Elektra (opera)
| Richard Strauss |
|---|
 |
|
Operas
|
- See Mourning Becomes Electra for the 1967 opera, based on the 1931 Eugene O'Neill play.
Elektra is a one-act opera by Richard Strauss, to a German-language libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which he adapted from his 1903 drama Elektra. The opera was the first of many collaborations between Strauss and Hofmannsthal. It was first performed at the Dresden State Opera on January 25, 1909.
Elektra is musically complex and difficult, and requires great stamina for the singers and orchestra. The role of Elektra is one of the most demanding in the dramatic soprano repertoire. Nevertheless, it is regularly performed. It is today's most frequently performed opera based on classical Greek mythology.[1] Despite being based on ancient Greek mythology, the opera is highly modernist and expressionist. Hofmannsthal and Strauss's adaptation of the story focuses tightly on Elektra and Klytaemnestra, Elektra's mother and murderer of Agamemnon, Elektra's father. Everything else from the ancient story is minimized as background to these two characters. Other aspects of the ancient story are completely excluded, tightening the focus on Elektra's furious lust for revenge. The result is a very modern, expressionistic retelling of the ancient Greek myth. Compared to Sophocles's Electra, the opera presents raw, brutal, violent, and bloodthirsty horror.[2]
Contents |
[edit] Performance history
Elektra received its UK premiere at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1910 with Edyth Walker in the title role and Sir Thomas Beecham conducting. The first United States performance of the opera in the original German was given by the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company at the Academy of Music, Philadelphia on October 29, 1931 with Anne Roselle in the title role, Charlotte Boerner as Chrysothemis, Margarete Matzenauer as Klytaemnestra, Nelson Eddy as Orest, and Fritz Reiner conducting. Today, the opera remains a part of the standard repertoire and is performed frequently.
[edit] Roles
| Premiere, January 25, 1909 (Conductor: Ernst von Schuch) |
||
|---|---|---|
| Elektra (Electra), Agamemnon's daughter | soprano | Annie Krull |
| Chrysothemis, her sister | soprano | Margarethe Siems |
| Klytaemnestra (Clytemnestra), their mother, Agamemnon's widow | contralto or mezzo-soprano | Ernestine Schumann-Heink |
| Her confidante | soprano | Gertrud Sachse |
| Her trainbearer | soprano | Elisabeth Boehm von Endert |
| A young servant | tenor | Fritz Soot |
| An old servant | bass | Franz Nebuschka |
| Orest (Orestes), son of Agamemnon | baritone | Karl Perron |
| Orest's tutor | bass | Julius Puttlitz |
| Aegisth (Aegistheus), Klytaemnestra's paramour | tenor | Johannes Sembach |
| An overseer | soprano | Riza Eibenschütz |
| First maid | contralto | Franziska Bender-Schäfer |
| Second maid | soprano | Magdalene Seebe |
| Third maid | mezzo-soprano | Irma Tervani |
| Fourth maid | soprano | Anna Zoder |
| Fifth maid | soprano | Minnie Nast |
| Men and women of the household | ||
[edit] Synopsis
The plot of Elektra is based upon the great Greek tragedy of the same name by the tragedian Sophocles. The unrelenting gloom and horror that permeate the original play produce, in the hands of Hofmannsthal and Strauss, a drama whose sole theme is revenge. Klytaemnestra (Clytemnestra), helped by her paramour Aegisth (Aegisthus), has secured the murder of her husband, Agamemnon, and now is afraid that her crime will be avenged by her children, Elektra (Electra), Chrysothemis, and their banished brother Orest (Orestes). Elektra, who is the personification of the passionate lust for vengeance, tries to persuade her timid sister to kill Klytaemnestra and Aegisth. Before the plan is carried out, Orest, who had been reported as dead, arrives, determined upon revenge for his father's death. He kills Klytaemnestra and Aegisth; Elektra, in an ecstatic dance of triumph, falls dead in front of her horror-stricken attendants.
[edit] Style and instrumentation
Musically, Elektra deploys dissonance, chromaticism and extremely fluid tonality in a way which recalls but moves beyond the same composer's Salome of 1905, and which represents Strauss's furthest advances in modernism, from which he later retreated. The bitonal or extended Elektra chord is a well known dissonance from the opera while harmonic parallelism is also prominent modernist technique.[3]
To support the overwhelming emotional content of the opera, Strauss uses a very large and in some ways unusual orchestra, with the following instrumentation: woodwind: piccolo (doubling fourth flute, although this is omitted from the instrumentation list at the beginning of the score), 3 flutes (flute 3 doubling piccolo 2), 3 oboes (oboe 3 doubling English horn), heckelphone, clarinet in E-flat, 4 clarinets in B-flat and A, 2 basset horns, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon; brass: 8 horns (horns 5-8 doubling 2 B-flat tenor and 2 F bass Wagner tubas), 6 trumpets, bass trumpet, 2 tenor trombones, bass trombone, contrabass trombone, tuba; percussion: 6-8 timpani (2 players), snare drum, bass drum (with switch), cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, tambourine, castanets, glockenspiel; keyboards: celesta (ad libitum); strings: 2 harps (doubled if possible at the end), 24 violins divided into three groups, 18 Violas divided into three groups (the first of which, unusually, doubles as the fourth violin section), 12 cellos divided into two groups, 8 double basses
[edit] Motives and chords
The characters in Elektra are famously characterized in the music through leitmotifs or chords including the Elektra chord. Klytaemnestra, in contrast to Agamemnon's clearly diatonic minor triad motif, is characterized by a bitonal six note collection most often represented as a pair of two minor chords a tritone apart, typically on B and F, rather than simultaneously.[4]
Agamemnon is depicted through a triadic motive: 
[edit] Recordings
See Elektra discography.
[edit] References
- Notes
- ^ Ewans, Michael (2007). "Chapter 5: Elektra". Opera from the Greek: studies in the poetics of appropriation. Ashgate Publishing. pp. 81–82. ISBN 978-0-7546-6099-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=oSSchkXuHUUC&pg=PA81. Retrieved 20 October 2011.
- ^ Bekker, Paul (1992). "Elektra: A Study by Paul Bekker". In Bryan Randolph Gilliam. Richard Strauss and his world. Princeton University Press. pp. 372–405. ISBN 978-0-691-02762-3. http://books.google.com/books?id=YYLKhf7-SE4C&pg=PA372. Retrieved 20 October 2011.
- ^ Reisberg, Horace (1975). "The Vertical Dimension in Twentieth-Century Music", Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music, p.333. Wittlich, Gary (ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-049346-5.
- ^ Lawrence Kramer, "Fin-de-siècle Fantasies: Elektra, Degeneration and Sexual Science", Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2,July 1993, pp. 141-165.
- Sources
