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and Philip Slater would hardly miss the phallic significance.25 Both Salomé and Elektra express a forbidden, obsessive love. Klytemnestra also caresses Elektra's breasts as she asks her advice about her dreams, and Herodias does the same with Salomé in another context. Later Elektra caresses Chrysothemis' breasts so violently that the latter has to push her away. Incest here has many variations. Another reference to the power of the genos? |
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Sophoklean irony is at play when Chrysothemis tells Elektra she thinks that Orestes has come back, just after Elektra has been told that he is dead. Hofmannsthal has Chrysothemis tell Elektra that messengers have come announcing Orestes' death. Elektra tries to convince her to help her kill Klytemnestra and Aigisthos. She refuses and flees Elektra's mental and physical pressure. |
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In Friedrich's opera, Orestes enters as if he were the ghost of Agamemnon shrouded in dark, wearing a helmet. His eeriness suggests the ghost of Hamlet's father, and vengeance will also be his message. As Orestes reveals himself, the music is bleakly haunting, reminiscent of both the Agamemnon and Orestes themes. These change into a romantic duet as Elektra and Orestes sing of their love for each other, and Elektra makes him pledge not to leave her. The musical theme here is reminiscent of Tod und Verklärung, written nearly twenty years earlier. As the man described in this tone poem is transfigured by his death, so is Elektra by the arrival of Orestes, who will also be the one to signal her death when she is fulfilled by vengeance (Musical Examples G and H). Both melodic phrases are built on the descent of a perfect interval. Both the death in Tod und Verklärung and Elektra's are marked by the ominous clang of the Chinese bass gong and both convey triumph by the use of C major. |
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After the celebration of Orestes' arrival, the gods are mentioned and invoked. The duet becomes a makarismos: "blest is he . . .". The makarismos was generally a song of praise for the bride and bridegroom, or for the dead. Euripides often uses the makarismos in an ironic way in his plays, seemingly as praise for the living, but in fact directed towards someone who |
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25 Slater cites Freud on "turning to stone as a symbolic erection," (1968) 321, but then refutes this observation by saying, "The symbol of turning to stone captures not only the response of the moment the frozen hypnotic staring and the conjoined feelings, but also the more long-range adjustment to these: impotence, frigidity, anesthesia. We know, from clinical studies, how frequently these outcomes are associated with early incestuous arousal" (1968) 322. Earlier it is asked, "But why is the head used as such a symbol? Freud's interpretation employs the concept of 'displacement upwards' the prudish substitution of a 'higher' more cerebral body part for a 'lower' one," p. 319. This symbolism has resonance for our two operas: since Salomé's love is not incestuous, she can fondle an actual head (albeit dead), but Elektra must restrict herself to the stone head. There are obvious objections to all this and our explanation may be much simpler. A head may often stand for a person's identity, and in particular, in Homer, the dead spirit: Circe tells Odysseus to invoke the strengthless heads of the dead: (Od. 10.521). |
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