Fine furies
OPERA CHARLES REID
On the first night of the Elektra revival at Covent Garden everything and everybody fitted, hung and marched together uncannily —five leading parts (and of those five the pre- dominant three especially); the calculated pas- sion of Mr Solti's beat in the orchestra pit; and, in that pit, every 'voice' from back-desk third fiddles (note, if you haven't done so already, that Strauss's string choir is here divided into ten parts instead of the usual five) to the `Wagner' tubas which, when Orest appeared, purred nobly. In short, an out-of-the- way night; a sort of electricity and a benign inevitability were in the air.
Such nights do not happen often at the Royal (or any other) Opera. When they do the memory grapples them for good. I think of a parallel. Who, lucky enough to be there, will forget the Don Carlos first night, 1957? The same singers and the same conductor (Giulini) were heard later on the same stage and in the same pit to grand effect. But the initial bonus of magic had gone. I am sure that the remain- ing performances in the present Elektra revival will be exalting and exact. I am equally sure, however, that last Friday's performance will turn out, in its way, to be a once-for-all.
The three predominants of Elektra are Elek- tra herself, Klytemnaestra and Chrysothemis. The acting of the second and the third—sung by Regina Resnik and Marie Collier—made my eyes pop. Whenever they were in action they monopolised my opera glasses. Any other Elektra would have been acted off the stage and out of mind by this mother and this sister. The Elektra, however, was Birgit Nillson; and Miss Nillson is not of the quellable kind.
From her first line, 'Allein. Weh, ganz allein,' sung while clinging to the great door- rings of Agamemnon's palace as if they were talismans of blood and retribution, to the `namenloser Tanz' at the end, she queened it intimidatingly—and with pathos. Unkempt, dishevelled and horribly obsessed, Elektra, who- ever sings her, is no pretty sight for eye or mind. Her make-up and drab dress usually suggest one who falls in fireplaces and lives on scraps in a lean-to of corrugated iron.
Miss Nillson looked a degree less squalid than some Elektras I have seen. When done as an exercise in 1915 eurythmy (this has been known to happen in fairly recent memory), the 'namenloser Tanz,' accompanied as it is by one if Richard Strauss's less seemly, six-to-the-bar romps, can be so embarrassing as to make one look the other way. Miss Nill- son's routine, a long spasm of strides, upflung arms and sudden kneelings, came straight from -Elektra's case-book. It was psychopathology. Which somehow made everything right.
Yet it was not her acting but her singing, the strength and unremitting lustre of it, that carried us away and had the whole theatre on its feet for her curtain calls. i remember with something like awe her invocations of Agamemnon, the truth and shine with which they won through the multiple octave pound- ings of the orchestral 'heavies.' Also, after her physical tussle with Chrysothemis, the demonic B flat ring of her `Sei verfluchir Who would have thought that, at this point, she had so much wind and tone control left in her?
The Klytemnaestra of Miss Resnik I have ex- tolled before. It is even more powerful than in 1965; sonorously sung; one of the half- dozen most sovereign (and frightening) pieces of acting I have seen on any kind of stage since I started going to theatres. For Miss Collier equivalent praise. She sang and acted Chrysothemis's great 'Kinder will ich haben' number without letting the bottom drop out of the brooding middle section .where she laments murdered father and absent brother. A rare thing this.
About the production (rehearsed by John Copley) two points. On coming down the stair into the courtyard Klytemnaestra traditionally times her steps to beautiful twanglings in the orchestra. On Friday the tradition was dropped. A good thing. It was over-fussy. And tricky. When she's negotiating steps Klytemnaestra's train gives her enough to think about. During 14,r second scene with Elektra, Chrysothemis knelt endlessly before her for fondling, with as much of her face (a pretty one) towards the audience as she could manage. Too gauche for words.
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