Elektrafying?

I'm now feeling thoroughly foolish, not having gone to Prom 59 and Strauss's Elektra. From the excellent review in Boulezian it looks increasingly like poor judgement.

I shall just rather mournfully reflect that two hours without an interval would have probably resulted in me strangling myself trying not to cough or sneeze, and they'd have had to have an ambulance waiting at Door 8 for me well before it was half over anyway.

I shall have to wait for the Radio 3 repeat. (Hoping there will be one: one is never too sure about R3 repeating Proms operas, especially as it gets later in the season.) All the same, I'm still unsure I really could have taken another Elektra.

At Covent Garden, as I and (I hope) many of the audience were still a bit shaky from the impact, three young 'fashionistas' alongside me blabbered about where they were going to eat and knock back the champers. (Having, of course, turned on their iPhones for a look at a restaurant guide before the cast had finished taking their bows.)  One looked, I now recall, disturbingly like that guy in a yoghourt TV commercial I keep seeing who patronisingly pats a sofa, sits a girl down and assures her that a spoonful of a dairy product is the only thing that will enhance her existence to the point of ecstasy.

I cannot understand how some people could be so emotionally distanced and uninvolved. Shallow, even. But then, if you can believe for two minutes that a path strewn with spilled yoghourt is the one to Nirvana, it may be easier than I thought. Opera, surely, however artificial it can be dramatically—at least often in terms of plot and characterisation compared to theatre—is not that unengaging on either count. Or that artificial in relation to real emotional life. Especially not if it's Strauss.

Would they, I wondered, have casually left a performance of Lear chattering about how they knew a pretty girl like Cordelia who'd been left an orphan and what kind of vintage might her husband grow in France that would cheer her up? And maybe how Gloucester should have gone to SpecSavers? Probably.

I did, however, get to the Chamber Prom on Monday (I see why the BBC calls them 'Proms Chamber Music', though it's still hard to stifle a little schoolboy snigger) though I was not altogether enamoured of Benjamin Grosvenor and don't think I'll write it up; people will begin to think I have some kind of aversion to young prizewinners.

Judith Weir's 'Day Break Shadows Flee' was fascinating, though I thought I detected many more strands of complexity, especially of tonal colour, and left-hand/right-hand interplay than Grosvenor achieved. A lot of breakages, and not quite enough shadows. I wondered if Weir thought so, too: I could see her just a couple of rows in front of me shaking her head, though, being behind her, whether that was out of some kind of nervousness I couldn't tell.

That's one of this year's commissions we really ought to hear in the future in other painists' repertoire.

I listened at home, under the influence of paracetamol and hot lemon again, to Dutoit and the RPO's very lively Prom 60. Very cheering-upping, and more on that later. And, perhaps, more on the rather odd pre-Prom chat that didn't seem entirely certain whether it was supposed to prove Respighi was a Mussolini Fascist, whether Italian Fascism in the Twenties was relatively benign, or whether Respighi was just an enthusiastic post Garibaldi d'Annunzio-reading Italian Nationalist. . .

Hopefully the cold will have been banished for Wednesday's Norrington, Friday's Berlin, and Saturday's Bach. . .

Meanwhile, do read Mark Berry's review of Elektra.

I whiled away a little of my time the other night trying to distract myself from my cold and woolly head with a thriller by William Boyd, Waiting for Sunrise. It begins in Vienna in the first decade of the 20th century: the years of Dr Freud and the spread of psychoanalyst's—'alienists'—couches. I won't bother you with the plot or the story, but Boyd explores a little of the psychology of 'selbstmord' (more than simply 'suicide') as it might relate to sexuality and stylised—maybe corrupted—concepts of 'honour' and 'morality'. 

And Vienna, about then, he writes quite convincingly of as a hothouse of sexuality, as much as Isherwood's Berlin. It's had me thinking; that, of course, is the era of Elektra and Salome. And, as the Glyndebourne Rosenkavalier production disturbingly suggested (despite Ticciati's, I thought, rather naive suggestion in a radio interview that it was fifty per cent  comedy fifty per cent bedroom farce and move along, nothing else to see here) sexually-induced psychological—and emotional— 'selbstmord' isn't perhaps that absent from that opera either. 

This, I think, is something I might mull over, spending rather more time with Strauss than I have for a while, perhaps coming back to it  on my 'audiobritain' website. Looking back, it was probably a mistake to have been thinking too much of Nietsche at school when I was discovering Strauss—the orchestral music, anyway, I was a latecomer to opera apart from Britten—and not enough of Freud who I'd also begun to read then.