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screams out, "Is there no one to hear me?" Elektra answers from outside the palace, "Agamemnon does," and we hear a loud triumphant version of the Agamemnon theme. The rain that began the opera starts again to pour in a jouissance appropriate for Elektra's final dance to celebrate her marriage with death. |
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Earlier rain was linked with blood in the text and in the music. As Elektra cries to her father about her vengeance and the victorious rite to follow in which blood will be shed to atone for the original bloody murder: |
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Von den Sternen stürzt alle Zeit herab,
so wird das Blut aus hundert Kehlen stürzen
auf dein Grab! So wie aus umgeworfnen Krugen
wird's aus den gebundnen Mördern fliessen.28 |
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As all time rains down from the stars, so will
the blood of a hundred throats rain down onto your grave.
As from overturned pitchers, so will the blood
flow from the bound murderers. |
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This is Hofmannsthal's and Strauss's echo of Aischylos' Klytemnestra: after she has killed Agamemnon, she rejoices in the dew of Agamemnon's blood, as the earth rejoices in rain at the time when blossoms are born (Ag. 139092). The music is reminiscent of the motif for rain that Beethoven used in movement two of his Pastoral Symphony; there continuous triplets in the second violins and violas suggest a running brook (Musical Example I). Bryan Gilliam points out that blood in Elektra's opening scene "serves a threefold purpose as a reference to Agamemnon's violent death, to the sacrificial blood that will avenge that death, and to the blood relation between Agamemnon and his children."29 This blood is the blood of the genos, and its demands are Elektra's imperative. |
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We can also see some symbolism in the triplets which we have just shown are often used to suggest water, or perhaps even the pervasive triple time that characterizes Elektra's passionate dances. This tripartite musical imagery could allude to both the divine trinity and the human (Agamemnon/Elektra/Orestes). As wine in the Catholic Mass is transubstantiated into the blood of Christ, so here the water that pervades the scenery and text is translated into the blood of the murderers. |
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This modern trope not only adds resonance to the past, but is another endorsement of the rightness of the act of vengeance, as Sophokles tells us. There are bloody aspects to any mass or to any revolution, but at the moment of sacrifice there can be a magic space in which, as Seamus Heaney |
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28 Hofmannsthal (1990) 41. |
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29 Gilliam (1991) 27. |
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