Mourning Becomes Electra

The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center famously opened in 1966 with the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, kicking off a season that featured nine new productions. The company unveiled its final new staging of the season on March 17, 1967, with a second world premiere—Marvin David Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra. An adaptation of plays by Eugene O’Neill, the opera resets the events of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in New England in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, with Agamemnon transformed into a Union general returning from battle. In this broadcast, recorded only weeks after the opera’s first-ever performance, Zubin Mehta conducts a cast of legendary Met artists. John Macurdy and Marie Collier are General Ezra Manon and his wife Christine, alongside John Reardon and Evelyn Lear as their children, Orin and Lavinia. And in only his second season with the company, baritone Sherrill Milnes appears as Adam.