(Taken from my programme notes, for my production with Fulham Opera)
Background
First performed in 1927, Die ägyptische Helena remains by far the least well-known of the six operas which Strauss composed to librettos by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (the others being Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, and Arabella). It has only been staged once before in the UK, at Garsington Festival Opera in 1997, and this is the very first time the 1933 ‘Vienna version’ of the opera has ever been staged in the UK.
In operatic circles its reputation chiefly rests on two things: the blockbuster aria, ‘Zweite Brautnacht’, possibly made most famous by the American soprano Leontyne Price, for whom it was a calling card, and the character of the Omniscient Seashell, perhaps the most oddly conceived of characters in all of opera! But this is in fact a fascinating work which contains much to admire, enjoy, and think about, and we are absolutely delighted to present it to a new generation of opera-goers in the UK.
The libretto
The impetus to write it came early in the 1920s, when Hugo von Hofmannsthal became fascinated by the myth of Helen of Troy and an intriguing puzzle. In the Odyssey, Homer depicts Menelaus and Helen living in calm marital contentment, apparently fully reconciled after the Trojan War, which had been fought, ostensibly at least, over Helen’s abduction or desertion of Sparta and new marriage to Paris, Prince of Troy. Since this is perhaps the most archetypal representation of marital infidelity in all of literature (the most public, with the worst possible consequences), this presents a fascinating question: how did the couple reconcile and reach a new equilibrium?
The question was already posed by Euripedes in his play Helen, in which he posits that it was not the real Helen but an evil doppelgänger Helen who had left Menelaus, and that the real Helen had been whisked away by Athena to Egypt for the duration of the Trojan War. This idea provides the basis of Hofmannsthal’s first act, though for Hofmannsthal the phantom Helen is just a ruse, invented by Aithra, to get Menelaus to take Helen back.
Strauss’s and Hofmannsthal’s original conception of the work is bizarrely far from the final piece they produced. Strauss had in mind an operetta-singspiel, something like Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, i.e. a frothy number opera, with witty dialogue. But, although Hofmannsthal was on board with the idea, he didn’t produce a text of this type, instead providing a complex marriage drama, with the central figure of Menelaus suffering from similar post-traumatic stress symptoms and depressive episodes which he himself had experienced in the aftermath of the Great War. With nary a joke to be found in the text, the Omniscient Seashell is the only remnant of the earlier comic idea, the joke being that Seashell (Muschel in German) also was the name of the mouth-piece and receiver of early telephones, which allowed one to receive limitless information from afar (hence ‘omniscient’). So that explains the character which has caused so much consternation to so many! In essence she represents the incursion of technology into people’s lives in the 1920s - the telephone and radio bringing limitless information from afar, and in the latter case the start of a new dynamic of the “all knowing” broadcast media who informed citizens of news and more, direct to their homes.
To the Euripedes play Hofmannsthal added a rich brew of other sources: the Helen of Goethe’s Faust, and also the figure depicted in late 19th-century decadent and symbolist writers, all of whom give Helen a sort of uncanny, demonic character, the extreme of the femme fatale. As a man of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Hofmannsthal was very influenced also by the burgeoning psychoanalytic literature of his time, once telling Strauss that he had read all of Freud. For the first staging, the librettist insisted that the opera be staged as a contemporary marriage drama, within the classical story, ‘somewhere between New York and Moscow’ as he had said to Strauss, with up-to-the-minute costumes alongside ancient Grecian regalia underlining this attitude.
The music
In the event, this very heightened, elaborate text doesn’t feel very modern compared to their lighter collaborations, and is perhaps most similar in style and subject matter to Die Frau ohne Schatten, though more eclectic in tone. Strauss responded in kind to Hofmannsthal’s text, providing a score of such frabjous grandeur, gloriously overstepping-the-line-of-good-taste orchestral splurge, and expansive, swooning vocal lines, that at times he almost risks parodying himself. At the same time, for much of Act I, Menelaus’s fractured mental state dominates the action, and so the harmonic language often feels very unsettled, its opacity, density, and dissonance reflecting his confusion and suffering. Beautiful moments abound too, especially in the music for the women. As always, Strauss’s affinity for the soprano voice comes to the fore. There are things he did in this opera which he never did elsewhere, and the score richly rewards repeated listening.
The moment the sleeping Helen is revealed to Menelaus, for instance, is depicted in an astonishingly managed transition from dissonance to consonance, followed by a plunge into what feels like a beautiful slow-motion opium dream, with music of extreme beauty as Helen wakes up and Menelaus looks on in awed silence. After the tortuous high-speed chromatics of the rest of the act, the effect of such slow-motion harmonic stability is genuinely dreamy and erotic. This technique of setting up a thrill ride of perpetual orchestral dazzle for the main action of the plot, and then slowing right down and expanding into lyrical finales, letting the audience catch their breath, is a trick he learned early on in Salome, and continued all the way to the end of his career in Capriccio.
The aforementioned aria ‘Zweite Brautnacht’ (Second wedding night), might be the most generously climaxing soprano cantilena of Strauss’s entire career, a moment of real exaltation with billowing orchestral eruptions underscoring every ecstatic phrase. Two of his loveliest tenor arias can be found in Act II, one early on for Da-ud in which he pledges himself to Helen, and the glorious (and hard-won) aria for Menelaus near the end, when he finally sees Helen as she really is. There is the feel of early Hollywood film scores in much of this. In 1925, during the composition of the opera, Strauss had been busy with preparing a film version of Rosenkavalier, and he also referenced an interest in filmic techniques when discussing the composition of his immediately preceding opera, Intermezzo, so the burgeoning art form was clearly on his mind.
Though always consummately well-crafted, there are of course also stretches of routine (‘notespinning’ as Strauss’s wife called them), as there are in virtually every Strauss opera. Strauss very easily retreated into his ‘Wagnerian armour’ (Hofmannsthal’s phrase) as a sort of reflex mode of composition when he was less than inspired by the dramatic material at hand. The sublime next to the commonplace is a permanent feature of his music, and it’s not there to ‘tell’ as it is in his contemporaries Ives or Mahler. It’s one of the paradoxes of his output which lovers of his music accept, and sceptics can’t look past.
Strauss quotes Wagner several times in this work – Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung at moments appropriate to the drama – ironically or more straightforwardly - and he quotes the climax of his own Rosenkavalier trio in the Act I trio, though this time the reference is ironic. In Der Rosenkavalier the moment depicts a female lover selflessly renouncing her man to another woman, and fully facing up to reality in the process. At the equivalent moment in the present work, two women are conspiring to trick a man in order to keep him, by one pretending to be something she isn’t. The elves add in their own ironic comments, framing the moment in parody, a mode which has predominated throughout the act. Strauss is very consistent across his career in assigning certain musical figures to certain moods or ideas, a sort of web of Wagnerian leitmotifs that leak out of one work into the next, sometimes decades apart. As a classic example, he presages the Act II Arabella love duet at the end of Da-ud’s aria, both of which are about pledging eternal love.
The Characters
With her magical powers, the sorceress Aithra is a fantastical character, yet she emerges as the most modern, immediately understandable and human figure, her reactions a sort of commentary on these strange mythic-epic figures that have walked into her life. Strauss associates much of the subtler, more tuneful music with her, which includes some of the most lovable and charming music in the opera. With her magical promptings and coterie of malicious elves to do her bidding, in Act I we find her in her own domain, and she acts very much as a sort of director figure, creating a land of illusions, enchantment, elves, dreams, shadows, phantoms, drug-induced fantasy. Act I is a land of women too; Menelaus is the only man in a sea of female spirits. However, the beautiful, artificial world created in Act I isn’t sustainable without continual sedation through readministering the forgetting potion, as the reality of the past keeps reasserting itself on the dream. Nor is it controllable for long - Aithra’s creations often spiral off in unexpected ways beyond what she had intended. In Act II we find ourselves in Altair’s desert lands, a domain of men and harsh reality. Now Helen becomes the focus of attention from the chorus of male voices.
Helen’s music, while intensely lyrical, has more of a heroic character, soaring, powerful cantilenas over rich orchestration, where one feels quite often that she is very aware of her role and powers to influence others. She is a supremely self-confident woman, always knows what she wants, tellingly never apologising to Menelaus, relying instead on her intelligence, charisma and animal magnetism to get what she wants. She is a portrait of a woman who has had to go through life as the embodied representation of an archetypal ideal – the feminine divine – with all its concomitant advantages and problems. The contemporary similarities with famous film or music stars are the most obvious instantiation of this pattern in the modern world. For the ancient Greeks, ‘stars’ often literally became stars, granted immortality by Jupiter, such as the Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux, brothers of Helen.
Because of her beauty and charm, no one in the opera can see her for the person she actually is, instead seeing a projection of their own inner ideal. This brings with it a huge amount of danger for Helen, but also a huge amount of power, which she seems to wield with elan. It’s not that she enjoys the attention, so much as that she puts it to use when she wants to and ignores it when she doesn’t. The cost to her is a lack of true intimacy with others, a constant need to manage and be in charge of her relationships, and a sort of resultant anonymity that comes with always playing a role. Figures like Marilyn Monroe or Maria Callas, to name two contemporary women who have been identified with cultural ideals in their own domains, were not so lucky. Unable to contend with the frenzied response they engendered, they faced fame, then personal tragedy and early death. The stakes are similarly high for Helen.
Much has already been said above about Menelaus, and in a way, the opera is really about his journey from sickness and anger, to health and reconciliation. Helen is the centre of fascination for all the other characters in the opera, but it is Menelaus who has the wider character arc, and ends the opera most changed. At the start of the opera, he is still reeling from almost having murdered Helen, and further he is haunted by what he has seen at war, not just in witnessing the atrocities that others have perpetrated, but also the crimes that he himself has committed. These are often the most traumatising memories for soldiers, as they struggle to reconcile their actions with their self-image. Helen is well aware that the lengths he has gone to reclaim her reveals his love for her, though it is masked in hatred. He himself only admits this reluctantly when at breaking point, and perhaps in his fury has not consciously realised the depths of his love until she provokes him to do so.
The other characters are seen more clearly in relief to these central three figures. Altair, the proud, virile, desert prince, cannot understand what Helen sees in Menelaus, and represents for Menelaus a repeat of one of the foreign Trojan kings who lusted after Helen, wanting her for themselves. This retriggers the memories of everything that has plagued him for the last ten years, causing him to play out the Trojan War yet again, and kill the boyish Da-ud, who becomes for Menelaus another Paris. Menelaus is right to suspect Altair – just as it occurred ten years before, it is while Menelaus is out on a hunt, that this suitor tries to take Helen for himself, though this time Helen rebuffs Altair’s advances, where she didn’t reject those of Paris. After Menelaus kills Da-ud he feels immense remorse; facing up to the destructive consequences of his actions paves the way to the eventual restoration of his sanity. Altair and Da-ud are derived from yet more eras and references: the Hollywood idol Rudolph Valentino would have been the immediate visual association for Strauss’s audiences; they also both utter “thus it is written”, a common Islamic saying, even though the founding of Islam was two millenia after the Trojan war! It adds to the feeling of the piece hovering in a magical realm, governed by association and dream logic, rather than it being rooted in a concrete time and place.
The elves of Act I shouldn’t be thought of as innocent fairies of English folklore, but rather as mischievous and malicious female spirits delighting in their harassment of Menelaus. Their laughter ironically underscores the beautiful music of the close of Act I – both at Menelaus’s belief in the concocted ‘phantom Helen’ story, and to her displeasure also at their mistress Aithra’s optimism in thinking her plan for reconciliation will work.
The Themes
There is a common thread that runs through all of Hofmannsthal’s work, which remains under-explored by many commentators. He was fascinated by the conflict in life between staying principled and true to your ideals in the face of life's flux, ineluctable change, and the constant mysterious transformation that we find within ourselves. How long should we hold on to the ideal? When should we compromise and move on?
This dichotomy is most clearly depicted in the characters of Ariadne and Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos – but different aspects of the same dynamic are seen in Elektra/Chrysothemis, Octavian/Marschallin, Arabella/Zdenka, and here Menelaus/Helen. As a result of this central poetic idea, all of Hofmannsthal’s libretti are fundamentally psychological, internal dramas, in which a central figure needs to solve this problem for him- or herself.
Menelaus is ruled by his principles – he has been betrayed and dishonoured and now lives only to avenge the memory of his happy life. He cannot accept the new ‘untouched’ Helen, yearning instead for the one he knew long before. In contrast, Helen is pragmatic to a fault. Paris has been slain, so it makes perfect sense for her to go back to Menelaus whom she also loved. She knows that not only will her life be better this way, but she will make Menelaus’s life better too, so for her the decision to return to him seems obvious. But Helen’s changeability has left carnage and turmoil in its wake, and this mode of living is no longer sustainable for her.
A compromise must be found. In Hofmannsthal’s schema, reconciliation cannot be achieved through dialogue; a miracle needs to occur. The mystery of self-transformation is a concomitant concern of Hofmannsthal’s, a process which often emerges from a confusion and a spiritual death. Again the model is most clear in Ariadne – she thinks that Bacchus is Death come to take her, and in willingly going with him into the afterlife she is in fact transformed, and given new life. The process is mysterious to her, even after the event. The same is true for Menelaus. In willingly letting go of his past and going to his death, he is in fact transformed and sees Helen as she is, and his marriage is renewed. The operatic model behind all of this is Tristan who believes he is drinking a death potion, which is in fact a love potion. And behind this is the central symbol of the west – Christ’s death and resurrection, itself presaged in other mythologies by other, less complete representations of the same symbolic pattern.
Another thread is worth teasing out. At the beginning of the opera the sorceress Aithra is waiting for her lover Poseidon who has not shown up for dinner. Poseidon is an abandoning lover figure, clearly the one in control, to Aithra’s frustration. Having shipwrecked Menelaus and Helen on her island, Aithra suggests almost that Helen is an undeveloped aspect of herself, the product of a Freudian wish-fulfilling dream: ‘The image conjured up with longing by our other, dreaming self’. So Helen for her represents the desirable woman she wishes she could be, who has a man chasing her across seas for a decade. In this reading, the whole opera could be a working out of Aithra’s dream. Interestingly, for all the resolute finality of the ending, her story arc is not rounded out in the text. Strauss pleaded with Hofmannsthal to allow a dancer depicting Poseidon to enter at the end, but Hofmannsthal wouldn’t countenance the depiction of a god in a modern work, so she is left hanging!
Finally, Helena realises that accessing the subconscious is the solution to healing Menelas’s trauma - “What was past now steps once more with ghostly power from the dark gate! And that which from the depths returns, is the only thing the hero needs.” The healing transformation is achieved entirely within oneself, forged from refashioned fragments of the past. This is a more explicit statement of the ancient idea of the hero going into the “underworld” to find what he needs to complete his quest.
The Production
I do not wish to comment too much on the present production of this piece, as I don’t want to spoil too much, and hope above all that it speaks for itself. Since I’m expecting that virtually no one in the audience will have seen this piece in the theatre, I have wanted to approach the piece as if it were a premiere, working hard to tell the (admittedly exceptionally convoluted) story with the cast as clearly and with as much detail as possible to reveal what’s there on the page. Following the example of the photos of the 1927 premiere of the opera, many of our visual cues were developed from images of 1920s cinema, with references to ancient sources seen as filtered through the prism of the interwar years when Strauss and Hofmannsthal were working on the piece.
Guido Martin Brandis
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