Elektra
In The Greek Myths Robert Graves paints this legend as one of a number of tales of sacred kingship: in a matriarchal system devoted to the worship of a triple goddess the king typically served for seven years and then was ritually murdered, and Graves found all the stigmata of that pattern in the tale of the House of Atreus. Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, found a different subtext in this, the first opera in their great collaboration. Freudian psychology named its Electra complex after the protagonist’s excessive devotion to daddy; typically dirty-minded, it assigned libidinal impulses to a daughter’s monomaniacal love for her father. The operatic Elektra (von Hofmannsthal preferred the Greek spelling) has more neuroses than a week’s worth of Oprah Winfrey and a very unhealthy worldview indeed.
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This show was that modern hybrid, a “semistaged” production, which can mean anything from characters in costume with props but no sets to characters in coordinated concert dress moving a little (the case here). Since the stage was full of instrumentalists, the singers were, rather imaginatively, put on a sort of catwalk above them. To make the faux opera house complete, a screen was hung for surtitles. It was helpful not to have the performers chained to their scores and music stands, but a semi-staged opera (no director was credited, but this was a great deal more than random milling about) has its own problems–as when Orestes exited stage left and Clytemnestra’s death cries then emanated from stage right.
