for in it Strauss built upon the modernist techniques he had previously employed in Salome. Just as he went beyond the conventions of nineteenth century opera in his psychological approach to dramatic characterization, so he also moved beyond convention in his use of dissonance and in his individualization of characters through the assignment to each of a distinctive chord, most notably in the case of the protagonist the Elektra chord. This is as far as Strauss would go. Following the premiere of this work, he would once again return to the harmonic traditions to which he had previously adhered. In much the same way, Wagner took a step back after having finished Tristan and Mahler after having completed his Seventh Symphony.
For a singer, the role of Elektra in one of the most demanding in the repertoire. The soprano is onstage for over 90 minutes, almost the entire length of the one-act opera. For much of that time her voice has to compete with the sound of a huge orchestra in order to be plainly heard. On Wednesday evening Christine Goerke gave a solid performance that showed sympathy for Elektra and her plight while doing nothing to diminish the madness and vengeful bloodlust that welled up within her. She had able assistance throughout from Gun-Brit Barkmin as Chrysothemis, Jane Henschel as Klytämnestra and James Rutherford as Orest. Andris Nelsons was superb on the podium as he elicited from his musicians an overwhelmingly powerful performance that was truly shattering in its effect. This was a fine orchestra at its peak.
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