Ocean of ugliness

Elektra
Barbican

La bohème
Opera North

In his little-read but wonderful book Daybreak, Nietzsche writes:

Our composers have made a great discovery: interesting ugliness too is possible in their art! And so they throw themselves into this open ocean of ugliness as if drunk, and it has never been so easy to compose…But you will have to hurry! Every art which has made this discovery has turned out to have only a short time to live.


Written in 1880, with Wagner in mind but unmentioned, the words fit Richard Strauss’s Elektra with uncanny precision. Everyone exclaims about Strauss’s alleged retreat from modernism after Elektra, but where was there to go? The extraordinary thing about Wagner’s harmonic audacities is that they are always leading somewhere, even if the goal is postponed to the last bar of the opera. But Strauss, in Elektra, startles minute by minute, but with no cumulative effect. The result is that his work plays merely on the nerves, for emotions need time to develop and take shape. The hysteria of Elektra herself, and of Clytemnestra, is conveyed by orchestral spasm and vocal ungainliness. It is apt that the thematic substance of this work should be so undistinguished, for these characters live only in the moment, however much they go on about the past and the need for vengeance. The big tune in the middle of Elektra’s monologue is a piece of intrusive schmaltz, which Strauss can’t employ in a genuinely motivic way, but can only drag in from time to time as a supposed reminder of the positive side of Elektra’s endeavour.

My feelings of unmitigated hostility to this climactic work in the Straussian oeuvre were intensified by the concert performance at the Barbican, an LSO occasion with Valery Gergiev in command.