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cal concept, but rather the rarified and clarified essence of human emotion. We hear ourselves in elevated song. |
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Music itself is a new critical tool which can aid in interpreting historical periods and social issues. Theodor Adorno applied Hegelian classifications to music, which Edward Said in his brilliant Musical Elaborations has rejected, opting for "an alternative based on a geographical or spatial idea that is truer to the diversity and spread of human activity."5 We see a movement from Adorno's abstractions to the particular. |
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Michael Ewans argues for the use of opera to interpret classics: "The opera successfully transmutes a  of the late fifth century B.C. into a tragödie of our own century . . . with the images of the ancient drama and the modern reflecting each other in mutual admiration."6 He interprets Elektra as created by Sophokles and Strauss, together with his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as, in the one case, "corrupted by her desire for vengeance to a level of savagery at least as low as that of the original criminals," and, in the other, "the sole rebel against a decaying, dictatorial system of monarchy so entrenched that, in fighting against it for human values, she loses them herself and is destroyed from within."7 |
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Bryan Gilliam also shows how the music enhances interpretation. He cites Strauss in his informative and sensitive study of Strauss's Elektra, saying "that his musical setting both intensified the dramaturgy, especially through 'the force of its climaxes', and structural unity."8 |
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Catherine Clément and Susan McClary give feminist readings to music, with tonality and masculine cadences seen as tools to tame the atonal chromatic female.9 Each shows that rigid musical forms can reflect the rigidity of societies and countries that created them. |
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5 Said (1991) xviii. |
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6 Ewans (1984) 1512. Although his work is invaluable, I find he reduces Aischylos' complexity, for instance, in saying, "In Wagner's trilogy the final resolution of the dilemmas, which become more entrenched as the cycle unfolds, comes not as in Aischylos from the calm judgement of Athena, goddess of wisdom incarnate, but from the furious anger of a woman scorned: Brunnhilde learns the wisdom needed to resolve the action of the Ring not through the power of reason but through her sufferings and jealousy, after Siegfried has betrayed her," Ewans (1984) 139. I feel this is a misreading of Aischylos, who claimed that one learned through suffering, and this was the violent grace afforded man by the gods (Ag. 17683). And for a sensitive reading of the problematic ending of the Oresteia, which is hardly resolved by "the calm judgement of Athena," see Rosenmeyer (1982). |
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7 Ewans (1984) 151 and 137. He claims, "As conceived by Strauss, Elektra truly has an Elektra complex," (145). I say she has more autonomy, as I shall argue in my text. |
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8 Gilliam (1991) 1045, quoting Schuh (1953) 154. Gilliam is also essential reading for those who wish to know the aetiology of Strauss's composition of the Elektra. His bibliography is to be recommended for those interested in the latest, and also some of the older and most important works, on Strauss's Elektra. |
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9 Clément (1988). Many of Clément's ideas are echoed, varied and sometimes more subtly defined by McClary (1991). McClary wrote the introduction to Clément's book. |
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