Movie time: Elektra (the opera not the Avengers character)
I happen to like Richard Strauss, especially his operas. Strauss had a lot of stress for an apolitical composer/conductor. Musically speaking, he was considered a successor to Wagner, and Wagner was you know who's favorite composer. Conducting wise, he was offered the position Toscanini quit in protest. Strauss' daughter-in-law was Jewish, he intentionally performed works by "banned" composers, hired a Jewish Librettist, wrote pieces that derided the Nazis, and gladly got fired. He used his influence to legally keep his daughter-in-law under house arrest during the War. Sadly, he wasn't powerful enough to do much for her extended family, but he tried. So much so, that he was specifically pardoned by name right before he died. Cool dude.
Now, the world of opera is just as bad about idolotry as commercial pop. Fischer-Diskau is great, so he performed everything, and people just got sick of only ever hearing his version of everything. Kronos Quartet is the same way. They are great, but that doesn't mean everybody else should just be understudies. I have his version of Winterreise hiding in here somewhere; way better than Sting's. I'm serious, Sting did a version of Winterreise. Anywho, i just really like the cinemetography of this particular version of Elektra.
Greek mythology is great because you've got thousand of characters all related and associated in detailed ways. Plus, everybody is morally ambiguous, they do good stuff and bad stuff and other characters react however you want them to react. Hofmannsthal's take is cool because he follows Sophocles, but limits the perspective to the actual first person view of Elektra. He downplays parts of the story that she wouldn't care much about personally, while emphasizing her particular psychological perspective during the conversations she has. Strauss himself would eventually move away from modernism, but this is right in the middle of his really dissonant, often bitonal gruesomness. Remember, Schoenberg abandons tonality and his umlaut 'cause Nazis, Webern is morally conflicted with his own political opinions, Picasso is painting people as deformed fractured monsters, Switzerland is trying really hard to not reject all the gold and cultural artifacts being smuggled in, Churchill is all giddy 'cause he gets to order people to kill other people while he drinks watered down Johnny Walker Red 24 hours a day, and how anybody can feel like they won a prize for any of it is an enigma. Lots of NOS vacuum tubes for stereo and guitar amps are kind of a prize, i guess, but we've used most of them at this point (i only bring up the enigma machine because the encryption on this particular dvd is weird and it took forver to find a device in our house that could decode it. I finally cracked it using a Drogan's decoder wheel (Spies Like Us reference, yay!) What i'm trying to say is real ordinary everyday people didn't like living through WWII. Real people don't hate each other. Real people try to solve problems rather than beat up other people. Real people accept "no" for an answer and try something else. Having a world war at all is kind of a big flashing neon sign that centralized federal governments with despotic figureheads aren't particularly good for humanity at large, but what do i know, i'm a dumb musician. People like to kill each other, i guess.
The opening scene sums that up pretty well: the servants say they taunt Elektra 'cause it's fun to make her mad, and the one maid who's nice to her gets taken away to be tortured. Not to spoil it for you, but Orest avenge kills his mom and her lover, and Elektra does her version of the Flashdance/Footloose montage until she herself falls down dead. Nobody wins, everybody loses something, mostly their waking up tomorrow. Maynard wrote a song about Orestes, maybe we should listen to A Perfect Circle next...shhh! The movie's starting.
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