Salzburg proves that full shows to live audiences can be a reality
Elektra Salzburg Festival
★★★★★
The stakes were so high that it couldn’t just roll over and surrender to the virus: Salzburg, the oldest and perhaps greatest of international cultural festivals, had planned to celebrate its centenary in 2020 with a bumper jamboree. In March, lockdown descended across Europe; in May, when just about everything else had been cancelled though the summer, the festival’s management, led by its formidable CEO Helga Rabl-stadler, decided to go ahead.
How did they do it? Austria has done enviably well in controlling the pandemic, blessed with a citizenry that has stuck by rules applied by a stern government: the result is that by reducing the programme to essentials, testing extensively, limiting venue capacity, and enforcing draconian guidelines, Salzburg has been able to open for business as not-quite-normal, allowing the world’s greatest musicians to perform for live audiences in three dimensions.
Fingers crossed, I hope to visit the festival towards the end of the month and report back on the atmosphere; meanwhile, I salute all those involved who have come this far – and how melancholy it is to reflect that had wiser counsels prevailed sooner, Britain’s festivals could have been in a similar position.
One highlight of the centenary season is a new production of Richard Strauss’s one-act drama Elektra, streamed free on demand via the Arte channel. A rewriting of Sophocles’s tragedy by the librettist Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, it draws on Freudian insights into the toxically repressed passions that run through family relationships, as focused on Elektra’s psychotic quest to avenge the murder of her father Agamemnon and her savage contempt for her mother Clytemnestra.
The libretto is of sufficient subtlety and power to stand alone as a spoken play (and did indeed begin life as such), but Strauss transforms it into an opera of mesmerising intensity, brutal in its primitivism, but also electrically alert to the nuances of the text and, at moments, lyrically tender. For any conductor it’s a balancing act and Salzburg’s Franz Welser-möst has admitted that the score offers the temptation to becoming “inebriated with the opulence of sound and losing control”.
Given the atrocious sound transmitted via the computer, it was hard to tell whether he was successful or not, but his pacing seemed confident, the singers weren’t drowned out and it helped that his instrument was the Vienna Philharmonic, an orchestra with lilting Johann Strauss waltzes as well as granitic Bruckner symphonies in its blood.
Lithuanian soprano Ausrine Stundyte made a sturdy and forceful Elektra, better dressed and less obviously lunatic than usual, even if in terms of vocal glamour she was outpointed by Asmik Grigorian as her anxious sister Chrysothemis. As Clytemnestra, Tanja Ariane Baumgartner was too conventionally hammy for my taste, but Derek Welton’s Orest was mightily imposing and all the important incidental roles were sharply taken.
Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski presented a visually stylish, clean-cut staging, lacking in any radical insights but well-rehearsed and not wilfully scandalous. There was no sense of singers socially distancing.
One’s overriding feeling, however, was simply this: if Salzburg can perform full-scale opera at full throttle to an audience sitting inside an auditorium, why the hell can’t we?
Available for next 90 days via Arte.tv/salzburg