Elektra

Agamemnon the King is dead—slaughtered like a beast by his own wife, Klytaemnestra. His daughter Elektra has been driven to the fringes of the court; half-crazed with hatred and grief, she lives only for the day when her exiled brother, Orestes, will return to wreak bloody vengeance on the murderous queen and her usurping second husband. Richard Strauss’ one-act opera Elektra takes its plot from ancient Greek tragedy, but its heart and mind belong uncompromisingly to the 20th century. For a libretto, Strauss used a new German adaptation by Hugo von Hofmannsthal—the Austrian poet and playwright with whom he would go on to form one of the 20th century’s great operatic partnerships. Hofmannsthal took the ancient characters of Sophocles’ drama and filled them with the tormented self-knowledge of the age of Freud. Strauss responded with a score that—from its first volcanic blast to its final, shattering denouement—pulls you in and shakes you to the core. Wagner-sized voices are pushed to their physical limit; a colossal orchestra veers from ear-splitting dissonance to clenched, eerie stillness as Strauss peels back the masks of his traumatised characters, or surrenders to ecstatic, cathartic violence. Audiences in 1909 were first shocked, and then thrilled. Strauss never wrote anything more extreme than Elektra, and over a century later, few operas are more visceral, more gripping or more raw.