
Recorded at the Vienna State Opera house in 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 availability. 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 decaying palace as well as an imposing, theatrical space, dominated by the mammoth body of the statue from which the head apparently dropped, draped with the ropes that seem to have enabled the decapitation. Sooner or later most of the characters cling to and twist around those ropes, an apt stage metaphor for the remorseless repercussions from the murder of Agammenon by his unfaithful wife Klytämnestra and her paramour, Aegisthus. Reinhard Heinrich’s costumes capture a distant era while sustaining a creepily modern look — part Goth, part homeless, part Spa-wear.
Directors: Brian Large, Harry Kupfer
Written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Switch country in the top-right to check availability elsewhere.
Not currently available in Lebanon.
Or switch country at the top to check availability elsewhere - Elektra may be streaming in another market.
Audience picks based on what people who watched this also enjoyed.
2020

2013

2020

2018

2014

2013

2016

2008

1990

1992

1961

1984

2018
2020

2025

2020

2012

2012

2019

1966

2008

2022

2006

1971

2021

2024