When King Agamemnon came home from the Trojan War, he was insidiously murdered by his wife Clytæmnestra and her lover Æegisthus. Elektra, who succeeded is arranging the escape of Orestes, has lived since her father’s murder with her sister Chrysothemis
in pitiful circumstances on her mother’s estate and is possessed with the manic desire to see Agamemnon avenged.…

When Richard Strauss (1864–1949) saw Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s tragedy “Elektra” in the Kleines Theater in Berlin in 1904, as he himself testifies, he immediately recognized “the brilliant opera text, and, as before with ‘Salome’, the tremendous build-up towards the end, in the case of ‘Elektra’, after the recognition scene, to which only music can do justice, the release of her dance, as in ‘Salome’ after the dance at the core of the work the gruesome final apotheosis”. In Strauss’s output no other work can be grouped with these two sister one-acters. “In them I advanced to the outer limits of harmony, psychic polyphony and tolerance for today’s ear”.

This expressive work, first performed in 1909 in Dresden, will now be seen in the staging of Christof Nel at Deutsche Oper am Rhein in co-operation with the Grand Théâtre de Genève. In the Frankfurter Rundschau Joachim Lange wrote of the première in Geneva, “A convincingly archaic ‘Elektra’. At the end the many-windowed palace tower built by Roland Aeschlimann on the revolving stage of Geneva is a pile of rubble, and of course the same can be said of the most problematical of all problem families that ever lived there. After a century of life in the repertoire there is still precious little to stand beside the ‘Elektra’ of Strauss and Hofmannsthal that gets even anywhere near approaching its massive sum-total of cataclysm.”
And in the NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) Peter Hagmann summarized, “On stage there stand no monsters, but people. Thus Elektra is no Fury, but a woman who has had the most terrible experience und is falling to pieces under the weight of it. Erratic movements and flickering glances testify to the traumatisation of this human being. But when Elektra recognizes her brother Orestes, love and warmth sweep all flood-gates away. The body language developed by the stage-director is of incomparable intensity.“



 
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Richard Strauss
Elektra


Tragedy in one act
Text by Hugo von Hofmannsthal after Sophocles

 
In German with German surtitles
 

Musikalische Leitung Axel Kober
Inszenierung Christof Nel
Bühne Roland Aeschlimann
Kostüme Bettina Walter
Licht Susanne Reinhardt
Chorleitung Christoph Kurig
Szenische Analyse Martina Jochem
 
Klytämnestra Renée Morloc
Elektra Linda Watson
Chrysothemis Morenike Fadayomi
Aegisth Wolfgang Schmidt
Orest Hans-Peter König
Der Pfleger des Orest David Jerusalem
Die Vertraute Maria Kataeva
Die Schleppträgerin Luiza Fatyol
Ein junger Diener Manfred Fink
Ein alter Diener Lukasz Konieczny
Die Aufseherin Jessica Stavros
1. Magd Sarah Ferede
2. Magd Iryna Vakula
3. Magd Katarzyna Kuncio
4. Magd Elisabeth Selle
5. Magd Anett Fritsch
Agamemnon Thorsten-Kai Botenbender
Chor Chor der Deutschen Oper am Rhein
Orchester Düsseldorfer Symphoniker