Metropolitan Opera Archives

Like a bleak, forbidding cliff, Strauss's "Elektra" looms through the landscape of modern opera, a unique and incredibly bold experiment that had far-reaching effects, even if it marked the end rather than the beginning of a new path. The Metropolitan had not given the work since the season of '51-'52, when it was heard under Fritz Reiner, with Astrid Varnay in the title role. Those performances were historic, very possibly the best that we will hear in our time. And while this present revival cannot measure up to them, it is excellent on its own rights.

With the solitary exception of Miss Votipka, every member of the cast was new to his or her role at the Metropolitan, and both conductor and stage director were also "firsts". The Urban scenery of 1932 was used, and except for one mishap, when Miss Borkh pushed a stone wall that gave way about six inches, it held together very well. True, one could hear the planks that simulated the stone terrace clattering under her tread, but at least they held her up.

Two of the artists were making their debuts with the company-Miss Yeend and Miss MacKenzie. Chrysothemis is not exactly the role that any soprano would pick for her debut, if she could help it, but Miss Yeend, whose admirable work is well known to New Yorkers, came through with flying colors. Not only did she make herself heard through Strauss's howling, surging orchestra, but she presented a gentle and pathetic figure-an admirable foil to Miss Borkh's savage Elektra. (The statement that Hofmannsthal invented this character, by the by, is not true. She is there in Sophocles, fulfilling precisely the same dramatic function.) In other operas Miss Yeend will have the opportunity to display the luster and color of her voice to better advantage. Miss MacKenzie was excellent, as were the other Serving Women (notice the extraordinarily high quality of the casting of these roles!).

Miss Borkh had enjoyed a tremendous success in some concert performances with the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos. In the opera house, she displayed the same vehement sustaining power and ability to encompass the lyric as well as the dramatic aspects of the role. Her portrait of Elektra's fate-ridden, inhuman thirst for vengeance was convincing, but I found her handling of the final dance unsatisfactory. She portrays Elektra as staggering and spent before the final collapse, and thereby the dance loses formal strength and the death its shattering climax. But, all in all, this was a very impressive performance and the audience recognized it as such.

Miss Madeira loves to act, and in the role of the horrifyingly decadent and cruel Klytaemnestra she could indulge her taste for melodrama to the full. Her use of dark, hollow low tones was a bit forced and monotonous, but in many places it was undeniably effective, and her outbursts of hysterical terror really made one's flesh crawl. Hers is the most psychologically graphic music of the opera, and although she missed some of its subtler points, she made the woman live for us.

Walter Cassel replaced Hermann Uhde, who was indisposed, as Orest, and gave a performance that was visually and vocally admirable. Mr. Cassel is improving apace in dignity and polish of stage bearing, clarity of diction, and general artistic authority. He was well costumed, as was all of the cast (no costume credits were given, by the way). And he brought strength and tragic awareness to the role. Mr. Da Costa was less happy as Aegisth, but then, Hofmannsthal was not very kind to this character, anyway. The others were all alert.

Mr. Rosenstock conducted with control and a sense of the fascinating web of orchestral color, but, truth to tell, he lacked the smashing authority and superhuman drive necessary to a perfect Elektra. (How pallid was his, compared to Reiner's!) And Mr. Manuel achieved some beautiful groupings and stage effects, but he should cut out those mass entrances with torches by the ballet girls.

Photographs of Inge Borkh as Elektra and Frances Yeend as Chrysothemis by Louis Mélançon/Metropolitan Opera.

Search by season: 1960-61

Search by title: Elektra,

Met careers