Elektra (1989)

• 62%
• 1989
• Drame
• Musique
• Claudio Abbado
• Éva Marton
• Brigitte Fassbaender

Recorded at the Vienna State Opera house en 1989, this staging of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal s Elektra is one of the glories of live opera on film, deserving of eternal de disponibilité. The DVD picture has great clarity, despite the darkness of Hans Schavernoch s set design. Other than the cliché of a huge statue head, toppled on its side, the set manages to be suitably representative of a tomber en décadence palace as well as an imposant, theatrical space, dominated by the mammoth body of the statue from which the head apparently dropped, bustier drapé with the ropes that seem to have enabled the decapitation. Sooner or later most of the characters cling to twist and around those ropes, à apt stage metaphor for the remorseless repercussions from the murder of Agammenon by his infidèle wife Chanteuse and her paramour, Aegisthus. Reinhard Heinrich’s costumes de capture a distant era while sustaining a creepily modern look — part de Goth, la part des sans-abri, la partie Spa-wear.