The opening night of this new production of Richard Strauss’ gut-wrenching Elektra by the controversial Christof Loy, conducted by the outgoing music director Antonio Pappano, and starring two great divas in the roles of Elektra and Klytemnestra, was remarkable on several counts.
At a point in her career when one might have expected Nina Stemme to gravitate towards less demanding repertory, here she was again undertaking Elektra, one of the notorious killer roles. As her neurotically decadent mother Klytemnestra – co-perpetrator of the murder of Elektra’s father Agamemnon – Karita Mattila, who has already made the shift to more matronly roles, offered a fascinating new perspective on her character.
Intriguingly, for two sopranos who have both possessed a ringing top register over the years, they shared a low centre of gravity here, the difference between their tonal qualities minimised in their scene together. Stemme brought infinite sorrow and tender affection for her father to her first solo, and had seemingly unstoppable power and confidence throughout. Until, that is, she encountered what sounded like an obstruction in the vocal tract, possibly catarrh, causing occasional notes thereafter to drop out or to be lowered an octave. To her enormous credit, Stemme battled heroically on, continuing to emit streams of powerful tone.
Mattila’s Klytemnestra, conceived by Loy more sympathetically than usual, downplays the creepily grotesque figure depicted in Hofmannsthal’s libretto. Indeed Mattila cuts a somewhat glamorous figure in her royal blue gown and white fur stole, holding the stage with her slow-motion tottering. Her plosive consonants ricocheting like artillery fire, there was a steely core to her tone, despite a looseness of pitch consistent with Klytemnestra’s moral collapse.
Sara Jakubiak’s radiant Chrysothemis rightly won her a big ovation, while Lukasz Golinski’s impressive Orest contributed to an affecting Recognition Scene.
Johannes Leiacker’s sets, skilfully lit by Olaf Winter, locate the action in a Viennese Secession-style palace – the Freudian/Jungian associations in the work are unavoidable – though there are references to the classical period of the Sophocles original, not least the flaming torch Elektra produces at Aegisthus’s murder.
The degraded maidservants, and the prolonged beating of one of them (Strauss’s instrumentation prescribes a switch of birch twigs) are taken by Loy as a cue for more systemic sexual abuse in this depraved household. But despite this and his more nuanced handling of Klytemnestra, faithful to Sophocles, Loy’s production is disappointingly unoriginal.
Galvanising this manic activity, however, Pappano’s high-octane conducting of the superb Royal Opera orchestra demonstrated that the score of Elektra doesn’t have to be exclusively defined by its marmoreal, dark purple quality. This reading also coruscated in a way more often associated with the slightly earlier Salome, spotlighting moments of neurotic clear-sightedness, Dionysiac frenzy and murderous obsession alike. It was revelatory in a way Loy’s production never quite achieved.
