Leonie Rysanek here finally graduates to the role of Elektra, and the only possible reaction is, “Why did she have to wait so long?” She is utterly superb, and as fine an actor as she is a singer. Even more over-the-top is Astrid Varnay as her murderous mother Klytamnestra. Her first appearance, with her face grotesquely filling the whole frame, is one of the visual high points of this visually explosive rendition.
Musically the entire enterprise is flawless. It was the final achievement of veteran conductor Karl Bohm (who was friends with Strauss), and he chose to bring out more of the music’s sonorous richness, and even lyricism, than he had in his abrasive CD recording, with Inge Borkh as Elektra, 20 years earlier (DGM 431 739-2).
A 90-minute bonus DVD accompanies the film. You see the frail Bohm, accompanied by a nurse, being driven through Vienna to the recording studio. You watch the preparations for the filming in a disused factory, and hear the film’s director, Gotz Friedrich, discuss a fascinating idea. This is that Klytamnestra perhaps represents an ancient matriarchy, seizing control back from the men by murdering her former husband Agamemnon. Thus when Oreste kills her (and her lover Aegisth) in revenge he is in fact clawing back male supremacy, and this is confirmed by his neglect at the end of the opera of his sister Elektra. She will be put in a “tower” (in other words a psychiatric clinic, says Friedrich), and her final death is at least in part because she has no viable role in the new order.
With the Vienna Philharmonic, Rysanek, Varnay, Catarina Ligendza as Chrysothemis and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Oreste, this is an almost unimprovable version of one of the greatest masterworks of the modern era, before that era became submerged in unartistic mathematics and a cacophony that had very few admirers.
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