I am still grateful to the conductor who once told me, “Don’t think of a concert performance as a watered-down version. Think of it as an unadulterated version: no filters of setting, scenery or interpretation between you and the composer’s thought; nothing to distract you from the music or the words; just the composer’s ideas on full beam.” Never was this more true than the masterfully penetrating performance of Strauss’ Elektra at this year’s BBC Proms, conducted by the renowned Semyon Bychkov and starring Christine Goerke, whose command of this fiercest of roles has drawn high praise from all quarters, and who reasserted her claims this evening with thrilling power.
After seeing Hofmannstahl’s play, Elektra, at the theatre one evening, Strauss wrote to the author seeking permission to turn it into an opera – the first gesture in what would become one of opera’s most famous, and productive, partnerships. The great thing about Hofmannstahl’s Elektra, and thus Strauss’, is that she is not just Elektra. Though all three ancient tragic Elektras (those of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides) find an aspect of their voice in her, Hofmannstahl also splices her with Aeschylus’s Kassandra, acutely sensitive to the reek of blood and death pouring out of Agamemnon’s palace, blessed with divine intelligence yet mistreated and misunderstood; he aligns her with Sophocles’ Antigone, flatly refusing to compromise or accommodate reality, inflexibly pursuing the task no one else dares attempt, threatened with living immolation, vainly begging her more-reasonable sister to act alongside her. He endows her with the language of the Erinyes, the Furies who will later haunt her brother, and even of the Gorgon and the maenad, who dances not for happiness, but for ecstasy – a very different emotion. In short, Hofmannstahl’s libretto gives us a condensed, comprehensive vision of Elektra: original and profound. It is a work of genius: no wonder it made such an impact on Strauss. But the music it inspired in Strauss could never have been expected: full of malevolent dissonance, the score utterly enfolds and overwhelms us in its terrible tide of blood, picked out with absolute precision and lyrical sweep by Semyon Bychkov, brought to full and terrifying beauty by the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Christine Goerke was a revelation as Elektra. Goerke gave a fully dramatised, utterly convincing performance which turned the small strip of stage in front of the orchestra into a real place, not just a space in which to sing. Her huge voice is full of beautiful textures: her cries of “Agamemnon!” and “Nun den, allein!” were spinetinglingly eerie, while her exchanges with her mother had a bitter tartness, and her final lines to Aegisth dripped with girlish sarcasm. The physicality of Goerke’s approach further enhances her portrayal; whether she sits brooding, tosses her mane of hair and walks furtively across the stage, or finally dances in jerking, stuttering steps which show her ecstasy already growing too much for her, we feel she is utterly, incontrovertibly Elektra. For the first time, I also thought about the echo of Brünnhilde in Elektra: dutiful daughters who understand their duty to their arrogant fathers better than anyone else, and also realise, much more than anyone else on stage, how important that duty is.