Uve from the Met: Elektra
Richard Strauss 's gripping, one-act setting of the ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles, to a libretto by Hugo von
Hofmannsthal. Elektra, abused and rejected by her mother Clytemnestra, is in a state of shock after the murder of her father Agamemnon.
She finds her brother Orestes, whom she had given up for dead, and together they plot revenge on their mother and her lover Aegisthus. When it was first performed, in 1909, the music of the opera was as controversial as its bloodthirsty plot: Strauss was accused of formlessness and of writing noise for its own sake. Sung in German.
Chorus and Orchestra of the New
York Metropolitan Opera, conductor James Levine