Elektra
Recorded at the Vienna State Opera house in 1989, this staging of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra is one of the glories of live opera on film, deserving of eternal availability. The DVD picture has great clarity, despite the darkness of Hans Schavernoch’s set design. Other than the cliché of a huge statue head, toppled on its side, the set manages to be suitably representative of a decaying palace as well as an imposing, theatrical space, dominated by the mammoth body of the statue from which the head apparently dropped, draped with the ropes that seem to have enabled the decapitation. Sooner or later most of the characters cling to and twist around those ropes, an apt stage metaphor for the remorseless repercussions from the murder of Agammenon by his unfaithful wife Klytämnestra and her paramour, Aegisthus. Reinhard Heinrich’s costumes capture a distant era while sustaining a creepily modern look — part Goth, part homeless, part Spa-wear.
Top Cast
Claudio Abbado
Self - Conductor
Éva Marton
Elektra
Brigitte Fassbaender
Klytemnästra
Cheryl Studer
Chrysothemis
James King
Aegisth
Franz Grundheber
Orest
Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper
Self - Orchestra
Richard Strauss
Self - Composer
Wiener Staatsopernchor
Self - Chorus
