Richard Strauss - Elektra
Wiener Staatsoper, 2015
Mikko Franck, Uwe Eric Laufenberg, Nina Stemme, Anna Larsson, Gun-Brit Barkmin, Monika Bohinec, Norbert Ernst, Falk Struckmann, Wolfgang Bankl, Simina Ivan, Aura Twarowski, Thomas Ebenstein, Marcus Pelz, Donna Ellen, Ilseyar Khayrullova, Ulrike Helzel, Caroline Wenborne, Ildikó Raimondi
Wiener Staatsoper Live at Home - 11 April 2015
The Vienna State Opera's new production of Richard Strauss's Elektra opens in silence at the rise of the curtain. A group of naked women cower in the corner of a filthy shower, are manhandled and hosed down by the maids of the royal house of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. It's a stark image, the women presumably slaves of the household, the maids dressed like prison camp attendants, merely following orders. They even brutally beat one of their own, the fifth maid who dares challenge their authority, authority they believe they have even above the Princess Elektra whose increasingly unstable behaviour they maliciously mock.
It's a powerful and effective scene that establishes the situation that Elektra finds herself in, and communicates it well to an audience. It's much more effective, for example, than a setting in Greek antiquity that would likely have less of the recognisable imagery of a brutal and hated regime. It's also a more objective look than we often find in productions of Elektra, the director Uwe Eric Laufenberg avoiding the more familiar subjective expressionistic depiction of the world from the view of Elektra's deranged mindset. It's set in a townhouse in Vienna, but the basement does indeed resemble "a dungeon" as Chrysothemis describes it, a dark place with a pile of coal in the background and wall-barrier slabs of concrete.
Visually, it's highly effective, particularly when a series of lifts are revealed coming up and down from the palace like a dumb-waiter. One of the lifts conveys Clytemnestra, worn down by her dreams and nightmares, fearful and paranoid. The stage for the one-act performance is well divided then, providing ambience and space for each of the characters to envelop themselves in the varying moods (increasingly tense and desperate) of the score and the expression of the singing. The space is well used, and the singing is superb, but dramatically it remains inert, and in this work, the main part of the dramatic intensity must be carried by Elektra.
It's true that the nature of the opera doesn't allow for great drama, at least not up until the final explosion of violence and its sense of cathartic release. A singer of great stamina and force is needed to carry a role like Elektra, and ther's no question that Nina Stemme is well qualified in that respect, her voice deep, resonant, and well-balanced across the range. The role however needs rather more drive and personality and Stemme can't quite fill out that aspect in her acting. She hits all the notes, but doesn't seem to be alert to the minute detail of Strauss's score, and it's hard to get the sense that she is driven, deranged, vengeful and truly despairing as the nature of her predicament and the conflicting news of the fate of Orestes swing her mind from one extreme to the next.
If Stemme isn't able to fully inhabit the character (and I don't blame anyone for not wanting to go to those very dark places that Strauss has scored in one of the most disturbing characters of any opera), the characterisation as far as the direction and the other members of the cast go is clearly well established and brilliantly performed. Gun-Brit Barkmin in particular is an outstanding Chrysothemis. This is a character who can be a little wishy-washy in comparison to the more powerful women all around her, but here Chyrsothemis seems even more driven than Elektra. Or if perhaps not driven, since she can't be spurred into action, at least much more conflicted and disturbed by the situation she and her sister find themselves in. Barkmin's singing is also wonderfully expressive, cutting clear and bright, bringing out the qualities of how her character is scored better than anyone else I've heard in the role and making it really count.
Anna Larsson likewise also brings detail and nuance to Clytemnestra. She's not imperious here or a monster, but a rather broken figure, destroyed by her own actions, hounded by nightmares, a true figure from a Greek tragedy. That's expressed as much in her appearance, in her gestures as in her singing. There's defiance here in her confrontation with Elektra that still holds the daughter at bay, but the fraying at the edges is starting to show. Elektra might sometimes appear to be a one-woman show, but the contributions of Larsson and Barkmin show how important it is to have strongly defined characters in those other key roles. Orestes and Aegisthus have lesser roles to play certainly - though they can also be developed further - and they are taken well here by Falk Struckmann and Norbert Ernst.
The manner in which the three women are developed however pays dividends at the conclusion of this Elektra. In contrast to the enhanced realism established in the earlier scenes, the set starts to reflect the horror of the madness and the violence that has been built-up and finally unleashed. The imagery has something of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining', the implications similarly that of a household where all the accumulated abuse and horrors that have taken place within its walls starts to seep out. The dumb waiter starts to bring down a sequence of horrors from the upper levels of the palace, mostly unidentified, but among them certainly the executed Clytemnestra. Elektra leads an exultant dance in which she is joined by a team of dancers dressed like something out of a 50s' prom (like the ball in 'The Shining'), and is swallowed up in the celebration, leaving a shocked Chrysothemis to contemplate the horror of it all.
Elektra was broadcast
from the Vienna State Opera as part of their Live at Home programme. The
next broadcast is DON PASQUALE on 8 May with Juan
Diego Flórez. Also in May, Plácido Domingo stars in NABUCCO on 14 May and Sven-Eric Bechtolf's production of DER RING DES
NIBELUNGEN, conducted by Simon Rattle begins with DAS RHEINGOLD on 30 May and DIE WALKURE on 31 May. Details of how to view these
productions live at home can be found in the links below.
Links: Wiener Staatsoper Live Streaming programme; Staatsoper Live at Home video
Iain Bell - A Harlot's Progress
Theater an der Wien, Vienna 2013
Mikko Franck, Jens-Daniel Herzog, Diana Damrau, Marie McLaughlin, Tara Erraught, Christopher Gillett, Nathan Gunn, Nicolas Testé
Theater an der Wien - Live Internet Streaming, 24 October 2013
Much in the same way that William Hogarth's prints lend a natural structure for Stravinsky to follow in his opera of The Rake's Progress, so too do the six engravings that make up the satirical morality tale of its companion piece provide a strong framework for A Harlot's Progress. Premiered in 2013 at the Theater an der Wien, British composer Iain Bell effectively fleshes out the six tableaux of A Harlot's Progress in music and drama in his first opera work. Even with the expertise and authenticity of a libretto noted London historian and author Peter Ackroyd, the work however never really brings any deeper sense of meaning, purpose or indeed humanity to Hogarth's sharp-edged satire.
The six scenes of Hogarth's 1732 engraving sequence for A Harlot's Progress could be described as follows: 1. Moll Arrives in London; 2. Moll is the Mistress of a Wealthy Gentleman; 3. Moll becomes a Common Prostitute; 4. Moll beats Hemp in Prison; 5. Moll is dying of Syphilis; 6. Moll's Wake. As each engraving of A Harlot's Progress represents a sequential stage in its morality tale, Bell's opera follows the same "progression", although Moll Hackabout's story is evidently and intentionally less a progress than a steady decline.
From the moment the young innocent country girl arrives at the Cheapside market in London "to find her fortune", the downward trajectory of her progress is indeed on the cards. Pressed into the service of Mother Needham, a procurer of young girls for wealthy gentlemen, Moll's fortunes decline steadily even as she lives a life of apparent luxury as the kept woman of Mr Lovelace. When the gentleman finds that Moll secretly has a lover of her own - the highwayman James Dalton - he throws her out onto the streets where she becomes a common prostitute, gets pregnant and dies ignominiously in a prison in a syphilitic condition.
No, A Harlot's Progress is not a barrel of laughs, but does Iain Bell's score and Peter Ackroyd's libretto really have to be so relentlessly miserable? Ackroyd's depiction of the period London is undoubtedly authentic in its character detail and language - which gets very colourful indeed - even if the work is consequently too wordy and descriptive. It certainly fleshes out the sequence of engravings into a credible narrative drama, and - like the image of Moll's hat and the presence of the baby in Hogarth's drawings, Ackroyd manages to use references that replicate the idea of the series being a cycle. That's all well and good, successfully bringing the series to life, but the opera doesn't advance further on Hogarth's ideas, nor bring anything new to the table.
As far as opera goes, the morality tale of the fallen woman story has by now been told many times in operas like La Traviata, Lulu, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and even most recently in Anna Nicole, and done in all the above with considerably more character, invention and colour. Even Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress recognised that there was humour, satire, irony and tragedy in Hogarth's work and found a way through neo-classical arrangements and pastiche to express the varied character of the tale. Neither Ackroyd nor Bell are able to match the wit and satire of Hogarth's prints, finding only misery, rutting, disease and death in it all.
The tone of Bell's score is consequently rather dark, drab and lacking in character. The overture sets the ominous tone for what is ahead, with rolling drums, fragmentary phrases, plucked notes and droning violin as bodies in rags crawl through the mist to the front of the stage. Individuals arise out of this seething mass, one stabbing and robbing another, others selling their wares, and the score picks out moments and characters with short phrases and serial runs. There's a full orchestra and a chorus employed here, but they are never used to bring any real dynamic to vary the tone or suggest any deeper level of individual character. Everyone in their own way is just miserable and out for themselves. Playing on the theme of Paul Bunyan's 'The Pilgrim's Progress', Hogarth's prints were a satire exposing the hypocrisy behind the society and its establishment figures in their exploitation of good people like Tom Rakewell and Moll Hackabout, but there's very little of that evident here.
The Theater an der Wien's staging is simple but effective enough for the purposes of connecting the scenes of the drama together. Although the costumes are approximate to the period (with some exceptions), the set wisely doesn't pile on the grimy misery of Georgian London. A stylised backdrop of a white wooden cage encloses the drama with panels that increasingly shut down sections on Moll's life as black ashes fall down upon the stage. Moving to contemporary opera is a considerable challenge for Diana Damrau and far from the Mozart roles she is most famous for, but she carries it off and gives a good performance. Tara Erraught's Kitty is also impressive, and Nathan Gunn is fine as James Dalton, but despite the attention paid to fleshing out the detail of the drama, there's not much for the characters to do here other than play out the misery of their existence.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold - Die Tote Stadt
Finnish National Opera, 2010
Mikko Franck, Kasper Holten, Klaus Florian Vogt, Camilla Nylund, Kirsti Valve, Markus Eiche, Sari Nordqvist, Kaisa Ranta, Melis Jaatinen, Per-Hakan Precht, Juka Riihimaki, Antti Nieminen
Opus Arte - DVD
Written when he was just 23 years of age and first performed in 1920, the high Romantic notions conflating love and death are particularly evident in Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die Tote Stadt - The Dead City. The Liebestod-like sentiments are expressed in Wagnerian fashion with an underlying Straussian Salome-like discordance, but what is notable about Die Tote Stadt is how it takes these ideas to even greater levels in its consideration of the underlying psychology or even pathology of his main character through dreams fantasies and impressions. The formal challenges of representing this in a production of the work then are considerable, but so too is the technical virtuosity of the orchestra and the singers to express this often difficult work. Both elements however are handled exceptionally well in this 2010 production from the Finnish National Opera.
Much like Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo', which follows a similar dysfunctional character who attempts to recreate his dead love in another person and relies very much on the varying tones and labyrinthine character of San Francisco and its outlying locations, Die Tote Stadt is a psychological study that is connected very closely with the nature of a city, in this case Bruges. You could say that this aspect is somewhat over-emphasised in the libretto, Paul noting that "the dead woman, the dead city... there's a mysterious bond between them" and Brigitta quoting Paul as saying "Bruges and I, we are one, we worship the most beautiful, the Past", but this is just one element in a deeper conflict that Paul has to reconcile between the past and the present, between the living and the dead, between an ideal and the reality.
Just as Paul's home then is a shrine to his dead wife Marie, so too he sees Bruges as a city of the dead, a monument to those who have lived before, the memory of the past being desecrated by the living. Whether this needs additional emphasis or not, Es Devlin's designs for Kasper Holten's production emphatically puts both Paul's room and the city, as a reflection of his inner mindset, right up there on the stage. It looks terrific, the room expressionistically designed with oppressive angles, littered in an obsessively organised fashion with pictures, portraits, mementos and shrine-boxes dedicated to Marie. At the back, tilted, but almost at right-angle to the stage, a vertiginous section of the city is revealed, bearing down on Paul.
Two other elements of the production and the stage design are relevant to this expression of Paul's mindset. One is the large bed in the centre of it all, which indicates on the one hand that much of what goes on is a dream in Paul's head and on the other hand it reflects much of Paul's repressed and misplaced urges. Much like Stefan Herheim's psycho-sexual study of Wagner in his Bayreuth Parsifal, where figures similarly emerge from beneath the sheets, there's a sense of guilt and corruption that Paul here associates with the sexual act, unable to reconcile the pure memory of the dead Marie with his feelings for the sensuous dancer Marietta. The other element helps make this problem more concrete by using an actor to play the ghost of Marie, having her present on the stage with her lookalike Marietta. It may not be called for, but it does make Paul's dilemma all the more real.
If there are any questions about Kasper Holten employing such techniques, they are at least borne out in how they fit with Korngold's musical arrangements for Die Tote Stadt. Musically, the opera doesn't follow any straightforward formal structure or narrative but follows its own chromatic muse, blending styles and working with a fragmentary montage of songs and waltzes, switching from lush orchestration to discordance according to the ecstatic reverie or the the tormented state of its protagonist. Wagner and Strauss may be the antecedents of this style, but there's a commonality here with Puccini, particularly the impressionistic style of Il Trittico and his latter works, and an awareness of cinematic structures which Korngold would develop later through his years in Hollywood.
The opera is consequently highly demanding of its performers, particularly the role of Marietta, which is pitched at the level of a Straussian soprano. Camilla Nylund has everything that is required here, the range, the stamina, and a necessary beauty in the colour of timbre and expression. She is simply phenomenal. This is a great performance. Klaus Florian Vogt's high sweet tenor might not seem like the ideal voice for the equally challenging role of Paul and he does struggle sometimes at the lower end of the tessitura. He brings a glorious soaring quality however to those ecstatic moments and a sense of vulnerability to his character that is not there, for example, in Torsten Kerl's strident singing of the role on the 2001 Opéra National du Rhin recording.
The Opus Arte release of the Finnish National Opera's 2010 production is released on DVD only, spread across a 2-disc set. The source is certainly not HD, but even in Standard Definition the image quality is somewhat disappointing, lacking real clarity and even appearing to be a little juddery in its NTSC transfer. It does however represent the light, colour and detail of the darkened stage production reasonably well. The LPCM stereo and DTS Surround 5.1 audio tracks don't have the depth of a high resolution recording either, the music not really lifting out or revealing the detail and colour of the orchestration, but that could also be down to the performance which doesn't seem to express the full quality of Korngold's lush score. The only extra feature on the disc is a Cast Gallery. Subtitles are in English, French, German, Japanese and Korean.
