Birgit Nilsson screams for 110 minutes and it's *gorgeous*.
It's hard to imagine confirmed Straussians not wanting this starry Metropolitan Opera performance of Elektra. Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, transformed Sophocles' take on Homer's tale into a harrowing opera noir. Elektra lives for one reason, to kill her mother, Klytämnestra, and her stepfather, Aegisth, the murderers of her father, Agamemnon. In contrast to Elektra's vengeful obsession, her sister Chrysothemis desires to get on with life. When their long-missing brother, Orestes, returns to do the deed, Elektra celebrates with a dance of death and, her sole purpose in life fulfilled, dies. Strauss joined the hermetic plot to music of the utmost opulence, violent and yearning by turns, evoking the cardinal principles of Greek tragedy - pity and terror.
Acting
Nilsson's Elektra: feral, broken, unstoppable.
Direction
Herbert Graf's staging: claustrophobic palace of rot.
Score
Strauss's orchestra = another character screaming.
Director
David Stivender
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Birgit Nilsson performed Elektra over 200 times; she called it 'a vocal marathon with no water stations.'
Strauss and Hofmannsthal wrote this in 1909 Vienna, where Freud's theories on hysteria and family trauma were electrifying society—Elektra practically IS a case study.
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