Die ägyptische Helena: Bard SummerScape 2026
- Seth Lachterman
- 9 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Die ägyptische Helena: Bard SummerScape 2026
Music, Richard Strauss
Libretto, Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Performance, July 31, 2026, 4:00 PM
Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater, Bard College
Conductor, Leon Botstein
American Symphony Orchestra
Chorus Director, James Bagwell
Bard Festival Chorale
Stage Direction, Christian Räth
Scenic Design, Christian Räth and Daniel Unger
Costume Design, Mattie Ullrich
Lighting Design, Tyler Micoleau
Projection Design, Elaine J. McCarthy
Choreography, Catherine Galasso
Hair and Makeup Design, Brittany Rappise
Helena, Hailey Clark
Menelaus, John Matthew Myers
Hermione, Cecilia Popp
Aithra, Jana McIntyre
Altair, Blake Denson
Da-Ud, Shawn Roth
First Servant of Aithra, Catherine Creed
Second Servant of Aithra; Omniscient Seashell, Deborah Nansteel
Four Elves, Holly Thomas, Mary Burke Barber, Hai Ting Chinn, Allison Gish
Dancers, George Chavez III, Jonathan Colafrancesco, Carl Ponce Cubero, Tracy Dunbar, Zultari (Zui) Gomez, Elijah Richardson, and Nicholas Ruscica
Die ägyptische Helena was the fifth of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s six operatic collaborations. Although both librettist and composer were pleased with the result, the 1928 Dresden and Vienna premieres were coolly received. Their preceding opera, Die Frau ohne Schatten, requiring a gargantuan orchestra (including a glass harmonica), had been produced amid the hardships of 1919. Die ägyptische Helena requires somewhat smaller forces and is considerably shorter. Strauss still luxuriates in an orchestral ocean of sound and color, but more modernist idioms appear throughout, along with leaner, uncluttered textures. He made significant revisions by 1933.
The growing restiveness of 1928 yielded plays, films, and operas that served as thinly veiled allegories, reflecting differing perspectives on the post-World War I mood. Die ägyptische Helena adapts Euripides’s version of the Helen story and strives to turn the convoluted conceit of “two Helens” into a tale of love and forgiveness. Having now seen the opera twice, including the Met production in 2007, I still do not believe its dramatic substance can be made coherent, notwithstanding the pleasure of its few wonderful arias and duets.
Most fortunately, there was no dearth of performing talent in this production. As in Ariadne auf Naxos, Strauss pairs a light coloratura soprano with a more powerful dramatic soprano: two superb voices at Bard. Aithra was performed by the enchanting soprano Jana McIntyre, a sultry, Zerbinetta-voiced sorceress. Throughout, she conveyed a mysterious longing for Helen, at one point even swapping blond and brunette wigs. Her vocal ascents were consistently pure, and her acting was always a pleasure. Hailey Clark, our Helen (or Helens), was as good as it gets. Her voice was commanding, resilient, unflagging, and brilliant. Her “Zweite Brautnacht! Zaubernacht!” at the start of Act II was fearlessly passionate and resounding. Ms. Clark’s Helen made a good foil for Aithra, whose longing for her is unmistakable. She ingeniously conveyed Helen’s many states of confusion with a great deal of welcome mugging. When will we see these two as Zerbinetta and Ariadne? John Matthew Myers brought a clarion tenor to Menelaus and was a pleasure throughout. When Menelaus finally drinks the potion of Remembrance, he recognizes his wife and sings the stately and grand “Ewig erwählt von diesem Blick.” Baritone Blake Denson was reverberant as the vainglorious prince Altair, and tenor Shawn Roth drew sympathy as his ill-fated son, Da-Ud. Kudos galore to Maestro Botstein, who knows this score well, and James Bagwell who directed the chorus. The troop of dancers and doppelgängers had quite a workout.
Some of the best ensemble writing comes at the conclusion. Altair is at his most threatening; Aithra finally vanquishes him; and Ms. McIntyre thrillingly soars to a high B-flat. When Hermione is reunited with her mother and father, Ms. Clark and Mr. Myers sing the final duet, “Gewogene Lüfte, Führt uns zurück,” in unison. Here, despite the convolutions and confusions, the reward of the evening is realized.
The opera’s greatest obstacle is its willfully confusing plot. It hinges on the claim that the woman who went to Troy with Paris and bore his children was a mere double, while the real Helen had been hidden away for nine years. But can Menelaus himself be convinced of this? The uncertainty runs throughout the libretto. To compound the confusion, Hofmannsthal employs the dual-potion plot trope: one potion induces forgetting, the other restores memory -- later termed “knowledge.” Furthermore, Helen herself is told that the double is merely a ruse.
Another distraction is the enormous number of additional figures onstage. At the sorceress Aithra’s palace in Act I, we have an Omniscient Seashell, two maidservants, young girls, obedient pest-elves, and elf warriors staging mock battles. In Altair’s domain we see desert warriors in chain mail, runners, spear-bearers, banner-bearers, male slaves, treasure-bearers, veiled girls, boy warriors, weapon attendants, hunting attendants, dressers, other slaves, eunuch servants with “feminine mouths,” masculine torsos and hidden swords, cupbearers, and Poseidon’s armored warriors.
Phew! Christian Räth spices things up with dancing doppelgängers who pantomime the action. Truthfully, there is a great deal of prescribed stage business, and plenty of hamming assigned to the performers to help the audience unknot the current state of affairs: Who and what does Menelaus believe? How does Helen try to win him back (for that, you see, is the happy-ending goal)? What do Altair and Da-Ud represent beyond, possibly, a miniature replay of the Trojan drama? How do Helen and Menelaus resolve this opera-long conundrum?
The answer is the metaphorical union of the real Helen (erstwhile wife, true lover, mother of Hermione, but also adulteress and partner of Paris) with the figurative Helen (spectral, alluring, an eternal trigger for jealousy and betrayal, the stolen “prize,” and the cycle of vengeance and war). Act I thus drives in the wedge of separation; Act II, admittedly laboriously, tries to recombine the oil and water of Helen’s two selves.
An important subtheme, however, is Räth’s emphasis on Aithra’s implied sexual longing for Helen. Aithra desires to be Helen. As a result, the reunion of Menelaus and Helen through the potion of remembrance can be likened to Eve and Adam’s partaking of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and thereby sealing humanity’s inheritance of mortality. The potion of knowledge initially threatens Aithra’s plans for a different union. At one point, when Menelaus is “necking” with the phantasm Helen, the torso appears to be that of Aithra.
Like Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena carries a humanist theme: working through past crimes and misdemeanors and achieving reunion through remembrance of what one’s love had meant. If Helen and Menelaus can reconcile after the horror of the Trojan War, perhaps the unrest then roiling Europe might likewise be assuaged. The last thing we see onstage is the German word Ehe—marriage—as old-fashioned as the celebration of love, marriage, and fertility in Die Frau ohne Schatten. We are left with a happy couple and the possibility of a lingering romance between Aithra and Helen. Yet, really, how seriously could Hofmannsthal have expected audiences to take a character called the Omniscient shell? Maybe the joke is on us?
I watched Fritz Lang’s Metropolis after seeing the Bard production this week and felt that both works wrestle with the anxieties of modernity while attempting to mollify their roiling times. Lang’s depiction of a society fractured by a lack of compassion may not be so distant from what Strauss and Hofmannsthal had in mind beneath this extravagantly lavish opera.