Ladies of mature vintage cloaked in elegant gowns and shimmering jewels search for their seats alongside college students wearing jeans and scruffy sweaters. One elderly man a couple of boxes over from where my wife, our daughter and I sit sports an ascot—the first one I’ve ever seen worn by someone other than an actor in a movie or a play.
We all have come to the venerable Vienna State Opera House, which in its earliest days when the Austro-Hungarian Empire still reigned was the Vienna Court Opera House, to touch a bit of history and embrace, in an ever-changing world, something that endures.
We are here to see and hear Richard Strauss’ “Elektra,” an epic co-mingling of ancient Greek tragedy and modernist classical music. We have come to an opera house where Gustav Mahler once served as director at a time when kings, queens, emperors and empresses sat in thrones all over Europe … before World War I upended their world and ushered in a new one.
Opera is about passion.
In our 21st-century world, when we use the word “passion,” it carries with it a positive connotation. It speaks of strong feelings that move or inspire us, that make our hearts beat faster and our spirits sing.
Earlier generations, though, used the term more warily. To them, passion was a force that could overwhelm reason and restraint, a force that, left unchecked, could lead to ruin and tragedy.
That’s why, so often in opera, passion is a power that destroys lives, breaks families—and even shakes the world. It is something as elemental as a flood or an earthquake, an entity that can shatter everything before it.
“Elektra” is no exception.
It tells the tale of Elektra, daughter of Agamemnon, who before the opera begins has been murdered by his wife (and Elektra’s mother) Clytemnestra and Clytemnestra’s lover. Elektra is consumed by rage regarding the murder and grief over her father’s death, so much so that the maids and everyone else in the house consider her mad.
She rails for much of the first two-thirds of the one-act opera that justice must be done so her sorrows may be soothed. She bemoans the fact that her brother, Orestes, is not there to exact vengeance on their murderous mother and the man who shares her bed.
Orestes, though, does return.
Both vengeance and escalating violence ensue. Clytemnestra and her lover die at the hands of Orestes.
And in the end, Elektra perishes, too, her passion burning away her life and spirit like a dry leaf in a flame.
“Elektra” premiered in December 1909, less than five years before the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, were murdered.
And the world plunged into World War I.
That sweeping and tragic conflict was, like “Elektra,” itself a tale of extended family dysfunction. Many of the crown heads of state on both sides of the fighting were cousins, family members who destroyed each other, themselves and much of the world because they could not redress—or in some cases, even acknowledge—wrongs.
“Elektra” explores its ancient themes accompanied by the dissonant tones of Strauss’ score, as if in anticipation of the jittery ages to emerge following the global smash-up soon to commence.
The opera is a marriage of the eternal and the ever shifting, a reminder that, no matter how much we humans may change over time, many of our struggles do not.
When the performance ends, the crowd rewards cast and orchestra with an extended standing ovation. Operagoers in jewels and evening attire stand beside those in sneakers and sweatshirts and applaud lustily.
When the applause dies, it is time to retire.
We all traipse out as we came in.
We leave the venerable building that has been home to so many tales of performed passion and we venture into the night.
And we step into an old city that once, in days now lost, was home to an empire and out under a sky as vast and cloudy as the future itself.
Just one more assortment of human beings paddling our way down the river of time.
