Elektra at the Lyric

I cannot understand people who consider opera to be boring. Well, no, that is not true at all: there are many examples of opera that can be boring, I readily admit. But this is not an inherent flaw of the genre; indeed, opera, when it approaches the ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk, is perhaps the most captivating of all things. (Several months ago I made an offhand remark to a fellow opera buff and church-musician that liturgy should be like opera. This is not to say that I esteem opera above liturgy, but rather that what is effective in one can and should be effective in t'other. But that is another discussion.) Yesterday's performance of Elektra at the Lyric, which I attended, instilled in me a fascination that straddled the line between rapture and disgust. One may therefore say that it succeeded unequivocally as art. I am getting dangerously close to pontificating about the nature of art; let me restrain myself.

Strauss's score for Elektra, though now more than a century old, still sounds fresh. (His dissonances are thrilling; perhaps this is because we'll never overcome a natural inclination for functional harmony? Certainly we won't, as a culture, if our popular music remains limited to four different chords.) The performances, instrumental and vocal, were uniformly excellent, though Christine Goerke, in the title rôle, deserves special praise. The costumes and set resonated with the ghastly splendor of the the plot and music; the Tribune review quite rightly notes the "beautiful ugliness" of the experience. Altogether it was like something out of a fever dream — unnerving, but riveting.