The filth one could argue is Anny Konetzni, way past it, as one critic says, “overcooked,” lunging at, missing or simply omitting high notes, though the middle voice is still oceanic in size and sound. Her final “high note” at the end of a desperate whoop.

The Florentine orchestra often omits cringy, out-of-tune sounds (especially the brass; listen to the opening chords) right before some particularly screechy maids (aka fishwives in this case) enter to split the ears.

But, remembering what Claudia Cassidy said, the performance was also demented. She remembers the immobile Konetzni (still emitting a vast voice) stolidly pointing out a stark contrast with the manic conducting of the great Mitropoulous; he was literally dancing in the pit. The singers and the orchestra could barely keep up with him (in the duet at the end, Ilitsch, who sounds like she strayed in from the Macbethian witches’ coven, and Konetzni cannot keep up). He drives his players to a frenzied sound that resembles the moans and shrieks of the animals driven to sacrifice. The strings lacerate; the brass howls; the winds moan. Pitch be damned. Martha Modl playing the crazed Klytaemnestra is actually the center of tonal and vocal gravity in her often bitonal music, her tone firm and steady, and the upward pull of the voice reveals she was in her brief dramatic soprano prime.