|
|
|
|
|
|
|
says, "The longed-for tidal wave /Of Justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme."30 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Friedrich stages the murders for us, and we see them both with mirrors replicating the bloody images. Blood flows down the palace walls outside. Blood flows as freely as the rain, and Elektra dances in both. The blood of her triumphant vengeance replaces her menstrual blood: her vengeance and fulfillment are her marriage and child. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sophokles' Aigisthos and Orestes bandy grim words about as Orestes orders him within the palace. In Hofmannsthal's version Elektra is solely responsible for delivering Aigisthos to Orestes waiting within. We do not have the ironic scene in Sophokles, where Aigisthos sees a body and thinks it is Orestes', but finds it is Klytemnestra's a grim reworking of the trick on Elektra who had to hold her brother's "death urn." In Hofmannsthal's version there are no mistakes, and little irony. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sophokles has Orestes say to Aigisthos that it would be good if criminals were executed swiftly, then there would be less crime (El. 15058). No such moralizing from Orestes in Hofmannsthal's text. Orestes disappears into the house when he enters to slay his mother, and is only glimpsed through a window. He has no more to say. Nor do we have the chorus' affirmation of freedom (El. 150810). Hofmannsthal has given triumphant, poetic and passionate words to Elektra. She dominates the stage. It is she who enacts her personal freedom, which coincides with the polis' freedom, in her final frenzied waltz. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
As Chrysothemis announces victory to the transfigured Elektra, the latter goes into a strange aria, claiming that she herself is the music of victory, and she knows that she must lead the dance, but ocean weighs her down. She claims she enacts the will of the gods. She sowed darkness and gathered in joy. She was a corpse, but now is the fire of life, and her flame consumes the world's darkness. Her face is paler than the moon. (We remember this pallor was Klytemnestra's, so Elektra has in a sense become a transfigured doublet of her mother.) If someone looks at her, he must know death, or be consumed with joy. Elektra asks Chrysothemis if she sees the light coming from her. She is the moon. Chrysothemis speaks of regained love, now that her brother is here. Elektra says love kills. She says for those who have such joy, one can only be quiet and dance. Then she dances and falls into a death-trance. Chrysothemis' last words are cries to Orestes. Elektra, "the Elektral," "the bedless one," will not marry the living, but like Antigone, will go as a bride to the dead.31 She is married to death in her triumph and the whole opera has been her makarismos. |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
30 Heaney (1990) 77. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
31 "Electra (with the derivation of her name from a- and lektron) is first mentioned by Xanthus, of whom we know nothing except that he was a lyric poet and earlier than Stesichorus," Denniston (1968) x. |
|
|
|
|
|