About 30 minutes before the end of Richard Strauss’s Elektra, the universe splits open. Elektra, daughter of the murdered king Agamemnon, lives for the day when her brother Orest will return to avenge her father by slaughtering her mother. Now Orest is here and his sister no longer recognises him. Until suddenly, shatteringly, she does, and Strauss’s 109-piece orchestra unleashes a dissonant scream unlike anything that had been heard in European music. Indeed, for many listeners in 1909 it was the end of music. Satirists compared it to capital punishment (one cartoon depicted a quaking victim of ‘Elektra-cution’). When it transferred to Covent Garden in 1910, newspapers promised London audiences ‘the most arduous score ever written’. It sold out.

‘It needs big personalities in every sense: musically, theatrically – even with those who are used to big stages’

Anyway, happy new year! That’s how the Royal Opera is greeting 2024, and if a 110 minute onslaught of sonic psychosis feels about right for our times, it has an additional significance for the company. This staging by the German-born director Christof Loy will be the last wholly new production conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano before he steps down as the company’s music director at the end of this season, after 22 years. It’ll also be the first time Pappano has conducted Elektra at Covent Garden.

‘It’s a piece that I used to coach quite a bit in my youth,’ says Pappano. ‘But isn’t it weird that Elektra has been performed at the Royal Opera in three incarnations during my time here, and I always gave it away? I used it to lure big-name conductors, but I always secretly coveted it for myself.’ Being music director of a major company isn’t the carte-blanche that armchair fans like to imagine. Pappano dangled this great glistening hunk of musical expressionism as bait to tempt guest conductors of the stature of Semyon Bychkov and Andris Nelsons to Covent Garden. He finally got to conduct a concert version with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, in 2022. ‘It was very, very meaningful for me,’ Pappano says. ‘The libretto alone is one of the great creations.’

He has a point. Strauss collaborated with the Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who took the raw bones of Sophocles’s Electra and clothed them in the heaving, throbbing psychological flesh of the age of Freud. The result is an opera that uses one of western culture’s most ancient stories to blast open the doors of modernity. ‘This is a serious business,’ says Pappano. ‘And of course Elektra has the names of singers like Birgit Nilsson and Regina Resnik attached to it and big conductors – Georg Solti, Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan. It’s a piece that demands a certain respect. It needs big personalities in every sense: musically, theatrically – even with people who are used to singing on the big stages.’

In that regard, Pappano has a head start: his cast is about as potent and as charismatic as it’s possible to find today, with three show-stopping dramatic sopranos – Nina Stemme, Karita Mattila and Sara Jakubiak – in the central roles of Elektra, her mother Klytämnestra and her traumatised sister Chrysothemis. And, of course, he has Loy, by a happy (and not wholly coincidental) circularity, the director with whom he worked on his very first new production at Covent Garden back in 2002 – Ariadne auf Naxos, also by Strauss and Hofmannsthal. Loy has described that production as a personal turning point, and they’ve been regular collaborators ever since.

‘It’s only on the surface that Elektra is loud. It’s big, but it is about very fragile souls’

‘He’s very musical, but hypersensitive to every nuance of text, colour and atmosphere,’ says Pappano. ‘And this allows him to cut to the meat of the matter. He can talk about detail, and yet because he knows the flow of the music so well, it doesn’t become bogged down in those details. He’s terrific with the girls too – so important in this piece. Strauss seemed to have a sixth sense for the female psyche, and for a director to have that degree of sensitivity to both the female and male psyches – and to harness it as theatre – is really quite something.’

This is high praise: opera conductors and directors don’t always find themselves pulling in the same direction (a notorious scene in the 1990s BBC documentary The House showed Pappano’s predecessor, Bernard Haitink, recoiling in dismay from a newly unveiled stage design). Loy and Pappano start, literally, on the same page: Loy begins with the orchestral score and works outwards. ‘The moment I first understood what opera should do was when I studied Mozart’s full score,’ he says. ‘With Mozart, to see all the middle voices in the orchestra is like a miracle: you just have to open the score and it is like an analysis of the character’s psychology. This is what I love in Strauss, too, because there you have the same kind of structure. It’s a way of reading the souls of the characters.’

While many opera-goers find contemporary productions almost wilfully alienating, Loy’s intense focus on the music as a key to character has given his stagings a refreshing directness. In his Tosca at the ENO and Forza del Destino at Covent Garden, in a widely revived Gothenburg staging of Strauss’s Arabella and an unsparing Puccini Il Trittico at Salzburg (now available on DVD) he plays with abstraction and big, bare spaces (his regular designer, Johannes Leiacker, has also designed Elektra). Loy strips away anything extraneous, leaving him free to tell the story in a way that makes full use of opera’s supreme quality – its ability to show you what’s going on both inside and outside a character at the same time.

‘It might have been different 20 or 30 years ago when we had an audience that knew the canon,’ Loy explains. ‘But now I feel that maybe there are people in the audience that are seeing, say, Tosca for the first time in their lives. I want that person to get a clear picture of the story – and also to be able to connect with it today. There are always some iconic moments – for example, in Tosca I want to see the candles that she places around Scarpia’s corpse. Always: I have to see it! So there are certain irreducible elements, and once I’ve found them, I try to decide what else is necessary. Sometimes it is really extremely minimalistic. In other pieces the message can be better understood if the audience has a little bit more information.’

Less, in other words, is more. Among his professional heroes, Loy cites Peter Brook – ‘the empty space, that is my Bible’ – but also Max Reinhardt who, with Strauss and Hofmannsthal, co-founded the Salzburg Festival (Loy lives in the city) and pioneered a way of making theatre, whether intimate or on the most spectacular of scales, that connects directly and immediately with an audience’s imagination. ‘Reinhardt loved, above all, the actor on stage. I love the acting singer on stage,’ says Loy. And at the heart of Elektra is a disarmingly intimate story. ‘This is a family drama, dominated by the women,’ says Pappano.

Loy agrees. ‘It’s only on the surface that Elektra is loud. It’s big, but it is about very fragile souls. It becomes interesting once you start to examine this lack of love they are all suffering from. First of all, you think Klytämnestra is a monster and then you discover that she wants to be loved, but she’s helpless – she can’t control herself any more. Elektra, too, shows such vulnerability in the Recognition Scene. At the same time, they’re brutally, destructively harsh to each other. But in my own life, I don’t know any family where you could say everything is fine and perfect. It’s actually the opposite.’ So, all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way? ‘Yes – exactly this.’

Somehow we’ve moved from apocalyptic musical violence and a 2,400-year-old revenge tragedy into the family circle and the human heart. For all its dramatic force, its musical extremes, its ancient roots and its fin-de-siècle psychology, Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Elektra wouldn’t have held the stage for so long if it really was the end of the line: if nothing lay beyond those blood-curdling sounds. ‘The shock value is not relevant for us any more,’ says Loy. If, together with his old friend Pappano, he can make good on his vision, the new Covent Garden Elektra should hit rather closer to home. It doesn’t get scarier than that.