Electra by Strauss, Fra (2023/2024), I regi av Nina Russi, Dirigent Enrico Calesso, Gabor Hontvári, Theaterfabrik Blaue Halle, Würzburg, Germany

Do you see my face? Do you see the light emanating from me? After the victorious war against Troy, Agamemnon had returned to Mycenae and was killed there by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisth. At that time, his daughter Elektra had taken her younger brother Orestes to safety with a nurse who was supposed to raise him to become his father's future avenger. Since then, Elektra has lived a life that only longs for the moment of revenge. When the rumor of Orestes' death spreads, she decides to commit murder herself. In vain she urges her sister Chrysothemis to help her, when suddenly a stranger appears: it is Orestes. Elektra sees her dreams come true. "O blessed, oh blessed, to be modern!" - The shock was deeply felt in the consciousness of a tradition-conscious bourgeoisie in the late years of Wilhelm II's reign, and even an innovator like Gustav Mahler brought the quoted exclamation about the January 25th Elektra, which premiered in Dresden in 1909, expressed more than superficial mockery of Strauss, who was four years his junior. Strauss had already caused an outcry in the music world with Salome (1905) after Oscar Wilde, so now Elektraafter Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Hofmannsthal's tragedy after Sophocles, in terms of its psychological character drawing, is almost a reinvention of the ancient material. Due to the omission of the chorus and the deletion of the opening prologue, the action is enormously compressed and dramatized; the focus is always on the protagonist. Strauss, on the other hand, used the most modern means to set the psychodrama to music. Never before or since has he ventured so far to the limit of atonality, has he carried out the leitmotif structuring of an opera following Wagner in such a differentiated and psychologically motivated manner.