“Dangerous serial offender wanted.

The offender is suspected of killing 18 women.

He is extremely violent, communicative, and manipulative.

Carefully researches the victims and easily wins their trust by posing as an alleged relative.

He is about 45 years old and about 175 to 180 centimeters tall.

The police are asking for information on the emergency number 110. "

This police profile is shown on the curtain when the going gets tough in the last scene of Richard Strauss' "Elektra", in which Klytämnestra and Aegisth are slain. Was it intended as a warning to the audience not to dismiss the murderous happenings in the opera not as theater, but as drama, as it is - or right now? - takes place behind bourgeois facades? Immediately afterwards, the bloody victims of the serial offender are dragged into the salon on large cloths and heaved onto two chairs at the dining table. When Elektra has finally performed a ritual death dance in silence, bearing the “burden of happiness” after the murder, her younger sister Chrysothemis is also a victim: Orestes (the Ripper redivivus?) Murdered with a dagger - murderer, hope of women?

The horror is among us - that is obviously the message of the Hamburg production of "Elektra" by Dmitri Tcherniakov under the musical direction of Kent Nagano. As his own set designer, the Russian director adheres to a scenic instruction from Hugo von Hofmannsthal. She called for the renunciation of “conventional temples and palaces” as well as “any antiqueization”. The action takes place in a drawing room with high rooms and double doors, pseudo-Chippendale furniture, bookshelves and a grand piano. Thanks to a thorough search in the libretto, the director - and certainly also, as can be seen from the program booklet, the dramaturge Tatiana Werestchagina - discovered the abyss beneath this withered, pretentious upper-class pomp.

In the first scene, four maids and a guard crouch together and spice up their chatter with poison and bile. But there is little linguistic understanding of what they are angry about or about whom. A glance at the libretto reveals it: about the hated Elektra, who “howls for her father” and complains that she “had to rinse the eternally fresh blood of the murder from the hallway” - the murder of Agamemnon. It is not clear that this scene outlines the ambivalence of Electra. Agamemnon died, assassinated by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisth. But he's not dead. He's always remembered.

He already appears as a sound figure in this first scene, just as he returns at the beginning of Electra's monologue and then in the finale.

Tcherniakov emphasizes the fact that the invisible is always present when Elektra compulsively fetches her father's coat from a box and stuffs it in such a way that she can seat him at a table like a doll and decorate it with red roses.

On the table she builds - a childlike regression - head-shaking dogs and toy horses.

Memory of early experiences?

But which one?