Metropolitan Opera Archives

There were three performances of Elektra this season.
In English
AMELIA GOES TO THE BALL {5}
Menotti-Menotti
Translation by G. Mead
The production of AMELIA GOES TO THE BALL was borrowed from the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia.
There were three performances of Amelia Goes to the Ball this season.

Review 1:

Review of Lawrence Gilman in the Herald Tribune

"Elektra" Returns to the Metropolitan with Rose Pauly and Thorborg

Richard Strauss's prodigious "Elektra," which was heard at the Metropolitan last night for the first time this season, retains its stature as a masterpiece - as one of the outstanding lyric-dramas composed since Wagner's death.

Probably the work will continue to seem anomalous to the tender-minded. And it is true that Hofmannsthal and Strauss have given us here something startlingly different from the conventionally imagined replicas of antique Greek tragedy. Elektra, the very type and image of incarnate hate - a ragged, glaring, disheveled ? shrieking her exhortations, snarling in the shadows, dwelling among the dogs in the courtyard like a hunted and degraded demon; Klytemestra, a loathsome apparition with her ghastly pallor and her somnambulistic tread, the symbol of an unimaginable depravity - the dark door, as Elektra cries out of which she, her daughter crawled into the world's light; these conceptions seem remote indeed from what we choose to think of as their classic prototypes.

Yet the heart and essence of the ancient tale are embodied in the music-drama of Hofmannsthal and Strauss. The dramatist and the musician have not forgotten that the flame which purifies the tragedy is Elektra's unquenchable and agonizing grief and her consuming passion for retribution; that this agony and grief have made her the living instrument of a holy cause; and that her degradation and her rags are worn as the spotless raiment of princess who is still the daughter of a king.

We have heard in New York a number of different Elektras since the work was first performed here at Mr. Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera House almost thirty years ago; but none of them save the latest, the Metropolitan's Rose Pauly, has succeeded in lifting the character of the heroine in the imaginative and spiritual level upon which its authors intended it to move. Mme. Pauly does this, and does it with transfiguring intensity and truth, so that the grandeur and nobility of Elektra's spirit fill the drama and its music with the exaltation of its sublimating tenderness and grief.

Mme. Pauly was never more compelling in her exertion of this transmuting power than she was last night; and her acting and singing at the great moment of the Recognition Scene was a prime example of the ability of a supreme interpreter to give a new significance and beauty in thrice-familiar works of art. Various Elektras had sung the rising two-note phrase (B flat-E flat) in which Elektra voices her incredulous repetitions of Orestes' name' but none other had ever charged it with so revealing a poignancy of achievement. Mme. Pauly heightened the beauty and significance of a great role and of the masterpiece whose meaning it conveys.

Mme. Pauly's principal companions in the cast had taken part in last season's performances of "Elektra." Chief among them was Kerstin Thorborg's embodiment of the pathological and monstrous Klytemnestra, bloated and heavy-lidded, corrupt and horrible, in her scarlet dress bedecked with precious stones and amulets, complaining of her broken sleep and her tormented dreams, shaking with terror and superstitious dread. The Orestes of Mr. Schorr was an eloquent contribution to the effect of the overmastering scene with Elektra, perhaps the noblest and most moving in Strauss's works.

Mr. Bodanzky's direction of the exacting score could scarcely be over-praised, and the orchestra played better than at any recent performances that I have heard. In those pages wherein the music compasses a lofty pathos and a releasing grief, the fervor and devotion of the conductor and his men were irresistible.

As the second part of the evening's double offering, the program billed the delectable "opera buffa" by Gian-Carlo Menotti, "Amelia Goes to the Ball," which was mounted last season at the Metropolitan. As before, the illecebrous Miss Muriel Dickson was cast as Amelia, with John Brownlee as her husband, Mario Chamlee as her lover, and Norman Cordon as the obliging Chief of Police. Helen Oelheim and Lucielle Browning were, respectively, the Cook and the Maid, and Mr. Panizza conducted.

Search by season: 1938-39

Search by title: Elektra, Amelia Goes to the Ball,

Met careers