Elektra - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Elektra

OCCUPATION
Tanja Ariane Baumgartner Klytämnestra
Aušrine Stundyte Elektra
Asmik Grigorian Chrysothemis
Michael Laurenz Aegisth
Derek Welton Orest
Tilmann Rönnebeck The keeper of the Orest
Matthäus Schmidlechner A young servant
Sonja Šarić The Overseer
Bonita Hyman First maid
Evgenia Asanova * Second maid
Deniz Uzun Third Maid
Sinéad Campbell-Wallace Fourth Maid
Natalia Tanasii Fifth maid

Elektra answers this to the message given to her by her sister Chrysothemis: her long-awaited and unexpected brother Orestes is acclaimed for murdering first her mother Clytemnestra and then her lover Aegisth, the new ruler of the city. Soon after, Elektra speaks her last words before she collapses dead: "I carry the burden of happiness, and I dance before you. Whoever is happy like us, has only one thing: to be silent and to dance. "The death of her father Agamemnon has finally been avenged, the cycle of violence closes, and the cycle of life could finally begin again. The lonely madness of Electra, who made nothing save the shadow of her father, had become a living tomb for him. She dies a few minutes after her mother, who had been her enemy, without the life of the electro but no longer has meaning: The world of yore, whether beloved or hated, had been the only reason for her existence, and now she no longer exists. Only Orestes and Chrysothemis try to give life to this rubble field. With the sacrifice of her sister Iphigenia, which was to enable the Greek army to capture Troy some 20 years earlier, the catastrophe had set in - the murder of her child had never been forgiven by Clytemnestra Agamemnon. This catastrophe now seems to come to an end. At least for the time being. For from now on, Orestes will have to live with the memory of the ineffectual homicide. Here, in the darkness of Mycenae's night, Elektra dies in the moment her only compulsively longed-for wish becomes reality, in a state of mental and physical exhaustion - in the wild dance of the ax that had once killed her father.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal's play premiered in 1903 in Berlin under the direction of Max Reinhardt. It shakes with its intensity and brutality, impressed by the unique in their wealth and in their quality language. There is hardly anything reminiscent of the work of Sophocles on which it is based. The young Austrian author had read Nietzsche's Birth of the Tragedy, the Studies on Hysteria by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, and was thus decisively influenced. The pale Greekism of an Winckelmann or Goethe gave way to the dark, brutal, almost barbaric side of this civilization at the turn of the century. The errors of the human soul now seemed darker. Illuminated by the newly emerging psychoanalysis of illnesses inspired the imagination of the artists, whose characters were more complex.
It was the interpretation of Gertrud Eysoldt in the title role of this Elektra, which prompted Richard Strauss in November 1903 to tackle a drama-based one-act opera. Strauss shortened the piece in part to the libretto on the relationships between the two sisters Elektra and Chrysothemis - the one on the side of death, the other on that of life - between Elektra and her mother Klytämnestra, and finally between Elektra and her brother Orest to concentrate on Orestes, whose appearance is almost unbelievable for her: because her life finally makes sense of it and the revenge she has always pictured can finally be accomplished.
After three years of work on the composition Strauss' opera was premiered on January 25, 1909 in Dresden. It was a huge event. Even with the first chords, the composer energizes his audience. On Elektras lawsuit, her first big monologue "Alone! Alas, all alone! ", Follows that monument of modern music that remains irrevocably in your ear even at the first hearing: Agamemnon's incantation, this desperate plea, that her father's shadow became hers at the hour when it was once written by Clytemnestra was murdered, show may.

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