Yesterday afternoon saw the first of six performances of Richard Strauss’ one-act opera “Elektra” to the San Francisco Opera in the War Memorial Opera House. The running time was only one and two-thirds hours, but the resources are abundant. The orchestra consisted of 95 musicians including two timpanists (one doubling on percussion), three additional percussionists, and four Wagner tubas. There is an offstage chorus of 45 vocalists, and sixteen characters on the stage.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal prepared the libretto, using the Sophocles “Electra” play as his source. Sophocles may have drawn upon the earlier “Electra” play by Euripides, which, in turn, mined sources from the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus. There are sixteen vocalists in Hofmannsthal’s cast, but the title role dominates all others from beginning to end. Even as the curtain first rises, there are five maidservants talking about Elektra.
The narrative itself is one of vengeance. Prior to the beginning of the story, King Agamemnon was assassinated by his wife Klytemnestra. Elektra is their daughter, and she joins forces with her brother Orest to murder their mother for the crime she has committed. As already stated, all of this fits into a single uninterrupted act with a large diversity of instrumental sonorities to keep things moving. The good news is that the vocalists on stage could hold their own against conductor Eun Sun Kim’s intense management of the orchestra. Given Strauss’ reputation for “pulling out the stops,” Kim’s technique would have made the composer (or his spirit) proud.
Elektra (Elena Pankratova) dwarfed by the excessive stage design by Boris Kudlička
The production by Keith Warner, revived for this performance by Anja Kühnhold, was another matter. Rather than trying to establish an Ancient Greek setting, he situated the performance in a museum with Ancient Greek artifacts on display. Personally, I felt that the staging would have benefited from a bit more focus. Too many things were happening (either through projections or “in the flesh”) to keep the viewer attentive to Sophocles’ narrative. It is one thing when Strauss’ music and Hofmannsthal’s libretto navigate us through Elektra’s thoughts and deeds and quite another when the navigation has to contend with superfluity.
In performances in 1991 and 1997, this opera was directed by Andrei Serban. This was a director who was often criticized for “going over the top;” but, every now and then, he knew just how to hit the nail on the head. Watching that production kept me on the edge of my seat. Yesterday, I felt that I was just clocking off the episodes from Sophocles’ play.
