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beats followed by rests (Musical Example F). Not only does this suggest crystals, but the magic they entail. The dissonance occurring off the beat and alternating with silence is disconcerting and once again the music suggests the inarticulate. |
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Elektra and Orestes carry out the will of the gods, explicitly in Sophokles (El. 3550), implicitly in Strauss/Hofmannsthal, but Klytemnestra must resort to pagan magic. We shall see by the end of the opera Elektra and Orestes will pray to the Christian God through suggestive music and invocations which remind one of the liturgy. The contrast of Elektra's harmonic sequences vs. Klytemnestra's dissonances lets the nonverbal replace the verbal and the music defines the indefinable. Elektra triumphs in the music: the proper God and the proper keys are on her side. |
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As Elektra concludes her baiting of her mother, the maids enter and whisper something in Klytemnestra's ear. Klytemnestra leaves laughing and makes menacing gestures as she looks down on Elektra from a window. She laughs again. We have not witnessed the debate between mother and daughter as in Sophokles. Once again a predominantly rational exchange has been transformed into the emotional one. The Sophoklean Elektra concludes that she has learned crime from her mother the criminal (El. 621). It is hard for us to see any crime, even a verbal one, in Hofmannsthal's Elektra, because the tyrants she eliminates are so obviously monsters. She is instrumental in killing her mother, but she does so in self-defense, and to liberate the city. |
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The dramatic irony in Sophokles' Elektra hearing of her brother's death, and fondling the urn in which she thinks his ashes have been encased, is transformed into Elektra's deceptive play with her mother, setting her up as the required victim to end her nightmares. Hofmannsthal concentrates more on the characterization of Klytemnestra here as an evil, haunted woman, and we are allowed both textually and musically to see and hear the world of nightmare. |
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Sophokles' Klytemnestra has a moment where her motherly concern, albeit brief, appears. After the Paidagogos tells her that Orestes is dead, she says, "O Zeus, should I call this fortunate? It is horrible, yet for the best. How sad it is that I must save my life through things that pain me" (El. 76668). She may be a woman who wants to live, but she is still a mother mourning the loss of her child. Hofmannsthal will not allow us to see this softness in Klytemnestra. |
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Friedrich emphasizes physical interactions between the characters, or between the characters and inanimate objects. For instance, Elektra caresses Agamemnon's stone head, and anyone who has seen Friedrich's Salomé will recall how Salomé caressed John the Baptist's head in a similar way. Freud |
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