The two worst sounding versions of Elektra are arguably its best recordings - from the two conductors people would probably dream about hearing conduct it most often - Carlos Kleiber, whose '77 Covent Garden version has been paraded on all sorts of labels in spite of the fact that the sound is nearly unlistenable, and Klaus Tennstedt, whose Kiel performance is so close to unlistenable that so far as I know, it's never been released on CD. I'll link to it below.
Nobody's broadcast sounds that bad, no matter what the vintage. Not Beecham in 47, not Reiner in 52, and Jochum's studio recording from 1944 sounds pretty close to magnificent. But in spite of the fact that both of them get great singers on off nights, they're two completely opposite performances of a work that does better than just about anybody to convince those of us skeptics that Elektra is a work that's greater than... well... I find Elektra problematic.
It's not problematic as a musical achievement, in that way it's obviously towering. or 'problematic' in the contemporary American parlance which means people find its content offensive, it's just... well... it's stupid. I cannot possibly listen with surtitles on or a libretto next to me, I just start laughing. Every time I see Elektra dance, I start laughing. To think that this is the same composer who would write Rosenkavalier next and move us all to tears (except the modernists...) is almost unthinkable.
I've long since stopped listening to Elektra as anything but background music, and as that, it's great, because the music is perhaps the most inventive ever written by one of the most inventive composers to pick up a pen, and inevitably brings out the best in musicians, who always treat it like Ahab approaching his white whale - the score is so difficult that everybody's at extra pains to get everything right.
The fact that Solti's recording is the most famous makes it worse. He and Culshaw make it into a Vincent Price creeper of an opera - a cinema for the ears that inevitably makes you want to put a movie on more than keep listening. Is it entertaining? Of course. Is it a serious artistic endeavor? Just listen to Birgit Nilsson cackling maniacally (or is it Resnik? At this point I can never remember which character does it and I kinda don't care...) through endless reverb until the most thrilling orchestral interlude Strauss ever wrote is completely subsumed by non-stop deafening laughing. That recording is the best possible evidence that Strauss created this opera with complete cynicism.
I get the sense that's what Kleiber thinks too, but that's what he loves about it. No matter how awful the sound on the Kleiber recording, you still hear every detail, and they come at you at light speed. Hewing closer to Strauss's impossible tempi than most musicians would ever dare, Kleiber built what might have been the greatest thrillride in opera history. Some people comment about how secretly tonal Elektra is. Sure, by the standards of Schoenberg it's plenty tonal, but remember Strauss's injunction to conduct Salome and Elektra like Mendelssohn. The quicksilver way the textures whiz by in Elektra is pure Mendelssohn, but atop all this very traditional counterpoint is a lot of very 20th century harmony and voiceleading. One can make the argument, correctly, that the dissonant harmonies are used for effect, but Elektra is pure effect, the difference is that the effects are not what we think they are. Elektra is not nearly so noisy an opera as we sometimes think it is, but it is much more frenetic. The whole point of Elektra is its concision - it's an opera in constant motion, hurtling us to an inevitable conclusion. It's almost literally written to be the exciting bits of the Ring condensed to an hour and a half (and there are subtle quotes from Der Ring all over Elektra, the least subtle of which is in Elektra's first dance - it's almost Walkurenritt note for note...). You hear Kleiber and you realize, Elektra is not noise, it's energy.
But when listening to Tennstedt, Elektra does not sound done for effect at all - rather a work of pure substance. However awful the sound, this is an Elektra completely unlike any other; slower than all but perhaps Jochum and Maazel, but of a character all its own. I'm sure real Straussians will find fault, not just with the sound or singing, but with Tennstedt's conception, which is truly Mahlerian in a way you'll immediately understand when you hear it. For all Strauss's avant-garde irony, there is no sense in Tennstedt that Strauss meant the work in anything but complete seriousness - a great tragic work in the tradition of Beethoven op. 131 and the Pathetique Sonata. It's a grand tragic prayer, like the sacred rite Aeschylus intended in which we are told truths too important to convey through any medium but the stage. Through the bad sound is ecstatic forebodding, a terrifying prediction of 20th century doom.
This is ultimately the difference between Kleiber and Tennstedt, and why I think Tennstedt's the superior artist. Kleiber made everything look joyful, but everybody knew that Kleiber was going through agony trying to convince us. Tennstedt laid bare his suffering and thereby found deeper things to tell us. Every practitioner since Kleiber has gotten a whole bag of tricks from him. The concert hall is practically populated with
dozens of mini-Kleibers who mime his arms and faces. But nobody's learned anything from Tennstedt, because what Tennstedt did cannot be learned.
Tennstedt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEI_W9wD4jg
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