Every household has its routines, especially the accursed house of Atreus, nucleus of Greek tragedy. At sunset each day, Elektra howls in grief for her father, Agamemnon, murdered years earlier by her mother, Klytämnestra. Bored housemaids watch and sneer. Richard Strauss’s 1909 opera, to a libretto of exceptional richness by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, keeps the focus simple. Family niceties (past infanticide and the like) are swept away. This daughter has one purpose: to kill her mother and avenge her father. Her daily stomp of mourning – graceless, elegiac and vehement as portrayed by Nina Stemme, one of the great Elektras of her generation, in the Royal Opera House’s new production – is an unholy dance of death.
In his last new production as music director of the Royal Opera House, Antonio Pappano has once again collaborated with Christof Loy, who directed Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in 2002 at the start of Pappano’s long tenure. Designed by Johannes Leiacker, with lighting by Olaf Winter, the look is secession Vienna at the time of Elektra’s composition: a soot-dirty palace courtyard and flight of steps; a basement where lowly staff dwell; illuminated upper windows past which glamorous figures in dinner dress glide without purpose. The sets give strong context to Elektra’s world, as seen by the opera’s creators in the early 20th century, when Sigmund Freud’s theories were fresh and the first world war was still out of view.
