Metropolitan's Elektra

The 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.

The 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 blood streams red as it streamed in Agamemnon's bath.

Soprano Kappel sang the difficult music beautifully, enacted the crack-brained role as well as any nice person could. But people who heard the performance over the radio were fortunate not to see the plush picture-book queen that Contralto Karin Branzell made out of Klytemnestra, supposedly half-crazed by the sense of her guilt. Soprano Goeta Ljungberg looked foolish posturing in an elaborate white satin dress. Tenor Rudolf Laubenthal seemed more like a saintly Lohengrin than a man who had committed murder to get a throne. Baritone Friedrich Schorr was a dignified but middle-aged Orestes.

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.

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