Moanin' Becomes Elektra

Inge Borkh is a tall (5 ft. 9 in.), handsome opera star with a crushing tennis backhand and a disconcerting habit of sitting about nude in her dressing room.

Both her athletic bent and her theatrical temperament combine to make Swiss-Austrian Soprano Borkh one of the world's most impressive performers in two of her favorite roles--Salome and Elektra. Last week, for the first time in nine years, Strauss's Elektra returned to the Metropolitan Opera, and Soprano Borkh all but blew the house down.

When Elektra had its premiere in Dresden in 1909, it nearly shocked the critics out of their seats. For the better part of two hours, Strauss's orchestra rages, shrieks and howls with a kind of demented fury. Moreover, Librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal's reading of Sophocles bristles with frank Freudian overtones of a kind the operatic stage had not seen before and would not see again until Berg's Wozzeck. All in all, the audience tended to agree with the fabled Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who sang the first Klytaemnestra but vowed never to do it again. "It was frightful," said she. "We were a set of madwomen. There is nothing beyond Elektra. We have lived to reach the farthest boundary in dramatic writing for the voice with Wagner. But Strauss goes beyond him."

In last week's performance, Strauss's one-act shocker still had plenty of power -- from the moment the enlarged orches tra came crashing to life, through the frankly erotic music accompanying the incestuous recognition scene between Elektra and Orest, to Elektra's shrieking "Stab her once more!" at the news that Klytaemnestra had been struck down. But the performance also was a reminder that Elektra no longer has the almost physical shock value it possessed in Strauss's time: overlaying the stark story is a thin coat ing of German Gemuetlichkeit that too often turns passion to mere posturing. What redeemed the Met's Elektra was a splen did job of conducting by Joseph Rosenstock and the singing of Soprano Borkh, who rose triumphantly over the raging orchestra with rich, ringing power.

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