The Chorus in Sophocles’ Electra

Zusammenfassung

When Peter Sellers’ opera productions became well-known in Britain a few years ago, they provoked in some places a violent public reaction. At Glyndebourne he was booed for his hippy-style Magic Flute. His three productions on television--Don Giovanni set in Spanish Harlem, Cosi fan tutte in a Cape Cod diner, and The Marriage of Figaro in Manhattan’s Trump Tower--all raised cries of outrage from the traditionalists. A write-up of the TV films was headed “Street-cred Mozart,” and subtitled “Controversial Peter Sellars transforms Mozart classics into shock opera.” Towards the end it added, “Sellers readily admits that this is Mozart for the masses, not the opera buffs, but primarily for a young audience that will be able to relate to the contemporary settings and the sensational symbolism. But there is also a serious intent behind the updating--Sellars believes that Mozart’s masterpieces are completely timeless …”; and the article ends with a quote from Sellars himself: “Ultimately, you have to recognise that the theatre exists only in one tense --the present.”² It is because of this last sentence that I have begun with Sellars, since all of us here at this conference must feel that these words strike to the very heart of the matter.

This paper was the opening contribution in a workshop on the chorus of Sophocles’ Electra which I had the privilege of sharing with Michael Cacoyannis. I have deliberately retained its somewhat informal style,and its frequent references to earliercontributors’ papersand to the previous night’s performance of Electra, so as to give some sense of its time-specific nature. The scholarly issues and controversies are taken up in the footnotes. The work for this paper was done while enjoying a British Academy post-doctoral fellowship at University College London,and I should like to record my thanks to both institutions.