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.
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