Pappano triumphs in the Royal Opera’s ‘Elektra’

The back-story to Richard Strauss’s Elektra involves the return of Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks during the Trojan War. His wife Klytämnestra, having taken Agamemnon’s cousin Aegisthus as

a lover, kills her husband on his return from the war (justifying this since he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to gain a fair wind taking his fleet to Troy). They have two other

daughters: Chrysothemis, who yearns for marriage and a family, and Elektra, who has rescued her younger brother Orestes from her mother by sending him away, and yearns for revenge.

The story of Agamemnon is one of the great tales of ancient Greece, embodied in the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, whose second part deals with the return of Orestes as a grown man ready to

avenge his father’s murder. So does Strauss’s one-act opera, which loosely follows the play by Sophocles where Elektra lives as a vengeful presence in the palace (in the Euripides play of

the same name she has been married off to a peasant).

The Austrian literary giant Hugo von Hofmannsthal composed his own version of the story, written as a play from which he and Strauss extracted an opera libretto. Operas demand fewer words

than plays, and the procedure was not dissimilar to that of Strauss’s previous opera Salome, which drew its libretto from Oscar Wilde’s play by simply striking out some of the material.

Elektra represents the first of Hofmannsthal’s hugely successful collaborations with Strauss, which continued until the playwright died in his mid-fifties, while Strauss lived on into his

eighties.

As an opera this is one of the greatest and most dramatic in the whole canon, so little wonder that in his final season as the Royal Opera’s music director, Antonio Pappano has decided to

conduct it — and what fierce beauty he has drawn from the orchestra. The intensely dramatic music carries huge power from the very opening chords which express the syllables of the name

Agamemnon. His loss is a running theme throughout in music that expresses a constant and unrequited yearning. Unlike Salome, with its lighter moments in dance rhythms, there is no dance

until near the end when, at the height of emotion Elektra breaks into a waltz. It is a slightly heavy waltz, but Nina Stemme certainly moved to the rhythm in what was a splendid performance

of the title role.

Her voice reached the heights when necessary to rise above the orchestra, and Sara Jakubiak sang divinely as Chrysothemis, her emotional antithesis. The director of this new production,

Christof Loy has described Elektra as “trapped in her rational delusion [while] Chrysothemis lives in her emotional delusion”. There is no way out for either of them. Elektra will expire

after her vengeance is completed by Orestes, and Chrysothemis who yearns only for a husband and child, is too damaged to fully recover from the murder of their father by their mother, and

the subsequent revenge killings by their brother. As their mother Klytämnestra, Karita Mattila in her midnight-blue dress was a picture of glamour with her powerful voice commanding a family

home that really managed to look as if it occupied a palace, unlike some stagings.

Indeed, this was a deeply intelligent production of the composer’s greatest tragic work. As is so often the case with Strauss, the female voices drive the action, and when a bass-baritone

enters the contrast is striking, as it was here with the superb contribution in the second half by Lukasz Golinski as Orestes.

During Pappano’s tenure as music director he has three times given this opera away to attract big-name visiting conductors, but now in his final season he has taken it on himself. It is a

triumph.

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