Metropolitan Opera – Strauss’s Elektra. March 9, 2018.

Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center.  Balcony (Seat B111, $110.50).

Story.  Klytamnestra plotted with Aegisth to murder her husband Agamemnon, and their daughter Elektra constantly mourns her father’s death and vows to avenge him.  Her sister Chrysothemis doesn’t want to kill, despite all of her pleading.  News reaches them that their brother Orest is dead.  When Elektra is beginning to lose hope, a stranger shows up and is in fact Orest in disguise.  He kills Klytamnestra, and also Aegisth when the latter shows up.  Elektra celebrates by dancing in silence until she dies.

Conductor – Yannick Nezet-Seguin.  Elektra – Christine Goerke, Klytamnestra – Michaela Schuster, Chrysothemis – Elza van den Heever, Orest – Dwayne Croft, Aegisth – Jay Hunter Morris.

Yesterday’s opera is about the tragic life of Cio-cio-san.  Today’s about the equally tragic life of Elektra.  Madama Butterfly rises and falls on the shoulder of its main character, so does Elektra.  There the similarities end.

Elektra is based on the Sophocles tragedy Electra, although it glosses over why Agamemnon is killed in the first place – he murdered his child.  Thus in the opera there is every reason to avenge the killing of Agamemnon.

While Butterfly is expected to show a range of emotions, for Elektra is the desire to exact revenge.  And in this case Goerke is expected to sing at the top of her lungs most of the time.  She doesn’t leave the stage from her first entrance early in the opera.  Comparison with Hamlet is quite appropriate, although Elektra isn’t the person to do the killings.

A full orchestra is used for the opera, and Goerke manages to get herself heard, most of the time.  Similarly, van den Heever and Shuster put in stellar performances.  Croft as Orest sounds weak when the orchestra is playing.

The Playbill has a very useful description of the techniques used by Strauss to convey the different characters: a crashing motif represents Agamemnon; the short, broken phrases of Aegisth (who did very little singing); the approachable, attractive music of Chrysothemis; the corrupt lines that hover between identifiable keys of Klytamnestra; and the pathological obsession of Elektra as her music returns inevitably to the Agamemon motif.  Too bad I didn’t get any of that, perhaps some book study is in order.

One thing I did get, there was some hint of Der Rosenkavalier towards the end.

Nezet-Seguin taking a bow as the cast looks on.

Madama Butterfly premiered in 1904, and Elektra in 1909.  It is amazing how different the operas sound.  I can’t tell, but wonder if the same level of difference exists in music written today.

I enjoyed reading the New York Times review, which heaps praise on Goerke and Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, for making this possible.  The reviewer also has a lot of good things to say about Nezet-Seguin.

Goerke will be singing the role of Brunnhilde in the Met’s ring cycles in 2019.  We are seriously considering attending one of them.

Today’s traffic was much heavier than yesterday’s.  The opera started at 8 pm, which allowed us time to eat at East Szechuan.  The upstairs area is now very small, part of that being converted into a shop (with a separate entrance.)  Let’s hope it doesn’t go the way of China Fun and Ollie’s.