Word: elektra
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...spite of makeup which gives her eyelids a furry look and her old tendency to read her more dramatic lines as though she were giving a schoolroom recital of Elektra, Actress Fontanne manages to be conspicuously charming in a role which is not a paragon of lucidity. Actor Lunt is at all times expertly droll, although his parts in The Guardsman and Reunion In Vienna appear to have permanently endowed him with a Central European accent. Actor Coward, particularly when he is imitating a butler on a telephone and giving an interview to the Press, is, if possible, more suavely...
Last week Strauss's Schlagobers had its U. S. premiere in a concert suite conducted by Bruno Walter with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony. Most critics pounced on it as asinine stuff well-named. They remarked, not for the first time, that the genius who wrote Elektra and Rosenkavalier, Till Eulenspiegel and Don Juan, had petered out. Strauss's amazing orchestrations are taken so much for granted that no one thought to comment on the fact that the worst of Strauss is better than the best of most present-day composers...
...golden curtains at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House shot up one afternoon last week on a stage for an instant ominously black. Trumpets blared a sudden, stunning dissonance. Richard Strauss's Elektra, the most hectic and hard-driven of operas, began its premiere at the Metropolitan, its first performance in New York in 22 years...
...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...
Strauss's taut, frenetic music deeply moved the audience last week. People stayed to cheer long after it had ended. Under Conductor Artur Bodanzky the basses whirred an awful suspense while Elektra waited for Klytemnestra's death scream. The horns exclaimed wildly while Elektra danced herself to death. Few critics bothered to carp at the stuffy stage production. They were grateful to the hard-pressed Metropolitan for mounting even so tardily a great opera which is unlikely to prove a great box-office attraction...