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After all have gone to bed, Lizzie has something of a breakdown. She imagines sister and herself remaining spinsters forever due to their father's suspiciousness of suitors: "Two old ladies in a childless house. Miss Lizzie. Miss Marget." What she is forbidden -- to love Jason, to love the memory of her late mother -- torments her. The next day Lizzie helps, indeed pushes, Margret to elope with Jason, so that at least one of them will be free of that house. Abigail (who knows of Lizzie's own love for him) comes in and taunts, "Looks like he's gone and left you" as the young lovers depart...and threatens to tell Andrew of Lizzie's complicity in the elopement. This is what tips Lizzie over the edge into killing her stepmother and then her father. There is an Epilogue: Several years have passed; in a distorted mirror image of the opening scene, the Reverend Harrington comes to request a donation. Lizzie, now a recluse, hears the children taunt her as they once did her father (only now the refrain is, of course, the famous ax ditty), and rejects her old friend's kindness. Not only is she a murderess, but she has, to all cold and concrete purposes, replaced Andrew, ever condemned to seek his love and approval: "Protecting my father's interests as he would have wished consumes my time."

A commission of the Metropolitan Opera, where it premiered in March 1967, Martin David Levy's Mourning Becomes Electra based upon the Eugene O'Neill play of the same title, is set in a New England seaport town and, in one scene, on a ship in Boston harbor, in the years 1865-1866. It is of course a modern update of Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy, in which Orestes returns from war to discover that his father, Agamemnon, has been murdered; he avenges this by killing his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Electra, perhaps best known to us in Richard Strauss's version of the Sophocles' version of the myth, is Orestes' bloodthirsty sister.

In Levy's opera, Christine Mannon (Clytemnestra) has been having an affair with Adam Brant, a sea captain (Aegisthus) -- who not incidentally is her bastard nephew by her husband's late brother -- while her husband, Ezra (Agamemnon) and son Orin (Orestes) have been away fighting in the Civil War. Lavinia (Electra) is faced with a terrible conflict: she hero-worships her father and is

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