Merry Straussmas!

Everyone has a Christmas tradition. Even Jews and Atheists – I smell cheap Chinese food and a bad holiday horror movie! If you’re me you sit on the couch and watch Richard Strauss operas all day. This is a personal holiday tradition that goes back a long way, all the way to today, because that’s when I made it up. Anyways, to compensate for a total lack of posts in November (still recovering from the election, actually) let’s get a double dose of great music and warm and fuzzy feelings from the composer of Also Sprach Zarathustra. So sit back, get yourself a nice mug of hot chocolate and cookies and enjoy this Super Review of

-and-

Films, 1974 & 1981

Director: Götz Freidrich

You know, it’s too bad that more operas aren’t made into movies. Sure, there are plenty of tapings of live performances (and some damn good ones, I might add) but for me complete immersion in the drama only comes when I can’t see any curtains or orchestra or hear the really annoying COUGHING in the audience. These two films, both from German director Götz Freidrich are a revelation: both visually and dramatically engaging. The direction by Freidrich is very good – you feel like you are watching a film instead of just a performance. Sure, sometimes the dude rips from Sergio Leone and gives us some unnecessary extreme close-ups

Cue Ennio Morricone.

but most of the time it works and really sucks the audience into the drama, which is the whole point.

All of the parts in these two movies are acted by the people singing them (which is not always done with movies like these), and they do a really good job at both.  I especially want to give props to Leonie Rysanek in Elektra, who nails the title character and gives the most intense operatic performance that I have ever seen.

With special mention to Catarina Ligendza as Elektra's sister,
who really sells us on her gas pain.

And there are even good musical performances to boot! There is always a danger in any musical film that the director will be so caught up in how it looks that the music (you, know the important part) will suffer. Well, the music in these movies is superb which is a given considering that a) the orchestra for both is the Vienna Philharmonic and b) the conductor leading them in both is Karl Böhm, who was the student of the composer himself. All of the singers are first rate with not one dud in the casts.

Coming to CBS this fall: Hans Beirer and Astrid Varnay in
everyone's favorite new sitcom, Everybody Hates Herod!

I’m not going to go into the stories of these too much since they have been around for quite a long time (before being made into operas the stories of Salome and Elektra came from the Christian and Ancient Greek mythologies, respectively). Needless to say that if you want a story about a cute but disturbing spoiled teenage girl who decides that she’s not going to let anything get in her way of, like, totally making out with that *hot* wild religious guy and gets her way with bloody but like-the-dude-totally-had-it-coming-to-him results than Salome is the opera for you.

"*yawn* Being slutty and evil is such hard work."

But if you thought Salome was cute, wait ‘til you check out this little hottie

and her equally hot MILF of a mom

Who looks like something right out of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

who have a minor tiff because, well, Mom sort of murdered Dad a while ago and took a new lover to rule the kingdom and that makes her daughter *sad* and now she sort wants to, well you know, use her little brother to murder their mom in a plot that would make Freud deplete a box of Kleenex more rapidly than a kindergarten class in the middle of cold season. Did I mention that Elektra is a warm and fuzzy story? 

Whoa, whoa!  There was enough of that in the last opera, babe!

Watching these both back to back I have to say that Elektra is the better of the two, both musically and as a film – Salome actually almost seems like a warm-up. Everything in Elektra is expressionistic and done bigger and better. It has larger sets (it seems more spacious and real) that expand the drama, being less "stagy" than its predecessor.

Compare: above, Salome.  Below, Elektra.

It has better camera work and better dramatic unity.  That’s not to knock Salome; it is still one of the better opera films out there, it’s just it is merely very good whereas Elektra manages to impress me to the level where it has become for me not only a great opera film but a great film, period. Even if you don’t like opera (and why not? What’s wrong with hearing people sing their lines rather than speak them?) you should still see Elektra. Don’t be put off by people telling you that it’s some weird, dissonant opera. Yes, the music is revolutionary and does not really follow traditional operatic tonalities that much – this ain’t no Marriage of Figaro – but it is supremely dramatic and in some spots even beautiful.

Kinda like this blood orgy.

So take some time off this holiday season and do what I do to celebrate this joyous season: watch a demented princess strip for her perverted step-dad before making out with a severed head then watch a demented, vengeance driven princess obsess a little unhealthily about her dad for an hour or two. Come to think of it, both of these main characters are princesses… hey, why doesn’t Disney make some movies out of these two than add them to their Princess line of merchandise? Little girls would *so* love to have an Elektra doll, am I right?

Anyways, I leave you with the most Christmassy picture of all, and to all a good night.

Merry X-Mas!