Later, in Elektra’s celebrated dance of vengeance, Nina Stemme was quickly reduced to a few random spasms, ending frozen in catatonia on a stone bench. Despite the character’s extravagantly eerie entrance music, Waltraud Meier seemed only mildly peeved, her distress apparent only in a tiny hand-wringing gesture. This manner of playing against the text works brilliantly, most notably in the scene in which the guilt-wracked Klytamnestra seeks advice from her surly daughter. For them, bloody revenge has become mere drudgery, no more glamorous than the listless sweeping and mopping the palace’s serving women do in the work’s opening scene. Strauss and Hofmannsthal upped the ante by depicting these oversized emotions as something akin to madness.Ĭhéreau’s characters seem drained of affect. Whether classic or post-romantic, the story tells of Elektra’s obsessive desire to see her long-lost brother Orest execute their mother Klytamnestra for the murder of their father Agamemnon. Similarly, Strauss wrote his music in the fashionable manner of the 1900s, post-romanticism, a style that might be called “Wagner, only rather more so,” featuring enormous orchestrations and vocal lines so daunting that the Met, like virtually every other opera house in the world, takes a number of significant cuts in the music for the title character. Whereas Sophocles treated such themes important to the Greeks as revenge, justice and family loyalty, Hofmannsthal decked out his play in the most stylish intellectual idea of the early 20th century, the psychology of Sigmund Freud. The freedom lies not so much in the plot, which Hofmannsthal copied closely, but rather in mood and underlying theme.
Elektra met opera series#
For GREAT PERFORMANCES, Bill O’Donnell is series producer David Horn is executive producer.The 1909 opera is adapted from librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s play of the same name, which was in turn a free adaptation of Sophocles’ classic tragedy. Mia Bongiovanni and Elena Park are supervising producers, and Louisa Briccetti and Victoria Warivonchik are producers. For the Met, Gary Halvorson directs the telecast. GREAT PERFORMANCES AT THE MET is a presentation of THIRTEEN Productions LLC for WNET. GREAT PERFORMANCES is on Facebook, and you can follow on Twitter. Yet in moments of frustration and despair, her singing has bright, piercing power… The bass-baritone Eric Owens is a deeply sympathetic Orest… his rich, muscular voice is suffused with suffering." CONNECT: Pieczonka's rich, clear voice conveys Chrysothemis's affecting vulnerability. The New York Times observed, "The director Patrice Chéreau's production of Strauss's Elektra … has already been deemed a landmark of contemporary opera staging… Nothing prepared me for the seething intensity, psychological insight and sheer theatrical inventiveness of this production… Ms. She also summoned compelling fervour that engaged everyone around her…." She paced, pranced and stumbled with fierce freedom, exuding passion even in repose. Of the current production, The Financial Times raved "… the great Nina Stemme … sang with unflagging power, with volcanic compulsion in passages of desperation, with shimmering gentility in passages of reflection. Courtesy of Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera Susan Neves as the Confidante, Waltraud Meier as Klytämnestra and Nina Stemme as Elektra in Richard Strauss's opera.