Marvin David Levy, Mourning Becomes Electra (1967)

YEAH BOY-EE! Look what I saw!!! Thanks, once again, to Florida Grand Opera. It's still online (with the same weird disclaimer that Florencia en el Amazonas had, that you are forbidden to evaluate any of the performers based on their work here), but probably not for much longer, so gather yer roses while ye may.

I've never actually seen or read the Eugene O'Neill plays. I've only read two O'Neill plays, in fact (way back when I was reading for comprehensive exams), The Hairy Ape and Desire Under the Elms. I remember liking them, especially the latter, which was, I recall, devastating, but hey, I was busy! I didn't have TIME for any more nonsense!

So why was I so fixated on seeing this? you might well ask. Well, partially it's just the thing where you want the one you can't have, for sure. Also, seeing it on the Met on Demand page, available only in audio form, was very tantalizing. Also, even though I'm not a patriot in most senses that people would use the word, but I do appreciate American art and I want to support it, so there's that. And finally: that title. It is SO COOL. Super-evocative. GIMME!

I didn't know it, but apparently this has a sort of fraught story. There was--I am told--a lot of controversy in the sixties about just how tonal operas should be. Honestly, that sounds like the world's dumbest controversy to me. Just write what you want to write and if aesthetic preferences seem to be going in a certain direction, the entire form probably will too, but you can't talk about these things in theoretical terms, as if there's some objective "reason" that opera of a given era should be one way or another. Be that as it may: for this reason, Levy apparently felt the need to include more atonal elements than he otherwise would have. The opera flopped--whether these things are causally related or not, I don't know--and the embittered Levy never wrote another opera. However, he DID revise this one twice, once in the nineties and once in the early oughts, changing the tonality among other things, and the work achieved a belated success.

What's it about? Well, even if you don't know the play cycle, you probably know at least the basic premise: Greek tragedy in the time of the American Civil War, with characters and situations loosely mirroring the ill-fated House of Atreus. Here, it's the Mannon family: the patriarch Ezra has been off fighting in the war, but now he's returning. But his wife Christine has been having an affair with Adam Brant, a bastard son of Ezra's brother and a maid. Her daughter Lavinia loves her father (of course--Electra is nothing if not complex) and is none too pleased with this, but Christine, not happy with her marriage, plots with Brant to murder her husband, which she ends up doing. Natch. Lavinia's brother Orin appears on the scene. Unlike Lavinia, he loves his mother (two complexes in one story!), but Lavinia convinces him of her treachery and gets him to murder Brant. Distraught, Christine commits suicide. A year passes, and Lavinia's and Orin's respective mental healths are both deteriorating fast. He ends up also committing suicide, and we'd better hope that mourning does indeed become Electra, because she shuts herself up in the house and prepares for a long and lonely life of it. The end.

Whether the music was what it was from the start or was altered later on (if you wanted, you could listen to the recording of the Met debut and compare), this is some really great, dramatic music, coupled with a plot to match. The story was a natural fit for an opera. A lot of the music reminds me of Samuel Barber, and not just because it has more or less the same ending as Vanessa, albeit with a much higher body count. There's always a worry: if you spend so much time anticipating something, what if it turns out to actually be kind of mediocre at best? WOULDN'T YOU FEEL THE FOOL? That's not the case here, however. It may not be the world's greatest opera, but it's pretty darned good, and this FGO production is really swell, mixing gothic Americana with Greek themes. Rayanne Dupuis is very striking in the title role.

It's kind of bizarre that a work of art like this should just sink back into oblivion after the video is taken down, but such is the dumb world of opera. I'm just glad to have finally had the opportunity to add it to my list.