Word: agamemnon
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Composer Strauss and his librettist laid their scene in a Hellenic back yard, envisioned livestock rooting about the grave of ax-murdered Agamemnon while his murderers' dying screeches float from backstage over the most malignant of operatic orchestrations. Their frenzied, hagridden Elektra, daughter of the slain Agamemnon and instigator of the ghastly revenge that overtakes his killers, demanded a singer of enormous endurance. Mariette Mazarin, who introduced the part to the U. S. in 1910, fainted while taking her final curtain calls. The late Ernestine Schumann-Heink, powerful Katrinka of opera singers, left the original cast at Dresden because...
...Turney tells the story, the priest Calchas (Harry Irvine) is clamoring for a ''holy war" to rescue divine Helen from Troy, but the gods will not let Troyward winds blow until the unclean house of Atreus is purged by sacrifice. Iphigenia, daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, is lured to Aulis in the belief that she is to wed Achilles, and Calchas there prepares to sacrifice her. Mad with grief when Agamemnon refuses to interfere, Clytemnestra blasphemes the gods, calls Helen a whore, vows vengeance upon her husband. When Agamemnon returns from Troy after 1,007 days...
...Philadelphia production left little to be desired. The one setting by Norman Bel Geddes was impressively stark and simple. The characters were expertly portrayed by such singers as Rosa Tentoni (Iphigénie), Cyrena van Gordon (Clytemnestra), Joseph Bentonelli (Achilles), Georges Baklanoff (Agamemnon). For the dances Charles Weidman and Doris Humphrey supplied excellent choreography, won great applause. Again Philadelphia Orchestramen proved their superiority to routine opera players...
...sudden lift of the curtain, the harsh blare of the brasses establish perfectly the mood for Elektra's maniacal lust to avenge the death of her father Agamemnon, murdered in his bath. Soprano Gertrude Kappel, ragged and disheveled, long black hair flying, scuttled, slunk and pranced around the stage, effectively shrilling her hatred for her mother Queen Klytemnestra, passionately pleading for the help of her lovely weak sister Chrysothemis (Soprano Goeta Ljungberg), eerily warning the conscience-stricken queen of the day when her son Orestes shall return, come upon her in her bed, hack her with an axe until...
...than once of another war, when Arabs, counseled by a stranger as wily, energetic and heroic as Odysseus, fought against the Turks for an idea as beautiful to him as Helen; may well have remembered some of his banished names when he wrote Odysseus' words to the shade of Agamemnon: "What an army of us died for Helen...