One singer. One hundred minutes. Zero mercy. The most unhinged family reunion in opera history.
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.
Acting
Éva Marton's Elektra: 109 minutes of sustained psychological demolition.
Production
That severed statue head? Cheaper than therapy, more effective than exposition.
Direction
Kupfer's staging makes Greek tragedy feel like a haunted warehouse party.
Director
Brian Large
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Hans Schavernoch's set was recycled from a 1972 production—decay on decay.
Éva Marton performed this role over 200 times; by 1989, her Elektra had calcified into something almost inhuman.
AT
US
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