Word: elektra
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...When Elektra shrilled her lust for vengeance in Carnegie Hall last week, Manhattan operagoers heard their first Strauss opera this season, their first Elektra since 1932. Because it is full of furious, hard-driven music, because it is pathologically concerned with adultery and blood, many consider the opera less appealing than Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. Others find its eery, passionate songs unforgettable. These were more than grateful when Artur Rodzinski announced he would put on a concert version of the opera with the Philharmonic-Symphony he has been guest-conducting all month (TIME, March 8), looked forward to hearing...
...Falstaff Philadelphia ever saw, increased his reputation when he mounted Mozart's Escape from the Seraglio and Gluck's Alceste in Florence's Boboli Garden last year. Hardly had he stepped off the boat in Manhattan last month when he was rushed to Cleveland to stage Elektra under Conductor Artur Rodzinski...
...Adolf Hitler, whose Bayreuth Festival was no great shakes, did everything he could to spoil Austria's show. He refused to let Richard Strauss, one of the Salzburg Festival founders, conduct a cycle of his operas, grudgingly allowed him to sit in the audience when Clemens Krauss led Elektra. He nearly ruined a performance of Tristan by yanking German Tenor Hans Grahl out of the cast at the last moment, He saw to it that Wilhelm Furtwangler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, stayed away from his two scheduled Salzburg performances...
Twenty-nine years have passed since Richard Strauss's Salome first shed her veils for Herod, shrieked her demands for the head of John the Baptist, groveled before it, kissed its cold lips. Scene was the Dresden Opera House where four years later Elektra scuttled crazily about the stage, screaming her lust for vengeance. Dresden heard the first Rosenkavalier, the first Egyptian Helen, the first Arabella, Strauss's latest opera (TIME, July 10). It was a right and fitting act of gratitude, therefore, for Dresden to stage a seven-day festival last week in honor of the greatest...
...Dresden critics were not vexed that Strauss had returned to tunefulness. They have long ceased expecting any more daring and original music from the composer of Elektra and the tone-poems. Conducting the premiere was an illegitimate Habsburg, Clemens Krauss, instead of Hitler-ousted Fritz Busch...