Wednesday, August 12, 2015

STRING THEORY


With the rest of the orchestra determined, the last piece of the puzzle is the string section, which in the case of Elektra is both the most fascinating and the most challenging.

14 winds, brass and others leaves me 13 - 15 players for strings.... theoretically.  Which in almost any other opera reduction would be more than enough (and for musical theater would be huge). The challenge with Elektra is not just the numerical strength, but how Strauss uses them.

A traditional orchestral string section is broken down in to:

Violin 1
Violin 2
Viola
Cello
Double bass

This group is typically deployed as four parts, with the basses doubling the cellos at the octave.  A good deal of the classical era repertoire deploys them in three parts, with the violas doubling the cellos either in unison or an octave higher -- so basically Violin 1, Violin 2, Viola/Cello/Bass.  The amount of players per section would vary according to both the needs of the individual piece and the resources of the performing organization.

Even the habit of the French school towards the end of the nineteenth century to split each of these sections continuously in two doesn't alter the essentially four-fold division of the section. Strauss himself utilizes this layout in certain parts of Salome, and it may well have inspired his expanded division for Elektra, which regardless of its antecedents remains no less remarkable in requesting the following:

Violins 1, 2 and 3: 8 players each
Violas 1, 2 and 3: 6 players each
Cellis 1 and 2: 6 players each
Basses 1 and 2: 4 players each
Total: 62

Aside from Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto (which is written for solo strings), I know of no precedent for a tripartite division of an orchestral string section in this manner. Strauss surely had his prospective harmonic approach for the opera in mind when devising it.

Defining his orchestra was typically one of the earliest steps Strauss took in the compositional process -- his copy of Hofmannsthal’s play contains quantities of marginalia indicating instrumental thoughts from the outset.  And in mapping out this unique string section, Strauss was surely preparing to continue his exploration of polytonality taken to its then furthest extreme in Salome, devising an orchestral layout that would facilitate the juxtaposing of foreign triads against each other. Arguably the most representative example of this approach is the so-called “Elektra chord”: effectively a Db major chord contrasted against an E major chord:

Thus, he could expect to ground these harmonic explorations in the string section - always the foundation of his orchestra - by writing the three notes of one triad in his violins and juxtapose its counterpart in the violas. The cellos then add emphasis where necessary and the basses a complimentary or contrasting fundamental tone.

The resulting expanded number of violas plays up the opera's overall heavy, dark atmosphere, though it's interesting to find Strauss reverting to a lighter, treble-prominant sound in two sections in the second half of the opera - the Recognition scene and the final triumphal scene - by asking the First Violas to take up violins as the Fourth Violin section. This restores the traditional four-part division of the strings, though it poses a practical hazard involving as it does cold instruments that, having lain unused for well over an hour, are likely to be out of tune with the rest of the section, much less the rest of the orchestra.  Anecdotally, a cursory survey of a handful of the world’s leading opera houses indicates that this directive is rarely adhered to.

Ironically, the section Strauss outlines gives him one desk less of string players than that for Wagner’s Ring of 16 firsts, 16 seconds, 12 violas, 12 cellos and 8 basses, an interesting anomaly considering the much larger wind and brass sections against which the Elektra string section has to contend.

The breadth of timbral variety that Strauss extracts from his group ranges from an essentially three-fold division (all violins, all violas, all cellos/basses) to a division of nine independent parts and beyond, including frequent solo turns by the principle players of each section.

So how to translate this complex group for a reduced orchestra? In order to keep the numbers low and make the edition practical for as wide a spectrum of performers as possible while still maintaining some fidelity to Strauss’s originality, my first thought was to keep things small:

3 violins
2 violas
2 cellos
1 bass

But for all the intimate possibilities this group offers, it’s become quickly clear that without some sort of amplification it would be easily overwhelmed by the rest of the orchestra.  Amplification is a tricky road to take in the traditional opera arena and would at any rate require the use of a sound mixer, something for which the smaller opera companies interesting in undertaking this reduced version are likely to have little capacity.

My ideal would be:

Violins 1, 2 and 3: minimum 3 each
Violas 1, 2 and 3: minimum 2 each
Cellos 1 and 2: minimum 2 each
Minimum 2 doublebasses

For a total of 20.  This is the section for which the edition will be tailored, even though it exceeds the boundaries of the commissioning organization.  The split of the section can still work with slightly smaller numbers, such as those suggested by Chris Fecteau:

6 violins
3 violas
2 cellos
1 bass

My only thought is to retain two basses, even with these smaller numbers.  A reduced orchestra version of Elektra still needs the added depth and heft of a second bass. There are also several sections where two basses will permit what I feel is a necessary fidelity to the original score.

Which leaves a lot to recommend in Chris' proposal: Divide your section in to the first two desks of violins, third desk of violins and first viola, and the remaining two violas, and you have a viable 3-section division not including the cellos and bass that can cover a fair amount of the disposition of the original.

Where this smaller section becomes tricky are passages where the six violins are required to be divided as individual desks, or two players to a line, a notorious challenge in terms of intonation, and one that string players typically regard with unease.  Two violins playing unison poses noticeable intonation issues: add a third, and better yet a fourth, and the combined sound almost immediately solves those issues.  The fact that Strauss himself poses this challenge in the final scene of his Ariadne auf Naxos doesn’t mitigate the issue, though it does perhaps grant a bit of authorial permission.

What are your thoughts?  What would you suggest?