The other day I was at the second of the six performances of San Francisco Opera's Elektra, a revival of Keith Warner's 2017 "museum" production of the Richard Strauss / Hugo von Hoffmannsthal setting of Sophocles. I saw the production the first time around & thought it was brilliant, even beyond my gratitude that someone thought to do something with Elektra besides drape the cast in sheets (to indicate Classical Times) & set them amid a few pillars, preferably broken (to indicate the unwholesome state of the House of Atreus).
There is a whole backstory to the setting, centered on a museum visitor who is accidentally locked in at night & relives her own past traumas through vitrined artifacts of Elektra's story, but honestly the staging works even if you don't pick up on that framing, or some of the setting's other particulars (& honestly many of them did not come through to me the other night, possibly a combination of my location in the house & my troubled vision). But the museum is such a vivid, fruitful metaphor, not only for the way we view the operatic repertory (exhibits from the past, the dust blown off for our continued amusement) but our own emotional lives: the Memory Palace converted into a series of labeled exhibits of our grief, our pain, our occasional glimpse of glory, which sometimes means just (in every sense of the word) revenge.
What keeps this conceit from becoming self-consciously arty? Part of it is the inherent horror of the plot, the long-awaited matricide of a woman who was herself wronged, with horror-film touches as we approach the end: Orest (to give Orestes his Teutonic name) suddenly sitting bolt upright in bed to surprise his next victim (beds & what happens in them are really the crux of the drama), or carrying out his mother's severed head after he kills her, a bit of Grand Guignol I did not remember from the earlier production (which doesn't mean of course that it wasn't part of the staging then; it was nearly 10 years ago, & since then there have been a lot of heads that should be severed).
The other element is of course Strauss's call for & expert handling of enormous instrumental resources, the largest pit orchestra (95 players) in SF Opera's history (pit orchestra, because Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise calls for 97 players but 8 of them are on stage, according to the Opera's press department). Eun Sun Kim led this massive force with aplomb, giving clarity & searing forward thrust to the angsty strains. There were a few moments (one of the early statements of the final dance theme) where the volume seemed as high as it could go maybe a bit earlier than it should go there, but then climaxing early is not necessarily a misjudgment in this opera. Richard Strauss, even when dealing with the great figures of Greek mythology, is a bit of a carnival barker, with something lubricious & seedy about his music, at least when it's at its best (or perhaps what I'm saying is that that is when & how I prefer him). This may explain some of the discomfort with this composer (is he quite top drawer?) but there's certainly precedent for treating Greek mythology this way: Euripides also cast an eye both cynical & compassionate on these mythological doings. (Treating Sophocles in this way, though, is more of a piquant disjunction, which is not a bad thing.)
We heard Elena Pankratova in the title role, Michaela Schuster as Klytemnestra, Elza van den Heever as Chrysothemis, Kyle Ketelsen as Orest, & William Burden as Aegisth; all were splendid in the face of this work's extensive & almost excessive dramatic & musical demands; I particularly admired van den Heever as a more forceful than usual sister, Ketelsen as the implacable avenger, & Burden in the thankless role of Aegisth. When the opera ends in this staging, we do not have Elektra's triumphant, ritualistic dance of death; instead, while the murder of her father in the tub replays overhead on video, she collapses under the weight of recurrent grief & remembered trauma: a psychologically acute moment with which to send us back out into our world.
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