elektraRICHARD STRAUss Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra Marc Albrecht Live recordings by De Nederlandse Opera 1 RICHARD STRAUss (1864-1949) Elektra Tragödie in einem Aufzuge (Dresden, 1909) Libretto: Hugo von Hofmannsthal CD1 CD 2 [1] “Wo bleibt Elektra?” (Erste Magd, Zweite Magd, Dritte Magd, Vierte Magd) 6:24 [1] “Nun denn, allein!” (Elektra, Orest) 1:21 [2] “Allein! Weh, ganz allein” (Elektra) 9:40 [2] “Was willst du, fremder Mensch?” (Elektra, Orest) 6:48 [3] “Elektra!” (Chrysothemis, Elektra) 2:24 [3] “Wer bist denn du?” (Orest, Elektra) 2:09 [4] “Ich kann nicht sitzen und ins Dunkel starren” (Chrysothemis, Elektra) 8:39 [4] “Orest!” (Elektra, Orest) 8:56 [5] “ Was willst du! Seht doch, dort!” 4:34 [5] “Du wirst es tun? Allein?” (Elektra, Orest) 3:07 (Klytämnestra, Elektra, Die Vertraute, Die Schleppträgerin) [6] “ Ich habe ihm das Beil nicht geben können!” 2:25 [6] “Ich will nichts hören!” (Klytämnestra) 5:01 (Elektra, Chrysothemis, Vier Mägde, Sechs Dienerinnen) [7] “Ich habe keine guten Nächte” (Klytämnestra, Elektra) 6:29 [7] “He! Lichter! Lichter!” (Aegisth, Elektra) 4:11 [8] “Wenn das rechte Blutopfer unterm Beile fällt” (Elektra, Klytämnestra) 4:27 [8] “Helft! Mörder!” (Aegisth, Elektra) 1:14 [9] “Was bluten muß?” (Elektra, Klytämnestra) 2:13 [9] “Elektra! Schwester!” (Chrysothemis, Chor) 3:29 [10] ”Lichter!” (Klytämnestra, Elektra) 1:44 [10] “Wir sind bei den Göttern” (Elektra, Chrysothemis) 3:44 [11] “Orest! Orest ist tot!” (Chrysothemis, Elektra, Junger Diener, Alter Diener) 3:06 [11] “Schweig’, und tanze” (Elektra, Chrysothemis) 2:16 [12] “Platz da!” (Junger Diener, Alter Diener, Elektra, Chrysothemis) 2:59 [12] “Applause 0:47 [13] “Wie stark du bist!” (Elektra, Chrysothemis) 4:45 2 3 Soloists Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Amsterdam Klytämnestra Der Pfleger des Orest Erste Magd first violin third violin second viola Michaela Schuster Tijl Faveyts Helena Rasker Vadim Tsibulevsky David Peralta Alegre Odile Torenbeek Jan Evert van Riemsdijk Paul Reijn Avi Malkin Elektra Die Vertraute Zweite Magd Angela Skala Heleen Veder Michiel Holtrop Evelyn Herlitzius Iris Giel Lien Haegeman Henrik Svahnström Jarmila Delaporte Marijke van Kooten Hike Graafland Jos Schutjens Joost Cransberg Chrysothemis Die Schleppträgerin Dritte Magd William Hill Saskia Schröeder Liz Ralston Camilla Nylund Hiroko Mogaki Astrid Hofer Armand Gouder Cynthia Briggs de Beauregard Mira van Dijk-Chendler third viola Aegisth Ein junger Diener Vierte Magd Anuschka Franken Suzanne Dijkstra Hubert Delamboye Pascal Pittie Anja van Engeland fourth violin Margrietha Isings second violin & first viola Nicholas Durrant Orest Ein alter Diener Fünfte Magd Saskia Viersen Janos Konrad Maaike-Merel van Baarzel Gerd Grochowski Jan Alofs Lisette Bolle Tessa Badenhoop Laura van der Stoep Ernst Grapperhaus Joanna Trzcionkowska Marjolein de Waart Katya Woloshyn Die Aufseherin Marieke Boot Stephanie Steiner Elaine McKrill Mascha van Sloten Derk Lottman Liesbeth Bloemer-Heijster Guillaume Serpenti Marina Malkin Peter Hoogeveen 4 5 first cello contrabass cor anglais bassoon trumpet timpani Christiaan Louwens Luis Cabrera Martin Anita Janssen Margreet Bongers Hessel Buma Peter Elbertse Nitzan Laster Julien Beijer Susan Brinkhof Mark Speetjens Elisabeth Wiklander Pablo Orenes baritone oboe Dymphna Auke van der Merk timpani Anjali Tanna Erik Spaepen Daniëlle Kreeft van Dooremaal Jeroen Botma & percussion Sebastian Koloski Sorin Orcinschi Hans van Loenen Theun van Nieuwburg Pamela Smits Diego Calderón Jimenez clarinet contrabassoon Erwin ter Bogt/ Pim van der Zwaan Rick Huls Jaap de Vries Ad Welleman percussion second cello Maaike Wierda Bas van der Sterren Hay Beurskens Douw Fonda Hanka van Doesum horn bass trumpet Paul Lemaire Carin Nelson flute Herman Draaisma Wouter Brouwer Wim Hendriks Gerda Tuinstra Rik Otto Leon Berendse Harrie Troquet Elizabeth Chell Atie Aarts Levke Hollmer Miek Laforce trombone harp Pascale Went bass clarinet Dim van den Berge Gerard Peters Sandrine Chatron Jozien Jansen flute/piccolo Peter Cranen Harrie de Lange Miriam Overlach Mirjam Teepe Wagner tuba Steven Verhelst Ellen Vergunst basset horn Jan Harshagen Wim de Vreugt celesta Léon Bosch Pierre Buizer Jonathan Waleson oboe Jelrik Beerkens Stef Jongbloed tuba Toon Durville Fred Molenaar David Kutz Rob Bouwmeester 6 7 english deutsch nederlands synopsis libretto 10 ON THE THresHolD Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote in a letter: “Whoever wants to live must surpass himself...” Electra cannot surpass herself. She is the very threshold Electra lives in a no-man’s-land – a region inhabited by no one else. It is for that she cannot cross. She blocks the way for herself and everyone else. this very reason that she occupies this region with unwavering determination, for only here can she validate the essence of her being: contradiction. The threshold is a line, not a real place. In order to become a space, it is She is at one and the same time nobody and more than everyone else; extended to the stairway. But the stairway, too, is not a real place. It traces she lives here, but she is in fact also dead. She remains at the place of her a path, from above to below, from in to out, from one space to another. It is youth, but never sets foot in her family home. With all these discrepancies, the theatrical setting of Electra’s inner no-man’s-land, the ideal stage for her she is the embodiment of contradiction, in two senses: as contradiction in ubiquitous contradiction. Everyone who wishes to enter her father’s house and of itself and in relation to the outside world, against everything and must go around her. She blocks everyone’s way. She contradicts, she inhibits, everyone, everywhere and always. The scene of this contradiction is the she disrupts, she refuses... She is like water that cannot stream, murky, dark, threshold, where she continuously dwells and which is not an actual place brackish. The stairway could be a way out, but Electra blocks this path – for or, better said, is a non-place, a no-man’s-land. her sister, for her mother. For years, for decades, Electra has swum against the stream that (via the stairway) tries to get out; she remains sitting in her non- The threshold is a point of transition, a boundary between internal and place and cripples all who must live with her. Just as her life plays itself out in a external, before and after. Truly living people cross thresholds, use them non-place, so is the time in which she lives a non-time. Bitterly, her soul holds to get from here to there. But those who sit at the threshold rebel, obstruct, the hands of the clock motionless. wish to go no further, refuse. Just like Wozzeck, who with his imploding life could be regarded as Electra’s depressed brother. When his life can go no With inhuman exertion, she grasps a single moment from the past, the moment further, he too sits on the threshold; he refuses to stand, for “... only in the in which her father was murdered by Aegisthus. She is rigidly fixed on that cool grave... would I lie better”. moment and she has turned the rigidity of that inner fixation against the stream 12 13 of life. She has become rigid, frozen, and yet glowing hot toward life itself, life and everything. Hatred is never fiercer than when it springs from frustrated that she wishes to forget, to forgive. “Whoever wants to live must surpass, love. And there had been love in this family, great, boundless love, like armour must change, must forget...” But Electra does not want to live – because her or a safe vessel embracing everyone. But this vessel was in a single second one and only, her father, is dead, it is for her unthinkable, even sinful to want to smashed to pieces with the blow of an axe. Now the survivors lie like shards, live. With desperate stubbornness, she rejects life and clings with a mysterious useless to one another, immovably in the way. Yet, like shards, they still fit passion to death. She gives herself entirely to this negative fascination as in together – each time they meet they want to piece something together as a her mind she places herself at the “icy abyss” where her father now lies, as memory, yet cannot become whole again. she imagines how her supposedly dead brother “wanders there below in the gruesome crypts”, his mouth “filled with earth”. With deceptive precision, she Clytemnestra has thoroughly erased one moment of her past from memory: sees in her mind’s eye the images of the dead; lustfully and despairingly at the the moment in which she was the murderer of her husband. In a passage from same time, she stares into the chasm of her angst and in doing so reveals the the original play that was unfortunately scrapped by Strauss/Hofmannsthal, actual dark core of her tragic rigidity: her inability to accept death. she says: “First it was beforehand, then it was past – between those, I have done nothing.” Years after the fact, she remains crippled by the thunderbolt of her first, deep confrontation with death, which revealed itself to her in its most extreme form: That single moment, which Clytemnestra has smoothed away, is the one that the unexpected, violent death of a father. This was death in its most absurd Electra consciously tries to keep eternally alive. The gap in Clytemnestra’s and shocking form. Above all, it was the death of her love. The first great consciousness is thoroughly filled with Electra, like a festering wound that love of her life, which had yet to be experienced, lived through and got over. cannot heal. Clytemnestra’s illness is named Electra, and Electra’s is named Aegisthus’s axe, guided by Clytemnestra, crushed this seed of love before it Clytemnestra. They fit like together like two jagged shards. They are inescap- could fully ripen and transform itself.