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Elektra
Max Reinhardt was the director of the Berlin production of Salome that gave Strauss the final push to turn the play into an opera. Reinhardt’s next project was Elektra, with a script based on the Greek tragedy by Sophocles, commissioned from the rising German poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It starred the same actress who had played Salome, Gertrud Eysoldt. Strauss and Hofmannsthal had already been in touch to discuss other possible projects they might work on together, but it was Elektra that became the first fruit of what was to be a long and abundant collaboration.
As they discussed working together, Hofmannsthal wrote to Strauss, “We were born for one another,” and as work began, Strauss counseled the playwright, “Don’t think of music at all -– I’ll take care of that.” For this time he was working with a living librettist, and his sure sense of musical drama gave him confidence to ask for many changes to turn the script into a viable opera libretto: cutting out much verbiage, adding lines where necessary, even moving a speech from one scene into another.
Elektra’s plot, the middle part of a Greek trilogy called the Oresteia, finds the heroine near insanity, harboring thoughts of reprisal against her mother, Clytemnestra, who long ago with her young lover murdered her husband Agamemnon for her own vengeful reasons. Elektra is reunited with her brother, Orestes, who has been raised in a foreign land to shield him from possible harm from their mother. Fortified by Elektra’s urging, Orestes enters the palace and murders Clytemnestra and her lover. Her life’s purpose now fulfilled, Elektra does a wild dance of triumph and falls dead.
Strauss was aware of the similarities between Salome and Elektra, of course. Each is about a strong-willed woman who, feeling wronged, single-mindedly defies all obstacles in order to set things right (as she sees it, at least). He differentiated Elektra by using a harsher, more dissonant musical palette, replacing oriental sinuousness with massive sonority and stark austerity. The composer used a huge orchestra this time, probably the largest in all of his operas, calling for more than 40 woodwind and brass instruments, including such rarities as hecklephon (a bass oboe, also used in Salome), two basset horns (relatives of the alto clarinet), four Wagner tubas, bass trumpet, and contrabass trombone. The large string section requires a portion of the players to be able to switch from viola to violin as needed, with the combined body of violins and violas sometimes subdivided into as many as six parts.
Like Salome, and like Sophocles’s original drama, the opera Elektra is in a continuous span of action without intermission, a single act lasting, in the case of Elektra, nearly two hours. Once again, Strauss’s music plays with motifs in Wagnerian fashion, picking them up from earlier appearances and bringing them back later, in transformed but recognizable form, when they can appropriately allude to the character or subject of that earlier appearance. Elektra, whom commentator Michael Kennedy describes as a “vengeful Valkyrie,” is characterized by jagged, spiky themes – appropriate for the haggard, run-down condition of a woman who has sacrificed her youth and beauty to her obsession for revenge – while her sister Chrysothemis, a “radiant mortal” who tries to get along in the household and hopes to put the family history behind her, receives more lyrical treatment. Memories of their long-dead father, King Agamemnon, are represented by noble themes, while Clytemnestra, his guilt-wracked queen, is practically schizophrenic with bitonal angst. The music of Orestes, who has only recently learned of his family’s history and now returns to fulfill his destiny, is fittingly strong and purposeful.
Work on Elektra began in 1906, but Strauss’s duties at the Berlin Court Opera, combined with the time required to oversee productions of Salome in various European cities, made for slow and halting progress, so he took a year’s leave of absence from Berlin and completed the new opera in 1908. The premiere in January 1909, once again in Dresden, was disappointingly received, but Elektra has continued to grow in critical esteem, taking its place as one of the composer’s finest creations.
The opera’s Recognition Scene is the high point of the drama. Failing to enlist her sister in her murderous plans, Elektra resolves to do the deed herself and so begins to dig up the axe (which has its own theme) that was used to dispatch her father, which she has kept buried these many years to use as her own instrument of revenge. (A Wailing theme from the orchestra hints at grief and mental imbalance.) She is disturbed by the appearance of a stranger, who insists he must wait here until summoned for an audience inside. The quiet dignity of his music shows him very much in command of himself, as he tells his cover story of the death of Orestes in a riding accident. Elektra mourns the loss, but the stranger says the Orestes she knew had to die, for “he enjoyed life too much.”
Grief-struck, Elektra rails against her oppressors and her miserable fate, revealing at last that she is related to both Agamemnon and Orestes. Orestes realizes who she is and repeatedly exclaims her name, while she continues to spout her fury. The stranger tells her that Orestes lives, but she still does not recognize him, even when several old servants come out of the palace and silently honor him. At last, he calls her his sister, and floods of joy and long-suppressed emotion are unleashed.
Transformed, Elektra sings tenderly to her long-absent brother (in a great outpouring of song for which Strauss asked Hofmannsthal for additional lines to fill out his musical conception). Shrinking from his touch, she laments her wretched condition, recalling her previous beauty. She has sacrificed everything in her quest for retribution. Horrified, Orestes renews his vow to be avenged. As he steels himself to commit the act, Elektra calls down blessings upon him.
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