Elektra (Opera)

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    After Nearly Five Decades, Waltraud Meier Takes Her Final Opera Bow

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    The famed singer, known for her captivating presence, intellectual approach and distinctive sound, is retiring from the stage with “Elektra.”“Orest and I are very nice to one another,” the opera star Waltraud Meier said during an interview at her light-filled penthouse in West Berlin. “This time around, we’re going to do everything differently.”She was speaking not about the mythical character, but about her small black cat, which she adopted in Greece. In Richard Strauss’s “Elektra,” Orest returns home to kill his mother, Klytämnestra, avenging the murder of his father, Agamemnon.And the role of Klytämnestra is how Meier will bring her 47-year stage career to a close at the Berlin State Opera on Friday.She will retire in the Patrice Chéreau production of “Elektra” that she originated at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France in 2013. Chéreau’s “Elektra,” the last of his series of acclaimed opera productions, adopts his typical classical, humanist style.Klytämnestra is one of the roles that have defined her career. Known for her captivating stage presence, intellectual approach and distinctive, tonally complex mezzo-soprano voice, Meier first made her mark in Wagner operas: as Ortrud in “Lohengrin,” Kundry in “Parsifal” and Venus in “Tannhäuser.” A daring leap into the dramatic soprano repertoire in the early 1990s made her a generation’s defining Isolde.As Orest occasionally nuzzled her, Meier discussed her career, her work with music and text, and the importance of listening onstage. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.How do you approach a new role?First, I read the text. Everyone’s text: It’s more important to really know what the other people onstage are saying. Then I listen to the music as a whole. I ask myself, What do I want to say? What could I be in this role? And then I decide if I should do it, and how I’ll do it. The conversation about how to do it vocally comes after.What have you learned about the role of Klytämnestra over the years?Patrice Chéreau and I had the strong feeling that we wanted to give her back her dignity. The story is a tragedy. There are two sources for the Electra story: Euripides and Aeschylus. Patrice based his direction more on Aeschylus. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto is so influenced by Freud — so in Hofmannsthal’s “Elektra” we get too much of the point of view of Elektra, of how she sees the story.But that’s not necessarily the real story. Clytemnestra is not just this man-murderer. She had a reason to murder her husband. Her daughter was sacrificed, and Agamemnon came back with a lover. Not that it’s justified, but she had a reason. And she knows her destiny is to be killed by her son. In Greek tragedy, it’s always the son who avenges the father. And his son avenges him. And so it goes for generations and generations. Clytemnestra did what she thought was right, to regain her dignity and some justice.The story for Klytämnestra [in the opera] is really tragic. She comes in; she has the strong need to finally talk to her daughter. But in the whole conversation — that half-hour scene between Klytämnestra and Elektra — they don’t talk about what happened. She wants to talk about it, she comes in for that, to talk, so that her nightmares can disappear. But they are not able to talk about it. It’s really sad.And you get the character away from Grand Guignol.That would be so banal. This other way goes much deeper. And it’s much more true.What did you learn most from your years of work with Chéreau?I learned to be true and natural. To take every word seriously. To believe what I am saying. How to walk. Patrice always hated that singer walk that doesn’t express anything. He didn’t like singers just facing the audience. He liked the diagonal; it gives more tension in the body.He took music seriously. He prepared us by first reading the role, just the text, at a table, like a play. We spoke it in our language. Then we learned the music, and then we went onstage. That’s not what other directors do, unfortunately.How do you overcome a production that hurts a piece? Do you try to bring something you learned from before?Yes. You can’t totally step out of the “regie” [“direction”], but I always wanted to at least give my role, my interpretation — or incarnation, as I prefer to call it — a stronger truth. In general, I tried to avoid productions like that. And then there is that wonderful word: no.What creates truth onstage?Seriousness. Taking the words and the music seriously. Not mocking yourself, not interpreting it. No irony. As I said about Klytämnestra: Believe her! Be it! Don’t make a comment on it. I did several productions with the director Klaus Michael Grüber, who told me to imagine the whole audience was 11 years old. An 11-year-old knows already everything about love, hate, hope, betrayal, all those feelings, but he doesn’t like irony and sarcasm.Are there roles you considered singing that you didn’t, and regret?No. There were two occasions when I had signed contracts and then decided not to, and it was the right choice. I had a signed contract to do Brünnhilde in “Die Walküre” at La Scala. Daniel Barenboim thought I could have conveyed new things in the role, and I agreed, but couldn’t figure out how to sing it.I also had a contract for Salome at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, when Götz Friedrich was the intendant [artistic director], conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli. But looking at the music, I thought, No, I am not Salome. To sing it — that’s soprano soprano. You have to have a silver voice. I’m copper. Of course, you don’t hear those silvery Strauss voices as much now.Did you ever wish you could sing something for a different voice type — a tenor, or a baritone?The Ingemisco in the Verdi Requiem! And seriously, in “Don Carlo,” Philip’s aria from the fourth act, “Ella giammai m’amò.” But, you know, if you have the chance to listen to it when it’s sung by someone that is touching you deep down in your soul, then it’s better you have not sung it yourself.What are your reflections on your years singing at the Metropolitan Opera?Well, let’s not talk about the “Carmen”! I always loved the Met. I always felt I had the support of people there. Joe Volpe was the best intendant ever. “Only a happy singer is a good singer,” he said. He made us feel comfortable, feel good showing our best.It’s a big house. It’s different to sing there. You have to act bigger, sing with more sound. Real theater-making is maybe not the thing you should ask for at the Met. A subtle gesture like I might make at the house here in Berlin will maybe be perceived up to Row 10, and then be lost.You mentioned earlier that the silvery Strauss voices are not as often heard now.For me, there is a sad trend of singing too loud. I miss the nuance. What makes it difficult to go back is that the audience loves when it’s loud. When singers give too much volume, the success misleads them. For me, that’s not music. Music is something else. Music is so refined, signing can be so refined. It’s much more interesting to really sing piano, mezzo piano, mezzo forte and not always fortissimo.Do you imagine yourself teaching after retirement?I don’t have the patience for real vocal teaching. If I did a master class, then I’d do it not in the sense that it’s done now, where you have two days, and singers have an hour here and there, and they work on an aria. That’s not what I’m interested in. I’d prefer a master class with a team of singers where we can really work on a scene. Then I could teach them how to listen. Listening is much more important onstage. More

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      Lise Davidsen and Nina Stemme Star in ‘Elektra’ at the Met

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      At the Metropolitan Opera, Nina Stemme and Lise Davidsen are a blazing pair as sisters in a revival of Strauss’s work.Behind the glorious excess of Strauss’s “Elektra” — the libretto’s mythic setting, the score’s unsparing terror — is something smaller: a starkly framed family portrait, albeit one knocked off the wall and scratched up by shards of shattered glass.That has always been at the core of Patrice Chéreau’s production, which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night. But in this revival, you could home in even closer to just its two sisters, antipodal soprano roles sung by Nina Stemme and Lise Davidsen with floodlight luminosity and painfully human sensitivity.Chéreau’s staging, which premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2013 before coming to the Met six years ago, doesn’t seem to have aged a day. And it’s difficult to imagine that happening soon with a placeless production that suits the timelessness Sophocles’ classic tragedy — which Hugo von Hofmannsthal adapted into a play for the age of Freud, then into a libretto for Strauss’s opera.The set, by Richard Peduzzi, is the grand and severe courtyard of the vaguely Mediterranean home of a vaguely elite family in vaguely contemporary dress (designed by Caroline de Vivaise). Where the production gets more specific is in its departures from the libretto: its absence of caricature and villainy, its climactic dance of death instead a scene of stillness and life continuing in agony. Mostly bloodless where it could be a massacre, it is a study of a family irreparably fractured by trauma.This concept demands singers who can truly act. And Stemme rises to meet it, if not always in voice then in dramatic intensity, which has only grown since she sang the title role in the Chéreau production’s first outing at the Met. She is never at rest: rocking as she stares straight ahead, her eyes wide open with laser focus on avenging her father, Agamemnon.When Stemme sang of his death — a murder committed by Elektra’s mother, Klytämnestra, and her lover, Aegisth — her voice didn’t always cooperate, especially at the low end of her range. At times she visibly braced herself for the role’s most punishing outbursts. Yet she delivered them as if with dragon’s breath, matched only by passages of aching delicacy.Davidsen, as Elektra’s sister Chrysothemis, gave her best performance at the Met this season — able to show a fuller range than in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” last fall, and more in control of her immense instrument than during a recent run of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and a benefit concert for Ukraine, in which she sang that composer’s “Four Last Songs.” Typically a better actor through her voice than her physicality, here she carried as much character on her sorrowful face as Stemme did in her eyes.Relaying the news that her brother, Orest, had died, “thrown and trampled by his own horses,” Davidsen let out a chilling wail — not for the last time in the evening. Originally trained as a mezzo-soprano, she has a full-bodied lower range that is just as thrilling to witness as her candescent high notes, and a commanding softness in more conversational moments.She and Stemme were supported throughout by a Met Orchestra in excellent form under the baton of Donald Runnicles, whose reading of the score was sensitively aligned with that of Chéreau. The opera has sounded scarier and more chaotic — its blood bath met with bombast in many interpretations — but Runnicles insisted on the possibility of dramatic momentum at a more restrained scale. And the evening was no less exciting for it; if anything, it was riveting in its revelatory transparency, the layers of expressionistic color, sweetness and Wagnerian abundance stacking in counterpoint or weaving in and out of one another with grace.There were standouts elsewhere — Hei-Kyung Hong as an authoritative and rending Fifth Maid — but also lapses among the principals. Michaela Schuster’s Klytämnestra was one of obvious gestures and a strained voice, which she occasionally sought to salvage with near-Sprechstimme declamation. Chéreau’s production hinges on a sympathetic Klytämnestra; she didn’t quite achieve that. And men were shadows of their past appearances. Greer Grimsley’s resonant bass-baritone was here faded and effortful, and not always easy to follow. As Aegisth, Stefan Vinke was barely audible — an upsetting turn for a tenor who has sung roles like Siegfried, perhaps barking but at least with penetrating power.You couldn’t help but feel bad whenever they sang alongside one of the starring sisters. Which is always: Stemme never leaves the stage. It is, after all, her show — and, for this run, Davidsen’s, too.ElektraThrough April 20 at the Metropolitan Opera; metopera.org. More

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      When Opera Livestreams Became Live Performances

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      This summer, three European productions, previously available to American audiences only online, were at last accessible in person.I should start with a confession: Rarely during the pandemic have I been able to watch an entire livestream through.Work is one thing: If I’m “attending” something for an assignment, I try to bring to it the focus of a before-times performance — phone off, sound system on, ideally in the dark. But nearly all my extracurricular experiences online have been nothing like my old days off. I would never walk in and out of Carnegie Hall during a recital or pull out my phone mid-Schubert to scroll through Instagram or write an email.Yet that’s exactly what the past year and a half has been like. Life and livestreams are inherently incompatible; there is always a dog to walk, a dinner to cook, a meeting to join. I have seen the greatest musical artists in the world in fragments from the seat of a Peloton; in a small window at the corner of a laptop screen; and, more times than I would like to admit, in bed.If anything has been likely to hold my attention from start to finish, it’s opera. That’s partly baked into the form; concerts, for all their recent engineering feats, generally can’t offer the multisensory experience of theater. And, miraculously, there have continued to be new productions during the pandemic — mostly in Europe, where they often premiered to small audiences or empty houses.Three of those — Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging of Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” Marina Abramovic’s project “7 Deaths of Maria Callas” and a production of Strauss’s “Elektra” by Krzysztof Warlikowski — were at one point available only as online streams for Americans like me, barred from casually traveling to most of Europe.Ausrine Stundyte, front, in the title role of “Elektra” at the Salzburg Festival.Bernd Uhlig/Salzburg FestivalBut this summer, a halcyon time of reopened borders and the return of large-scale productions in full houses, I was able to see all three again, now in person: “Freischütz” and “7 Deaths” at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and “Elektra” at the Salzburg Festival in Austria.That juxtaposition — livestream and live performance — is worth reflecting on as a wave of opening nights heralds the arrival of a new season; as international travel becomes newly precarious; and as orchestras and opera houses consider whether to weave livestreams into their regular programming.Some projects, it should be said, have emerged independent of any live audience or presentation — even traditional ones, such as the Paris Opera’s new production of Verdi’s “Aida,” which was altered to look better online than in the house (where critics were invited to see it, and mostly panned it). One of the great treasures of the pandemic has been Opera Philadelphia’s digital shorts, with contributions from the likes of Angélica Negrón and Tyshawn Sorey. Boston Lyric Opera developed “Desert In” as a mini-series, bringing the art form into the Netflix era.The productions I saw both onscreen and onstage, though, were conceived for the opera house. Opera just isn’t a filmic medium, even if certain composers anticipated it — such as Richard Wagner, with the immersive theatrical experience he pioneered in Bayreuth, Germany.But not every composer is Wagner, and although the streamed productions I later saw live had flashes of revelation, those moments were few and far between in what was, on balance, limited by the medium: the subjective and inevitably narrow perspective of the camera, the engineered flattening of sound. Virtual opera, unless designed as such, is ultimately just a document.Tcherniakov’s “Freischütz” production splits the stage into two halves: the bottom a set for the actors, and the top a surface for projections.Wilfried HöslEspecially in a staging as acutely dramatic as Tcherniakov’s “Freischütz.” It abandons the work’s fantasy Romanticism, setting it in the corporate penthouse of Kuno, a chief executive who behaves like a Mafia boss.The other roles, too, bear little resemblance to any traditional production. To bridge the gap between libretto and concept, the stage is treated as a split screen, with the set occupying the bottom half and the top serving as a surface for projected text messages — and, during the overture, background information on each character in Tcherniakov’s treatment. (The camera mostly shows either the set or the projection, rarely both, which in the final scene makes for a confusing resolution that is easily legible in the house.)Crucially, the introductions reveal that Kaspar — in the libretto a jealous rival of the protagonist, Max, he wants to marry Kuno’s daughter, Agathe — suffers from a trauma that, we later learn, manifests as a kind of multiple personality disorder. (He also takes on the demonic role of Samiel.)As sung by the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, Kaspar is the opera’s horrifying black heart. In a crowd of excellent performances — including Golda Schultz’s heavenly Agathe and her character’s Sapphic subplot with Anna Prohaska’s Ännchen — it’s nearly impossible to take your eyes off the fierce and angular intensity of Ketelsen’s face.A viewer of the livestream wouldn’t necessarily get that. The score’s focus in its climax is on Max, and the camera follows, with a close-up of the tenor Pavel Cernoch’s fright and anguish. In the theater, however, I could see that Ketelsen’s scowl was more pronounced than ever — a sign that the opera’s traditionally happy ending would here be anything but.“7 Deaths of Maria Callas” features arias performed by sopranos including Adela Zaharia (bottom left) and campy videos starring Willem Dafoe and Marina Abramovic.Wilfried HöslAlso at the Bavarian State Opera, Abramovic’s “7 Deaths” — which pays homage to Callas through seven arias and a prolonged final scene that imagines that famed soprano’s final day — worked better as a livestream, because it worked so intermittently as a live performance. With in-person singers accompanying big-screen videos of Abramovic and Willem Dafoe artfully acting out death scenes inspired by the arias, the piece relegates opera to mere soundtrack.Abramovic is an undeniably electric presence. But the scale of the opera house — the vast distance it can put between a performer and audience member — negates much of the charged intimacy on which she has built her career as a performance artist. At least the livestream of the work’s premiere allowed for a proper zoom on every facial expression and gesture — while also reducing her to just an image on a screen, less powerful than she can be at her best.In Salzburg, Warlikowski’s “Elektra” — using the breadth of the unusually wide Felsenreitschule stage — was almost defiantly unfilmable, with multiple parts of the set in use nearly all the time. The opening credits of the streamed version doubled as a tour of the whole space: a pool (where Elektra’s father, Agamemnon, was murdered) and showers, as well as a glass box filled with luxurious furniture and the vast rock walls of the theater, a canvas for projections.Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, left, and Stundyte in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production of “Elektra.”Bernd Uhlig/Salzburg FestivalThese close-ups presage the limits of the filmed production, in which the camera tends to focus on only one thing at a time, with wide shots largely reserved for the eventually blood-splattered, fly-swarmed walls. The stream did catch chilling details I missed in the theater: Klytämnestra, for example, commanding as sung by Tanja Ariane Baumgartner but easy to miss in a silent moment of handling human organs in a bucket inside the glass box. Or Ausrine Stundyte’s Elektra, wide-eyed and wild-haired from the start, yet progressively more so each time she appears onscreen.But “Elektra” is a musically dense, busy opera that Warlikowski matches in his staging, while the camera lacks the restlessness of a spectator’s eye. The only perspective that would accurately reflect the production would be a wide, straight-on view of the stage — something you might find in the research archive of Broadway shows at the New York Library for the Performing Arts.That problem pales, though, in comparison with the sound of the streamed “Elektra.” I like to believe the story that, ahead of the opera’s 1909 premiere, Strauss told the conductor: “Louder, louder! I can still hear the singers!” Franz Welser-Möst led the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg as if that were true (if with a little more of a level head). At its best, this score overwhelms and terrifies. On a laptop, however, it was simply too balanced, with singers and instrumentalists favored equally; no one came out better for it.As Europe again considers whether to close its borders to Americans, and as live performances remain more of a delicate triumph than a given, new productions may return to the small screen. If that happens, I’ll tune in. But I’d rather see you at the opera house. Because this “Freischütz,” “7 Deaths” and “Elektra” affirmed what we already knew: Fundamentally, opera is theater. That couldn’t be more obvious, or more essential. More