Wo bleibt Elektra?

Dover Score of Richard Strauss's Elektra

(Black background, white type, different beige and black graphical motifs running across the score above and below the text)

I was looking for my Elektra score yesterday, and panicked when it wasn't on the shelf where it should be, you know, with the score of Die Frau ohne Schatten. Also nowhere to be seen: the score of Salome, which I'd gotten used at the same time I bought the used Elektra score.

I did eventually figure out that they were on that shelf but tucked in at the very end invisible for various reasons (whew). I was reminded of a....dream? nightmare? I had a few years ago.

Somehow, I'd been pulled in at the last moment to conduct Elektra, and I was trying to figure out how to do this. The score I had was bizarre: two square volumes, maybe 10" x 10", in other words, nowhere near big enough to accommodate the opera's instrumentation. It calls for 111 instruments, the largest orchestra of any work in the standard operatic repertory. (Schoenberg's oratorio Gurrelieder calls for around 150!)

I was in a total panic – really – because I definitely don't know Elektra well enough to conduct it without, say, a year of study. On top of that, a friend was trying to talk to me about something completely different, and I was having to fend her off.

I think I woke up at that point.

 

Anxiety Dreams

Historically, I don't have a lot of nightmares or anxiety dreams, and the ones I have tend to be of the crumbling-teeth variety. The other day, though....

I woke up from a dream in which I had somehow been appointed to conduct the world premiere of Girls of the Golden West. And it was two weeks until the date, and nobody had provided me with the score.

I have basic conducting skills, it's true, but they are very basic and  they have deteriorated since grad school, when I was an assistant conductor of one of the choruses at Stony Brook and led sectional rehearsals of the Missa Solemnis. I led a rehearsal of a very tiny chorus doing comparatively uncomplicated music earlier this year, with no personal rehearsal of the pieces we worked on, and I could wing it fairly well. But there is no way I could conduct a John Adams opera without lengthy study. NO WAY, you hear me?

Realistically speaking, if Grant Gershon is not, for some reason, able to conduct, the most likely substitute is JCA himself. There can't be many people who know the score well enough to step in and conduct GGW.