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conceived in the incestuous union between his father Thyestes and his daughter Pelopeia. Incest is only suggested in this opera, but it is clear that vengeance is something due the beloved. Elektra dies for her brother and father as Antigone died for her brother in a type of mock marriage, which Elektra celebrated in dance, in the final perverse makarismos. The dance makes physical the love implied in the text. Love in her case will kill, as it killed in the past ("Liebe tötet" = Elektra's Liebestod). Strauss's Elektra claims the light and music emanate from her: "Ob ich die Musik nicht höre? Sie kommt doch aus mir . . . Seht ihr das Licht, dass von mir ausgeht?" She is fulfilled by her vengeance and death as Chrysothemis will be in exogamy. Strauss's Elektra will remain intimately and symbolically endogamous. Segal corroborates this: "Elektra exemplifies interiority carried to its extreme," and further, "Elektra's commitment to death over life is a condition not only of her soul but of her whole universe."34 The music affirms the triumph of Elektra's death with an E-flat minor chord violently thrust into C major, the last chord of the opera (Musical Example E). |
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Gilliam has an excellent analysis of the keys and themes that Strauss explicitly selected to suggest the complex concatenation of what we associate with the characters and their motives, feelings and circumstance in this opera. The key of E major, the key of Elektra's dance, is typically used "to express Dionysian, passionate, or even erotic sensations in music, hence the use of E as tonal centre for Don Juan."35 Agamemnon's death is in C minor, as E flat minor conveys Elektra's death. It is most appropriate for Elektra's triumphal dance to be in a major variation of E, and for the entire opera to resolve in C major, the musical affirmation of Agamemnon's death avenged. Gilliam points out other uses Strauss made of C major to convey a type of triumph at the end of a work, namely "evoking the ultimate restoration of the soul in the coda of Tod und Verklärung; the perfection of nature in Also Sprach Zarathustra; the restoration of sexual harmony at the end of Die Frau ohne Schatten; and the final chorus of Der Friedenstag, where opposing armies are reconciled at the end of the Thirty Years War."36 Since this final chord is a major version of the minor chord associated with Agamemnon's death, here is the ultimate victory of the genos which Elektra joyously affirms in her bacchic dance. Ancient and modern religious associations, coupled with musical suggestions show us an Elektra transfigured in death, and transubstantiated into music. She is "the music while the music lasts." |
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Clément and McClary might say this is hardly the politically correct thing to do, to eliminate a female heroine in this way. They lump Elektra with |
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34 Segal (1981) 257 and 249. It might not be out of place at this point to quote the second law of thermodynamics: "For a closed system, entropy is either constant or increasing." |
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35 Hofmannsthal (1990) 68. |
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36 Hofmannsthal (1990) 227. |
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