Flawless delivery of Greek tragedy
The centuries roll by, and human nature doesn’t change all that much, and so we keep telling ourselves the same stories over and over in different guises — tales of love and betrayal, of heroic deeds and toxic families and the impact of it all. Sometimes we tell those stories with enough verve and timelessness that they become art.
The extraordinary production of Richard Strauss’ “Elektra” that opened Saturday night at the San Francisco Opera — a tour de force of musical bravura and theatrical inventiveness — both explores and exemplifies that little homily. It ostensibly treats the plot’s ancient Greek roots at a certain remove, by viewing the travails of the House of Atreus through the eyes of an anonymous contemporary woman who finds there an echo of her own familial trauma.
Yet the opening performance at the War Memorial Opera House was delivered with such fiery intensity by a basically flawless troupe of singing actors and orchestral musicians — led by soprano Christine Goerke in the title role, and guided from the pit by conductor Henrik Nánási in an unforgettable company debut — that Elektra’s fears and grievances seemed to become one’s own.
Your head may have been busy parsing the narrative framework, and musing on the durability of myth. But your heart was, at every moment, engrossed by the psychological plight of these characters.
The premise of director Keith Warner’s production, which premiered last year in Prague and is staged here by Anja Kühnhold, seems too high-concept at first blush to be quite plausible, yet it soon pays off with dramatic riches. As the audience files in, the curtain is already up to reveal a modern-day museum, where an exhibition on the Elektra story is in place.
There are glass display cases holding elaborate costumes and Mycenaean bronzes, and monitors playing video loops that seem to be drawn from some early Expressionist film versions. A handful of patrons — including a few who may look familiar from the artist’s pages of the program book — circulate under the eyes of watchful guards. Then a closing announcement is made, and everyone is ushered out — except for our protagonist, who is so moved by what she’s seen that she lingers behind for a night in the museum.
What follows in the ensuing nearly two intermissionless hours is a performance of Strauss’ taut masterpiece as conceived and executed by the main character’s traumascarred consciousness. The parallels seem unavoidable to her: She Elektra, her dead father might as well be the heroic Agamemnon, and the faithless, murderous Klytemnestra is for damn sure her own mother — the source, whether literally or not, of everything that’s gone wrong in her life. (In one of the most viscerally telling moments, the protagonist pulls the Klytemnestra waxwork out of its case and strips it of its ancient robe and crown, to press it into service in her private drama.)
Warner uses this schema to allow for a freewheeling approach to the episodic dramaturgy of Strauss’ opera, which is built around a series of discrete encounters between Elektra and members of her family. The various display cases in Boris Kudlicka’s elegantly gleaming set fly in and out of focus at the protagonist’s behest, and flashbacks appear and disappear with theatrical virtuosity.
Even a merely passable musical account of Strauss’ score would, I suspect, have made for a potent account under these circumstances. Instead, the San Francisco Opera has assembled a cast for the ages.
Goerke was, of course, the focus and main conduit for the evening’s brilliance. Elektra is onstage through the entire opera, and a performance of the work stands or falls on the contributions of its leading lady.
Yet to try to catalog the virtues of Goerke’s magnificent star turn feels like a poor substitute for merely pointing in dumbstruck awe. She unleashed volleys of voluminous and perfectly tuned sound capable of riding easily atop the crashes of Strauss’ mammoth orchestra, then turned around to deliver soft-hued phrases of impeccable intimacy.
She caressed the twists and turns of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto, from the machine-gun bursts of verbiage — sardonic, wheedling, fiercely accusatory — with which Elektra confronts her interlocutors to the almost wordless howls of despair that overcome her in her darkest moments. And her performance was so expressively transparent that the production’s theatrical premise registered with crystal clarity (although, fair warning, a little advance familiarity with the plot is not unhelpful in this case).
The rest of the cast surrounded Goerke like so many gleaming planets around a fiery sun. Soprano Adrianne Pieczonka gave an exquisite performance — bright-toned, ardent, poignant — as Elektra’s sister Crysothemis, who wants nothing more than to be free of the family turmoil so she can find a man and start popping out babies.
Michaela Martens’ Klytemnestra — a figure of needy menace, swaggering around with a whiskey bottle clutched in her claw — showed a masterful ability to sustain the musical and dramatic tension of a moment through an attenuated, almost inaudible thread of sound, only to follow up with a finely crafted blast of malignancy.
Alfred Walker, his singing as ominous and sepulchral as his presence, made a formidable company debut as Orest, the late-arriving agent of vengeance (staged here in exuberant horror-flick style), and Robert Brubaker oozed arrogant smarm as the usurping Aegisth.
Through it all was the crashing, insinuating work of the Opera Orchestra, tackling Strauss’ opulent score with a degree of precision and fluency that were a delight to hear. Nánási, a young Hungarian conductor with a rare combination of interpretive insight and technical command, made the most of every moment.
May he come back again, and soon. May Goerke continue to scale the artistic heights she has undertaken in this production. May the San Francisco Opera, and its patrons, continue to look on this “Elektra” as a benchmark to aspire to.
The performance was delivered with such fiery intensity that Elektra’s fears seemed to become one’s own.