Alastair Macaulay: An important Elektra for all the senses

Our critic is electrified at a Covent Garden first night:

by Alastair Macaulay

Nietzsche wrote of Wagner’s “Parsifal” that its characters all belonged in hospital, all exhibiting forms of mental sickness. What would he have made of Richard Strauss’s “Elektra”, where the mythological House of Atreus abounds with quasi-Freudian case studies?

New in 1909, “Elektra” will be 115 years old later this month. On Friday 12, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden opened a handsome, detailed, strong new production that brings “Elektra” into an era somewhere after the Second World War. (Costumes vary between 1950s and today.) As directed by Christof Loy, designed by Johannes Leiacker, conducted by Antonio Pappano, this palace of Atreus is a vast nineteenth-century building seen from the courtyard, with the vast windows of a grand passage seen from below. At the opera’s start, the maids are nursing mugs of tea or coffee and smoking cigarettes.

This isn’t a radical staging, but it’s vividly real, engrossing. Its visual modernity connects to the opera’s psychological modernity: the body language of Nina Stemme (Elektra), Sara Jakubiak (Chrysothemis), and Karita Mattila (Klytämnestra) opens up the vulnerabilities and raptures and needs of these women.

Opening night, however, was marred by vulnerabilities of a different kind. Stemme’s top notes were problematic, some were yelped, some screamed, some squeaked; one no sooner began than it evaporated. The middle of Mattila’s voice had lost much of its texture and force. Monday’s troubles may have been temporary, but both these women are in their sixties, and will be increasingly prone to mishaps. Many will have wondered if Stemme would make it to the opera’s end. When she took curtain calls, she laughingly but apologetically gestured to her throat, as if to indicate the warm applause was more than she deserved.

The main body of Stemme’s voice remains generous, even glamorous. Physically, she gave herself totally to Loy’s production, reacting vividly, without exaggeration, and differently to every other character. Each change in her face and body during her long scene with her brother Orest (Lukasz Goliński) is touching; she relishes the internal rhythms of her celebratory dance (kicking off her heeled shoes, she does this in black tights).

Mattila’s Klytämnestra is both absurd and riveting, a raddled glamourpuss in a full-length midnight-blue gown and a white fur stole, with jewellery strikingly placed from her platinum-blonde beehive coiffure to gloved wrists and belted waist. She’s the epitome of imperious decadence; she indulges her strong chest register. Mattila’s art often involves exaggeration, but her Klytämnestra – a role that can stand plenty of that – veers powerfully between paranoia and cruelty. Or it will, if her middle voice regains its texture.

Jakubiak’s Chrysothemis (dressed in a pink, flaring New Look dress) was the evening’s source of vocal radiance. She interacted to fine effect with Stemme: at different points in the action, while showing their longings for lost family security, each woman showed the same childlike way of lying sideways on a ledge in the courtyard. Goliński’s Orest, the Ägisth of Charles Workman, and other characters were all nicely differentiated, as were those palace maids.

Pappano and the Royal Opera House orchestra show the many facets of Strauss’s immensely intricate and complex score. Epic mass of sound keeps breaking up into multiple parts; modernist dissonance and lush romanticism keep tugging the music drama in opposite ways. If current vocal frailties pass, this is an important “Elektra” for ear, eye, and mind.

photo: Tristram Kenton/ROH