THE TENSION BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT IN THE CHORUS OF ELECTRA:

SOPHOCLES AND STRAUSS

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate School

of the University of Notre Dame

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Arts

by

Sean M. Kelly

Isabelle Torrance, Director

Graduate Program in Classics

Notre Dame, Indiana

April 2016

© Copyright 2016

Sean M. Kelly

THE TENSION BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT IN THE CHORUS OF ELECTRA:

SOPHOCLES AND STRAUSS

Abstract

by

Sean M. Kelly

This thesis examines the dismantling of the chorus’ functions in Sophocles’

Electra in Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss’ opera adaptation of the play in

order to demonstrate that this action reflects Hofmannsthal’s personal literary crisis,

which involved the tension between literary tradition and innovation.

The first chapter explores the classical Greek tragic chorus as a locus of societal

and civic tension, and then traces the development of the chorus in the context of opera in

order to show that this structural element of the genre is in fact the inheritor of these

tensions, which stem from competing interpretations of past and present within the civic

and ritualized context of classical Greek tragic performances.

The second chapter then offers a comparative analysis of Sophocles’ play and

Hofmannsthal’s libretto, citing Freudian psychoanalysis as a formative context for

Hofmannsthal’s innovation and subsequent representation of his own literary crisis.

The final chapter examines the musical formulae of Strauss’ score in order to

demonstrate that they highlight the literary innovations that Hofmannsthal has made,

Sean M. Kelly

focusing on the extreme isolation of the heroine and the competing forces of past and

present within the work.

ii

CONTENTS

Figures................................................................................................................................ iii

Introduction..........................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1: The Diachronic Chorus: Greek Origins and Operatic Contexts.........................4

Chapter 2: Hofmannsthal’s Dismantling of the Chorus and the Effect on Elektra ............23

Chapter 3: “Ob ich die Musik nicht höre? Sie kommt doch aus mir.”: The Music ofIsolation ....................................................................................................................48

Works Cited .......................................................................................................................67

iii

FIGURES

Figure 1. The Agamemnon motive. ...................................................................................50

Figure 2. The maids’ sympathy motive. ............................................................................53

Figure 3. The motive of retribution....................................................................................56

Figure 4. The axe motive. ..................................................................................................58

Figure 5. The children motive............................................................................................59

Figure 6. Elektra’s will motive. .........................................................................................60

1

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this project has been to examine Richard Strauss’ 1909 opera Elektra,

with libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, with respect to the notable lack of a chorus in

the Viennese playwright’s adaptation of the Greek drama by Sophocles. Opera as a genre

was conceived of, three centuries earlier, as a rebirth of Classical Greek tragedy.

Therefore the absence in this work, of the chorus, a central structural element of the

ancient genre, is significant and ought to be explained by examining the cultural and

historical contexts in which the work was created as well as by careful consideration of

the work itself. This particular example is noteworthy because this opera represents a

return to classicism in the modern era within a genre which has explicit classicizing roots.

This classicism, as will become apparent below, and as is central to this study, is not a

conservative force but rather one which generates innovation and novelty, both at the

birth of the genre and at each of its subsequent rebirths.

The main two methodologies employed in the pursuit of this project have been

historical inquiry and close reading of the opera libretto and score for the sake of

comparative analysis with the original play by Sophocles. The first chapter contemplates

the historical development of the chorus in its two relevant contexts. First, the primacy

and longevity of the chorus as a civic and social institution in the Greek world is

explicated. This discussion includes an analysis of the functions of dramatic choruses,

and specifically those in the plays by Sophocles that survive. Next, the origins of the

2

operatic genre are laid out to demonstrate that this specific cultural production was

intended to be a recreation of classical Greek drama, complete with notions of what the

chorus should be and how it should function. These conceptions are then traced from

these operatic origins down to fin-de-siècle Vienna in order to illuminate the context of

the chorus for Strauss and Hofmannsthal at the time of their collaboration on Elektra. It

will be demonstrated that the chorus in opera was in fact the cause of much tension

between competing interpretations, some based on readings of Athenian tragedy, and

others based on the disjointed choral interludes of New Comedy.1

The second chapter then closely examines the libretto of Elektra next to

Sophocles’ text in order to explicate what exactly Hofmannsthal has done with the

chorus. First, a few of the disparate functions of Sophocles’ chorus are explained, and

then it is shown that Hofmannsthal has dealt with these functions individually,

dismantling, rather than deleting, the Greek chorus. Freudian psychoanalysis aids in this

dismantling and provides a frame not only in which Hofmannsthal is able to characterize

Elektra and Chrysothemis, but also one that reflects the poetic crisis in which

Hofmannsthal found himself around the turn of the twentieth century, at once self-

consciously constrained by and desiring to be free from the influence of his literary

predecessors, including Sophocles. This crisis of originality finds its expression in the

way that Hofmannsthal has dealt with the chorus, a prime candidate for such expression

since the chorus as an institution, as shown in the first chapter, was a contentious subject

for the creators of opera.

1 For Renaissance interpretations of New Comic choruses, see Savage (2013). For a brief moderntreatment of the chorus in New Comedy, see Hughes (2012) 223-5.

3

The third chapter then looks closely at Strauss’ score for Elektra, highlighting the

way that motivic formulae reflect the literary concerns expounded in the first two

chapters. The shifting tonal landscape of the piece, upon close examination, underscores

the isolation of Elektra which is a direct result of the dismantling of the Greek chorus and

which is reflected in the text that the heroine sings. The motivic formulae – especially the

most famous example, the Agamemnon motive – also serve to highlight Elektra’s

isolation and her mental state, as well as that of others, especially Chrysothemis and

Klytämnestra. Thus this project will show that the treatment of the chorus in the 1909

adaptation of Sophocles’ drama is fundamentally significant for the work, having been a

pivotal issue on which Hofmannsthal’s personal literary concerns played out and shaped

the rest of the work. Far from being discarded completely, Sophocles’ missing chorus is

an integral formative force and hermeneutic frame for Hugo von Hofmannsthal and

Richard Strauss’ Elektra.

4

CHAPTER 1:

THE DIACHRONIC CHORUS: GREEK ORIGINS AND OPERATIC CONTEXTS

The origins of the chorus are ancient and obscure even by classical Greek

standards, and the cultural significance for the Greeks of groups of people singing and

dancing in unison is difficult to overstate. This first chapter will set forth the evidence for

these claims, showing that choruses were a significant part of Greek life several centuries

before the chorus of Sophocles’ Electra took the floor in the Athenian theater, and that

the chorus as an institution was of central significance to the normal activity of Greek

communities in the areas of religion and education, both of which were fundamentally

intertwined with the Greek conception of the operations of states. This cultural

significance is amplified by what is perhaps the most famous context for Greek choruses,

the classical Athenian dramatic theater. The functions of the tragic chorus have been the

subject of much scholarly thought, and little consensus has been reached on the matter.

Despite the common tension present in all instances of the dramatic choruses between the

giving of voice to disenfranchised groups and the expected civic participation by young

adult men, the functions of dramatic choruses vary greatly between the three tragedians

whose work survives, and indeed even between plays within the individual canons. To

that end this section will also explore the functions of Sophoclean choruses specifically,

paying special mind to Cynthia Gardiner’s volume The Sophoclean Chorus. This will set

the stage for a consideration of the functions of the chorus in Electra at the beginning of

5

the next chapter, and in order to demonstrate its participation in a Sophoclean model of

chorality, the functions of which are central to the discussion below of Hofmannsthal’s

treatment of the chorus of Electra.

Following this section on the Greek chorus, this chapter will examine the history

of the operatic genre as it relates specifically to the institutions of classical Athenian

tragedy, beginning with its conception as an art form around the end of the sixteenth

century in Medici Florence. It will be significant at this point to make a distinction

between the influence of Greek models of theater on the development of opera as an art

form and Greek models of theatrical subject matter on the content of early operas. Both

are significant for contextualizing the work of Strauss and Hofmannsthal, engaged at

once in the overarching tradition of operatic composition, and also in the specific vein of

operatic adaptations of Greek source material. Thus this chapter will look both at the

development of the institution of the chorus in opera diachronically up to the time of

Elektra’s composition and at the prior examples of operatic adaptation of Greek content

that formed the tradition in which Hofmannsthal and Strauss created their work. These

two lineages converged in fin-de-siècle Vienna, a hotbed of intellectual innovation and

creation remarkably similar to the circumstances of Medici Florence around 1600, in a

time in which the chorus could justifiably either be removed entirely or configured to be

as faithful a representation of the ancient dramatic chorus as possible. It is this tension in

the traditions surrounding the operatic chorus at the time of Hofmannsthal’s creation of

the libretto which made it a natural locus for the expression of his own literary crisis, the

results of which played a fundamental role in shaping the characters of the opera and

which are therefore represented in the music of the piece.

6

The performances of choruses in the Greek world are attested long before the

famous groups on the Athenian tragic stage made their first appearances. T.B.L. Webster,

in his 1970 book The Greek Chorus, surveys much evidence for the existence and

prevalence of choruses in the Greek world from before the Archaic period through to the

rule of the Roman Empire.2 This evidence begins with depictions of choruses, primarily

agricultural, on pottery from Crete dating to the 16th century BCE. This material

evidence continues to be substantial through the late Geometric period into the Archaic

period. At this point, as Yana Zarifi has pointed out, literary references are being made

frequently to choruses, especially those of the gods and celestial bodies.3 Webster also

treats the literary evidence for the chorus as an institution, but his concerns are directed

more at the uses and implications of meter for an understanding of ancient dance than is

helpful for the present study.4 Suffice it to say that the literary evidence for the existence

of choruses is even more abundant than the material sources, which make clear that the

setting up and performing of choruses was, even for the Greeks, an ancient practice that

persisted through many centuries of Greek life.

The evidence that choral activity was such an ancient practice is compelling in

light of the nature of much choral activity from the archaic and classical periods. Claude

Calame’s 1997 volume, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece, remains an

authoritative work in the field, and his survey provides several helpful case studies for

examining the antiquity and character of many Greek choral traditions. The most

2 Webster (1970) 1-45.

3 Zarifi (2007) 228.

4 Webster (1970) 46-199.

7

prevalent choruses in the Greek world were those attached to cult worship, and Calame

also points out that music and dancing are integral parts of archaic and classical

representations of the gods. Here Zarifi’s analysis is helpful, who points out that “when

the Greeks project dance onto cosmos, deity, and nature, this is a symptom of the social

centrality of their dancing.”5 One significant trend appears in the context of female

choruses: young girls throughout the Greek world dance and sing most often for Artemis

and Apollo, while young women perform in the worship of Aphrodite and Hera, and

finally mature women celebrate the rites of Dionysus and Demeter. Calame is right to

point out that this progression is intentional and specific; the age of the choral

participants reflects their devotion to each of these gods.6 Artemis and Apollo are the

protectors of the youth; as a woman begins her transition from maiden to wife, her

patrons are Aphrodite and Hera, being newly engaged in sexual affairs; finally, the grown

woman who has had her children is essential for the maenadic rites of Dionysus, as well

as the rites for the motherly Demeter. Calame asserts that this progression reflects a kind

of tribal initiation sequence, in which the various stages of a female Greek’s life are

marked by significant ritual practice that seems always to revolve around participation in

choruses. The model of tribal initiation is a helpful frame through which to view these

acts, if only because it highlights their very ancient nature. It is unlikely that a precise and

regimented system of ritual worship that is explicitly tied to the stages of participation in

the community would develop overnight; surely the practice of marking life events with

5 Zarifi (2007) 228.

6 Calame (1997) 258-63.

8

choruses must be older than the first extant examples, which date back as far as the early

archaic period.

In addition to its ritual context, choral activity was one of the primary forms, if

not the singular primary institution for education in the archaic period.7 Particularly

relevant and recognizable are two of the examples Calame cites. The first comes from

Plato who says in his Laws that the ideal system of education involves instruction in

traditional songs and dance, because this provides young men with not only a structure

akin to the order of a well-organized city, but also an introduction to the beautiful as a

gateway toward higher understanding and thus good governance.8 The question then is

whether Plato is drawing upon a contemporary function of choral participation or one that

he has made up as an alternative to his own present. Aristophanes, the second of

Calame’s examples, proves helpful for resolving this concern. In the Clouds, the main

tension is between the old and new forms of schooling, and several times throughout the

comedy there is reference to the old method of teaching as involving the memorization

and repetition of traditional songs and dances.9 It would seem that within the cultural

memory of Aristophanes’ time, the primary mode of education had been at one point

participation in traditional choruses, which consisted in a significant way of cult worship

and civic rituals. This makes sense given that Plato must then have drawn upon an

established practice with a distinctly civic character for his model of education. His

advocacy is in part a return to an idealized past, in which boys are educated by

7 Calame (1997) 221-43.

8 See especially Plat. Leg. 654e, 657a, 659dff., and 655aff.

9 Aristoph. Nub. 964ff. and 1054ff.

9

performing sacred ritual choruses that are integral to the structure of the society, being

grounded in its religious roots.

The most famous examples of the choral tradition are contained in the surviving

tragedies from the three great Athenian playwrights. John Gould and Simon Goldhill, in

Michael Silk’s seminal volume Tragedy and the Tragic, provide a useful perspective on

the tragic chorus for the purposes of this paper, dealing with the chorus’ collective

identity and its relation to the creation of meaning in tragic performance. The tragic

chorus always represents groups from the fringes of society.10 Most notable is the large

number of choruses with a collective female character, approximately 70% of the

choruses from all extant tragedies. These groups represent the speaking out and direct

political involvement of a group which was not afforded that opportunity in the normal

operations of the polis: women. The chorus of women in Sophocles’ Electra are thus able

to explicitly side with the heroine against her mother and Aegisthus, while the maidens of

the Seven Against Thebes can challenge Eteocles even as he is marshalling the troops to

defend the city. Seven of the 21 female choruses are made up of slaves. Thus an even

further marginalized group is given a voice through the vehicle of the tragic chorus. The

slaves in Aeschylus’ treatment of the Electra myth can side with the heroine just as do the

maidens in Sophocles’ version. This is even more striking when we consider that

Aeschylus’ treatment was written first. When the choruses are male, 70% of the time they

are elderly men, and these men are intentionally ineffectual. The aged Argive men in the

Agamemnon are those who have remained home from the Trojan War because they are

10 Many scholars have written extensively on this subject and the inherent tension that is the resultof choral identity, explored below, including Gould, Goldhill, Winkler (1990), and Foley (2003).

10

too old for military service, and we must imagine this to mean significant age in a world

in which a man’s political and social prime coincided with glorious military

accomplishment. That is, these men are so old as to have lost civic agency, and they are a

prime example of the kinds of men that make up tragic choruses.

Thus we come to a central tension in the choral performances in tragedy of the

classical period: choruses are marginalized groups given voice and sometimes even

agency. This is problematic for a highly hierarchical slave-keeping society, and it is made

even more problematic by the fact that these re-enfranchised groups were portrayed by

citizen men. Theatrical performance was as compulsory as military service, and thus all

young men participated in the staging of tragedies. This at once legitimizes and highlights

the tension at hand. On the one hand, the representation of marginalized groups was an

integral structural element for what was viewed as a necessary civic process; on the other

hand, young men dressed as slave girls or as old men having lost all of their political

agency highlighted the anxieties of the citizen body: thoughts about the potential power

of slaves and women, and about the inevitability of aging and the subsequent loss of

power. Thus from as early as the classical period the chorus as an institution carried

connotations of problematic and tension-riddled identity. This tension inherent in the

practice of choral performance is the precursor to a similar crisis of function in the

development of opera, which would eventually set the stage for Hofmannsthal’s

dismantling of Sophocles’ chorus in the libretto for Elektra.

Having identified this programmatic tension in the institution of the dramatic

chorus, it is possible now to turn to the Sophoclean chorus specifically. Especially helpful

for any consideration of Sophocles’ choruses as a discrete unit is Cynthia Gardiner’s The

11

Sophoclean Chorus. Gardiner writes against a backdrop of scholarship that for much of

the past several centuries has regarded tragic choruses as dismissible as far as their

relation to the dramatic elements of the dramas. After Schlegel the chorus was for a long

time regarded as an “ideal spectator,” commenting on and reacting to, rather than

engaging in, the dramatic narratives of the plays.11 This notion has been rejected in favor

of readings of the utterances of choruses as significant to the dramatic arc of each play.

Indeed Gardiner shows that the choruses of Sophocles’ dramas have stable, if dynamic,

characters and are integral to the action of the tragedies in which they appear.12 Gardiner

proves this thesis convincingly, noting the ways in which Sophocles characterizes his

choruses in a similar fashion to his principals.13 That Gardiner felt compelled to write this

book in the first place, however, is indicative of the uncertainty about the role of the

chorus, hinted at above, which was highly influential in the development of the operatic

genre. There was no consensus about the primary function of the dramatic chorus, and

this uncertainty can in fact be traced back to the tension, explored above, inherent in

choral identity in classical Greek drama. This tension existed between the actors’ civic

and dramatic identities. On the one hand, if their civic identity is more important, then the

chorus becomes a purely structural element within tragedy, based in ritual and external to

the production of meaning within the plays themselves. On the other hand, if the dramatic

identity of the chorus is more important, then it is involved in the production of meaning

within the drama and not as a purely structural element.

11 See Gardiner (1987) 2, n.2 for an account of this idea in German scholarship especially.

12 Gardiner (1987), especially 186-92.

13 Gardiner (1987), 179-84.

12

This notion that the Greek chorus was potentially not integral to the creation of

meaning within the ancient dramas became significant during the end of the Renaissance

period and the beginnings of the operatic genre. Toward the end of the sixteenth century

intellectuals gathered at the home of Giovanni de Bardi regularly in a group that would

later be referred to by one of its members as the “Florentine Camerata.”14 The group was

largely dissatisfied with the state of artistic production, especially musical, at the time in

Italy, and sought to find ways to improve the music, and thus the culture, of their era. The

agreed course of action was to seek to revive the ancient drama of the Greeks, which the

members of the Camerata believed to be entirely sung.15 They believed that in classical

Athens there had been no distinction between poetry and music, and that the greatest

expression of the blending of these two artistic productions was in one of the most

famous legacies of the Greeks: the theater.16 Creators such as Peri, Monteverdi, and

Rinuccini therefore sought to recreate the musical dramas of the Greeks, composing

dramatic texts in verse to be through-sung in theaters modelled after Greek theaters.17 In

attempting to recreate this art form, the group in fact created something new, and it is

most accurate to label this new mode of production as the invention of recitative, the style

14 The name was first used by Caccini in the dedication of his score for L’Euridice. It is also worthmentioning that it is reductive and in fact incorrect to attribute the invention of opera wholly to theFlorentine Camerata, especially in light of the fact that the first operas were produced by a group gatheredaround Jacopo Corsi, a fierce rival of Bardi. It is more accurate to point to the Florentine Camerata as asingle representation of a larger phenomenon of its contemporary artistic culture. Thus the ideas of groupssuch as this one, rather than the group itself, were the birthplace of opera. For more on this, see Palisca(1968) and Pirrotta (1982).

15 On this belief of the Camerata and its inaccuracy, see Savage (2010) 2-3.

16 On the Camerata’s conception of musical production in their own words see Vincenzo Gallilei’streatise Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna.

17 On the architectural impact of the Greek model, see Savage (2010) 14-21.

13

of singing that operatic composers utilize to imitate expressive speech patterns, typically

featuring many notes in fairly quick succession and a limited melodic range. This new

monodic mode of singing that blurred the lines between heightened speech and song

became the standard for composers of the earliest operas, and remained for several

centuries the vehicle for dramatic action within the genre. The earliest arias were, in

contrast, more lyrical and song-like sections that gave characters the opportunity to voice

their emotions and psychological states independent of the dramatic time of the piece,

and these would eventually develop into set-pieces within the genre. These methods of

composition became popularized as the Baroque era dawned; musical production was

now self-consciously derivative, and its relationship to its source material was complex.

As mentioned above, the Italians at the court of Bardi were of course not successful in

recreating exactly ancient drama; their attempts to do so resulted in an entirely new form

of theater, and its relationship to its inspiration bears some investigation and explanation.

Within this complex relationship between artistic predecessor and derivation, and

of particular relevance to the present study, are two significant topics: the utilization of

ancient Greek and Roman subject matter for the content of operas, and the role of the

ancient chorus in the production of music drama. Indeed the earliest operas were more

often than not based on classical themes; the first known opera is Ottavio Rinuccini and

Jacopo Peri’s Dafne in 1598, followed in 1600 by Peri’s Euridice. This trend continued to

the end of the Renaissance, with Monteverdi, one of the most influential operatic

composers of the first half of the seventeenth century, composing works such as Orfeo

(1607) and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643). The reliance of early operatic composers

on classical sources for their content is perhaps not surprising, given that these artists

14

were those who had participated in the original discussions about attempting to revitalize

Greek drama. Since the music and stage conventions of the Greeks were so desirable as

to warrant attempts at honest replication, the subjects of those ancient dramas must also

have been worth representing. The opera’s earliest incarnations were honest recreations

of ancient drama at least in the sense of material. Euridices, Alcestises, and Orpheuses

crowded the late Renaissance Italian stage, pretending to have stepped straight out of the

ancient Greek world.

While the inheritance of heroes and heroines from the ancient world was at least

presented as linear and uncomplicated, the representation on the operatic stage of the

Greek chorus was far less straightforward. Already in the decade before 1600 competing

interpretations of the nature and purpose of the chorus muddled the issue of how best to

utilize what was only sometimes recognized as a structural element of the ancient art

form. Ottavio Rinuccini, for example, seems to have wished to faithfully represent the

ancient chorus as a dramatic element in his libretti for the earliest operas. To that end,

“the anonymous nymphs and shepherds of his Dafne are constant in their presence and

sympathy, and the attendant fisherfolk in Arianna even rise to something of a classical

kommos by interspersing the heroine’s lament with their expressions of concern.”18 Thus

from its earliest realization opera included a tradition of representing the chorus as based

faithfully upon readings of the ancient Greek models.19 This did not, however, remain the

18 Savage (2010) 22.

19 This is not to say that Rinuccini was engaged in critical analysis of the role of the ancient chorusin drama, but rather that he at least attempted to recreate the chorus as far as he perceived it. Certainly thereare many examples of sympathetic choruses in the Greek canon (such as in the play considered in thisstudy), and the kommos was a common practice among the three Greek tragedians. Rinuccini’srepresentations were thus superficially faithful if not literary-critical.

15

norm in early operatic composition. While Savage is perhaps reductive in his assessment

of the “reflective, philosophizing stance that could characterize Greek tragic choruses,”

he is nevertheless right in pointing out that the choruses of early opera which frequently

left the stage and reentered as different groups, now farmers and now demonic spirits,

now satyrs and now soldiers, were of a very different kind than those of the ancients.20

While some creators of opera in its first few decades did make use of the coro stabile, a

group with a fixed identity, remaining onstage for the duration of the performance, this

practice died out rather quickly and was replaced by these newer, more fluid choruses.

Savage and others have pointed out that the abandonment of Greek models of stable

choral identity is linked to the prevalence during the late Renaissance and early Baroque

periods of intermedi, spectacular, extra-topical performances between the acts of larger,

coherent dramatic works. This interpretation is supported by the notion, stemming from

the ancient tension within the chorus, that choral performance was not central to the

production of meaning within a given work. Even while Rinuccini was writing parts for

consistent choruses of the Greek kind, other librettists and composers were utilizing the

institution of the chorus to create intermedi within their larger dramatic works, such as

Chiabrera’s Il rapimento di Cefalo.21 Thus at its inception the operatic genre contained a

tension that was nothing new to the practice of staging choruses. Just as the Greeks had

experienced their own tensions about the appropriate functions of and engagement in

choral performances, so did the first creators of opera. The chorus was representative of

20 Savage (2010) 22. Cf. also Savage (2013). Moreover, these early operatic choruses were allsung in harmony, rather than in the monophonic unison of the ancient performances.

21 Savage (2013) 120.

16

both the ancient tradition from which opera ostensibly took its justification and the

novelty of the resulting genre itself. Past and present were at odds in a structural element

of the art form, and this conflict continued throughout the development of the genre.

The Baroque period saw these trends complicated yet further, especially with

opera’s spread from Italy across the European continent. Particularly illustrative of this

era’s developments are the life and work of Jean-Baptiste Lully, who composed at the

court of Louis XIV at Versailles in the second half of the seventeenth century. Lully’s

operatic works became the standard for French Baroque opera. They were referred to as

tragédies en musique, had verse libretti, and nearly always treated classical subjects.

From 1673 to 1683 he composed works inspired by the myths of Cadmus and Hermione,

Alcestis, Theseus, Atys, Isis, Psyche, Bellerophon, Proserpina, Perseus, and Phaethon.

His persistence in choosing classical mythic figures as the subjects of his operas, as well

as his crafting of libretti in verse in order to marry poetry and song, clearly demonstrate

his devotion to and intentional preservation of the Florentine school which had inspired

the operatic genre and which had its roots in classicizing intentions. Indeed not only did

Lully choose to represent Greek myths in his tragédies en musique, but his compositional

methods even recall those of his Florentine predecessors, especially Monteverdi.22 This

devout preservation, however, trailed off at the end of Lully’s career. His final four

operas, with the exception of his last, Achille et Polyxène, which he himself did not

complete, were not based on classical myth but rather turned toward stories of knights

and courtiers. This departure is in fact indicative of a larger trend in operatic production

22 On this relationship of compositional practice, see Kerman (1988) 41.

17

of the Baroque period. In the decades leading up to 1700 composers began to turn

elsewhere for their material. Purcell composed The Fairy Queen, Handel premiered

Radamisto, and in 1728 John Gay turned the genre on its head with The Beggar’s Opera.

The reliance of the Renaissance on Greek myth for the content of operas was gone.

This development in the sourcing of operatic material was in fact symptomatic of

the generation of a new sub-genre that grew out of the Venetian school: that which the

Italians described as opera seria. This new style of opera, which did, as its name implies,

tend to treat grave subjects of weighty import, saw changes in compositional style as well

as content. Kerman, speaking of the contrasts between the French court opera of Lully

and his Italian contemporaries, writes of this period that “Venetian opera…had

completely eliminated the chorus.”23 Indeed the chorus had all but disappeared from

Italian opera in the Baroque period as a result of musical innovations. While Lully’s

tragédies en musique had preserved recitative as the focus of the art form in the absence

of fully-fledged arias, composers in the Venetian camp had developed the aria into a set-

piece which functioned as they perceived the ancient Greek choruses to have done. Arias

replaced the choral odes which early composers used simply to frame dramatic episodes

and in order to break up the action of the drama. “The alternation of recitative-scene and

time-arresting aria in opera seria was a happy mutation out of the alternation of sung

dramatic episode and meditative choral lyric in ancient tragedy,” and so choruses were

done away with entirely.24 Even in Lully, who preserved the chorus in his operatic works,

his devotion to the institution was most probably only a byproduct of the fact that “the

23 Kerman (1988) 41.

24 Savage (2013) 123.

18

weight of his opera shifted toward...‘le merveilleux.’”25 Thus even when the chorus was

preserved it was not in its own right, but only for its virtue as a spectacle, since a

multitude of singers in ornate costumes pleased the French courts greatly. The influence

of Greek antiquity on the genre seemed to have faded almost entirely by the end of the

Baroque period.

The Classical period of opera is in fact where a consideration of the tradition of

adapting Greek plots in the centuries leading up to Strauss might stop. Moreover, in

considering the Classical period and its place in the developments being traced here, it is

possible to discuss entirely the work of one man: Christoph Willibald Gluck. This is

especially true because, as will be outlined below, Gluck had a direct and substantial

influence on the German school of operatic production in the time leading up to Strauss’

career. Gluck was an international success: his operas premiered in Milan, Vienna,

London, Prague, and Paris, among other locales. He became the icon of a new movement

within opera that began definitively with his reform opera Alceste in 1767. Dissatisfied

with the artistic products of the Baroque era, Gluck turned back once more to the Greeks

for inspiration, and there he found the material for nearly all of the eleven operas he

completed after Alceste. Despite the resurgence of classical subjects in this one composer,

whose works were, in fact, monumentally popular, this development did not take hold in

a significant way in the rest of the Classical period or in the Romantic era which

followed. Gluck’s Greek operas were some of the last significant operatic adaptations of

Greek myth before Strauss’ work on Elektra. The contributions made by Gluck’s works

25 Kerman (1988) 42.

19

are therefore of great importance for understanding the artistic context of Strauss’ own

work.

One of the most important contributions of these works was their influence on the

other trend being traced here: the shaping and use of the chorus, especially significant in

this instance because the two strands have been recombined. Gluck’s Greek chorus was

revolutionary; unlike the static hierarchical groups bound to the edges of the stage that

had become the standard for choruses in French court opera, Gluck’s choruses were

imbued with movement. This movement and involvement in the drama was lauded as

recapturing the spirit of ancient theater and widely regarded even in Gluck’s own time as

integral to the development of the operatic genre.26 Indeed his intention in reshaping the

operatic chorus thus was to present once more a nuanced understanding of Greek theater

as the artistic progenitor of opera. Roger Savage has noted the similarities of Gluck’s

chorus in Iphigénie en Tauride with that of Rinuccini’s Arianna.27 The chorus was once

more active and mobile, part of the drama itself rather than distinct from the action. In

justification of this view, the members of the Florentine Camerata were fond of citing

Aristotle’s and Horace’s mentions of the integrity of the chorus in their treatises on

poetics.28 The chorus seemed, to those seeking to maintain opera as the descendant of

Greek tragedy, to have once again found its proper expression. Nevertheless, this

achievement, centered as it was on an institution whose history was tumultuous and

riddled with tension and uncertainty, was not to last, as the enormous choruses of French

26 Goldhill (2010) 217-8.

27 Savage (2013) 129.

28 ibid. 118 n.3.

20

grand opera overwhelmed Gluck’s classical reproductions and, more to the point for this

study, Romantic composers such as Richard Wagner did away with them entirely.

Wagner, the most important German composer of the nineteenth century, is

himself the last piece of the puzzle which must be fit into place in order to consider

accurately Strauss’ engagement with Greek models of drama and the chorus as an

institution. Wagner’s interaction with Greek antiquity has been the subject of countless

studies, beginning in his own lifetime with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, which praises

Tristan und Isolde as the pinnacle of the realization of Greek ideals of artistic

production.29 This initial praise, however, was qualified by Nietzsche himself later in life

as being compelled more by personal opinion than by any scholarly method of

investigation.30 Wolfgang Schadewaldt, on the other hand, with an eye toward German

classical scholarship, carefully noted Wagner’s readings of and close engagement with

Greek material.31 The investigation from that point on has only grown, being at times

colored by Wagnerian fanaticism and at others by anti-Wagnerian sentiments, and

continues to be explored to this day.32 Of particular import for the present study, however,

is the relationship of Wagner to Gluck, and this relationship is explicated well by Simon

Goldhill in his 2013 article “Who Killed Gluck?” in Ancient Drama in Music for the

Modern Stage. Goldhill shows that Wagner’s reworking of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride

29 This is particularly interesting given that Nietzsche, also in the Birth of Tragedy, cites the chorusas the locus of the extremely important Dionysian element of Greek drama, and Wagner had done awaywith the chorus entirely.

30 On the debate over this topic between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, see Dreyfus(2013) 226.

31 Dreyfus (2013) 226.

32 For example, see on this topic Drews (1980), Ewans (1982), and Lee (2003).

21

especially is programmatic for Wagner’s engagement with the classical past.33

Recognizing Gluck’s accomplishments in revitalizing his own vision of Greek antiquity,

Wagner appropriated and reshaped that production to suit his very different vision of

antiquity, and in doing so reawakened the mass of competing interpretations of the Greek

world which had seemed to have been quelled by Gluck’s work. Because of Wagner the

adaptation of Greek models was again fair game as a method for defining the operatic

genre against its ancestor art from.

One of the most significant areas in which Wagner’s work makes clear this

reawakened potential for interpretation is his engagement with the Greek chorus, which

has been the subject of much scholarship in recent years.34 Wagner, like Gluck before

him, having become dissatisfied with the state of operatic production in his era, sought to

reinvigorate the art form through the revival of ancient Greek models. Central to this

project was Wagner’s conception of the chorus, which he regarded on the one hand as a

marker of the shortcomings of contemporary operatic production and on the other as a

legitimizing Greek practice.35 Here again did the tension inherent in the chorus which had

troubled operatic creators since the genre’s inception rear its head, and Wagner once

more threw open wide the doors of possibility when he chose to move the voice of the

chorus from singers to the orchestra. Thus he showed once more that the questions which

had initially concerned the Florentine Camerata about how best to appropriate the styles

and structures of Greek theater were still open to yet unexplored possibilities, and it was

33 Goldhill (2013) 230-2.

34 See especially Laurence Dreyfus’ article in Choruses, Ancient and Modern.

35 Dreyfus (2013) 227-8.

22

this demonstration, in combination with his reproblematization of Greek content, which

set the stage for Hofmannsthal and Strauss to explore their own solutions in Elektra.

23

CHAPTER 2:

HOFMANNSTHAL’S DISMANTLING OF THE CHORUS AND THE EFFECT ON

ELEKTRA

The functions of the chorus in Sophocles’ Electra have been the subject of many

studies in the past half-century. Adams asserted the importance that the chorus

“sympathize with Electra,” highlighting the closeness of their relationship.36 In addition

to this amicability, he points out that the chorus primarily throughout the drama

encourage what they consider to be right action, which is at odds with Electra’s excessive

mourning and desire for revenge: “They have never condoned her behavior. But they

would comfort her.”37 Burton, in his 1980 volume, develops the idea of the chorus as

advisors and agents of justice while leaving to the side the amicable relationship between

the women and Electra. For Burton the chorus’ main functions are to “advise and exhort

[Electra] with some appearance of authority,” to be the “mouthpiece of a fundamental

theme of the play, the certainty of justice,” as well as “to urge…the need for ε σ βεια

and προμηθ α…to hold the balance between contestants in passionate debate…[and] to

act as a bridge between characters in the grasp of intense emotion.”38 Burton’s

36 Adams (1957) 65.

37 ibid. 72.

38 Burton (1980) 186-7.

24

recognition of the chorus as a kind of bridge between characters is essential for the

present study, but helpfully contextualized by later developments in the scholarship.

Gardiner in 1987 is the first to emphasize fully the friendship between Electra and the

chorus and their interest in tempering her grief and providing relief because of that

relationship.39 Finally, in recent years scholars have begun to explore the relationship

between the chorus and time. Kyriakou, in her volume dedicated to the topic of time in

tragedy, points out that the chorus of Electra has a unique relationship with mythological

time, being the only characters to invoke the distant mythic past,40 and Dudouyt observes

the function of the Greek tragic chorus to create the “rhythmic suspension of narrative

time.”41 These two observations contribute to a picture of the chorus of Greek tragedy as

having a special relationship with dramatic time, and it is this general function, coupled

with the amicable nature of the chorus of Electra, which serves as the foundation for the

present study.

The chorus of Sophocles’ Electra thus serves, among others, two distinct but

interrelated primary functions. First, they represent the negotiation between the mythic

and dramatic past of the work and the tragic present. This is not to say that they are the

only characters in the drama that interact with the dramatic past; indeed Electra’s

obsession with the past comprises the primary tension of the tragedy. I will argue,

however, that the chorus are able to react appropriately to the past and incorporate this

appropriate reaction into their dealings in the tragic present. Further, I suggest that it is

39 Gardiner (1987) 142-4.

40 Kyriakou (2011) 339-42.

41 Dudouyt (2013) 204.

25

the nature of the institution of the chorus, grounded in the cultural and literary past of the

very genre of tragedy,42 which makes this ease of temporal negotiation a natural part of

the chorus’ character. The impact of this aspect of the chorus is determined by the other

function on which my paper focuses: I argue that they are Electra’s closest companions

throughout the work. Electra is in many ways isolated from those around her, most

notably because of her obsession with the traumatic events of her past and her rejection

of others. This results in a kind of temporal isolation; Electra is not able and is in fact not

even interested in participating fully in the dramatic present. She would rather continue to

mourn her murdered father ceaselessly (S. El. 103-4). Indeed her most protracted and

significant action in the dramatic present, her lament over the urn which supposedly

contains the ashes of Orestes, is problematic for two reasons. First, this lament is merely

the reenactment of her ongoing lament for Agamemnon and thus an echo of her past

rather than true present action, and second, the dramatic present in which she is engaged

is not the reality of the drama; Orestes still lives, and thus her mourning for him is

removed from the true progression of the action. The chorus, however, able to easily

negotiate the bridge between past and present and sympathetic toward Electra, is in the

perfect position in which to advise and gently admonish Electra throughout the drama. By

their agency, indeed by their friendship, Electra’s difficulty with her dealings in the

dramatic present are mitigated and she is able to participate in the progression of the story

actively, less constrained by her obsession with the past than she would have been

without the aid of the chorus of Argive women.

42 On this point see the introduction in Swift (2010) as well as the fourth chapter of Calame(1997).

26

In Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Sophocles’ work for the libretto of

Richard Strauss’ operatic treatment, Elektra, first produced in 1909, the chorus has been

dismantled.43 Hofmannsthal, writing for opera, a genre that for most of its history featured

a prominent chorus directly inherited from the Greek dramatic tradition,44 and having

deleted the group of chorus women from the drama, faced a choice about their most

significant functions in the Sophoclean drama. He could choose to reject those functions

outright or to redistribute them in other parts of his adaptation. Hofmannsthal chose to do

away with their function as the companions of Elektra45 entirely. Not only is the chorus

no longer present to interact with the heroine as they had been in Sophocles’ treatment,

but their companionship is not replaced by that of anyone else in the opera. Certainly

Klytämnestra and Aegisth are not suitable companions for Elektra, and we are told in the

opening scene that she has violently rejected the company of the five maids who open the

opera and constitute the closest thing to a chorus in the work. Though they never sing

together as one might expect a true chorus to do, it is possible that Hofmannsthal, in

writing their parts and Elektra’s subsequent rejection of them, meant for audiences to

identify them as a kind of chorus and thus recognize his symbolic dismissal of them from

the stage, when they all exit, not to return until the very end of the piece, in order to

43 It is worth noting that Sophocles would not have been the sole influence on Hofmannsthal’slibretto, especially in such a literary culture as fin de siècle Vienna, but this paper will focus on therelationship between the Greek drama and his work. For example, on Hofmannsthal and his sources for theDance of Death and motif of the femme fatale, see Scott (2005).

44 On this see Savage (2013).

45 In order to differentiate easily between characters of the ancient drama and the opera,Sophocles’ characters will be rendered with modern English spelling, while Hofmannsthal’s will retaintheir German spelling. This leaves Chrysothemis and Agamemnon, whose names are the same in bothcases, and for them the differentiation will be made explicit.

27

mirror his own rejection of the chorus as a dramatic tool. Chrysothemis and Orest, who

might be thought of as the natural choices for Elektra’s closest companions, and who

indeed both attempt to offer her some form of supportive relationship, are rejected by the

heroine. Without her only companions, Elektra is made to deal with the other primary

function of the Sophoclean chorus by herself, namely the navigation of dramatic time as

she imagines and reimagines her father’s brutal murder throughout the opera. The result

is that Elektra is in fact unable to fulfill this function in the same way the chorus did for

her in Sophocles’ treatment; she becomes stuck in time, grounded wholly in the past. This

psychological characteristic is inverted in her sister, Chrysothemis, and contextualized by

an implied diagnosis of Freudian hysteria, an idea with which Hofmannsthal was

intimately familiar, writing during a notably Freudian era of German literary composition

(see below). Thus Hofmannsthal’s dismantling of the chorus and subsequent treatment of

their distinct functions has significant ramifications for the characterization of his

dramatic heroine, which takes the form of the cultural material available to Hofmannsthal

at the time in which he wrote.

A study such as this, which seeks to illuminate aspects of the influence of one

work upon another, necessitates a theoretical framework within which to consider the

relationships between texts, authors, and audiences and how those relationships

contribute to meaning. Many theories of intertextuality have been put forth in the past

several decades, beginning first with Saussure’s linguistic principles that proposed a

28

relational nature of the way language produces meaning.46 Saussure’s linguistic theories

were complemented by the work of Russian literary theorist M.M. Bakhtin, whose

theories about the development of meaning through language in specific social contexts

were developed and refined into the first articulated theory of intertextuality by Julia

Kristeva. Kristeva’s work on the matter, as Allen points out, occurred within the

movement away from structuralism toward poststructuralism, when theorists began to

disrupt the idea of stable meaning within texts. This movement resulted in two clearly

defined camps concerning intertextuality. Barthes, on the one hand, took this instability

of meaning to the extreme, asserting that the intertextual nature of works of literature was

solely responsible for the creation of meaning, being the first to talk about the “death of

the author;” Genette, on the other hand, argued that the intertextual nature of texts was in

fact a tool to be utilized on the path to critical certainty. Bloom, in his famous work on

literary influence, successfully combined these two disparate camps into a functional

model of intertextuality in which the author, self-consciously constrained by his or her

predecessors, necessarily participates in the production of meaning which is caught up in

the literature which proceeds it, but Bloom asserted that this is an observable trend which

can in fact lead to critical understanding, rather than obscuring it.47 It is this functional

model of intertextuality which serves as the frame for the present consideration. Bloom

argues for this model as applying to poetry, which is not problematic since both

Sophocles’ and Hofmannsthal’s works are written in verse. More importantly,

46 For an expert survey and explication of the history and problems of intertextual theory, seeAllen’s 2011 volume on the matter in The New Critical Idiom series, to which most of the presentconsideration is owed.

47 Bloom (1973).

29

Hofmannsthal himself provides autobiographical writing about his own “anxiety of

influence,” the self-conscious nature of which meshes perfectly with Bloom’s frame, as I

will discuss below.

Finally by way of introduction, a word on Hofmannsthal and Freud is necessary.

Hofmannsthal is known to have read the work of Freud, which is not surprising for an

intellectual living and working in fin de siècle Vienna, shortly before he began work on

his Elektra.48 Though the influence of Freud’s theories on Hofmannsthal’s dramatic

compositions has been debated, even those who deny Freud’s influence admit that

Hofmannsthal’s psychological profiles in his works engage with contemporary

psychological theories which abounded in the culture in which he composed his drama.49

To deny Freud’s contribution to the circulation of such theories would be absurd, and

thus I would argue that Freud influenced Hofmannsthal at the very least indirectly,

though direct influence seems to have been the case. Hofmannsthal’s Elektra is hysterical

in the Freudian sense, psychotic due to her fixation on a traumatic event from her past,

and this manifests in the opera as the heroine being stuck in time, which this paper will

argue is a direct result of the dismantling of the chorus by Hofmannsthal.50 Thus

Hofmannsthal’s removal of the chorus fundamentally changes the characterization of

Elektra, resulting in the heroine being stuck in time as a symptom of Freudian hysteria,

48 The evidence for this is neatly surveyed by Scott (2005) 63.

49 Examples of such scholars include Urban (1978), Jens (1955), and Politzer (1973).

50 Many scholars have commented on Elektra as a hysteric, including Urban (1978), Worbs(1983), Martens (1987), and Kronberger (2002). For the Freudian text which served as Hofmannsthal’sreference during the years leading up to Elektra, see Freud’s famous Studien über Hysterie, Volume II ofthe Standard Edition (1957).

30

and, as this paper will argue, this characterization can be interpreted as reflecting

Hofmannsthal’s own literary anxieties.

Electra’s fixation with the past is clear in Sophocles’ drama. In her very first

speech she makes it plain that she has spent an exceptionally long time mourning her

father, and she vividly recalls the moment at which Aegisthus and Clytemnestra split

Agamemnon’s head with an axe (86-102). Moreover she states, “But I will not cease

from dirges and wretched weeping” ( λλ ο μ ν δ λ ξω θρ νων στυγερ ν τε γ ων,

103-4)51, asserting that she will mourn him until her death. Swift rightly points out that

this extended period of mourning is meant to be unsettling to Athenians who would

expect public grieving to be limited to a brief span of time.52 This motif, of remembering

and reimagining, dominates Electra’s character throughout the drama. Bernard Knox in

his 1964 volume claims that Electra, as a typical Sophoclean tragic hero, is isolated from

those around her due to a trait he calls the “heroic temper.” Knox thoroughly examines

the isolating effect of Electra’s grief, citing passages throughout the tragedy in which she

asserts her connection to her traumatic past and continued obsession with grieving for her

father.53 Knox is right to read isolation in the characterization of Electra, and the isolation

which he explores is social and dramatic. Most significant for this discussion, however, is

the true functional nature of Electra’s isolation from those around her, and that is

51 Quotations of the Greek are taken from Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ 1994 edition, and all translations aremine.

52 Swift (2010) 337.

53 See especially Knox (1964) 19-26.

31

temporal. The most isolating characteristic of the heroine, indeed as Knox points out, is

her relationship to time.

Electra’s temporal isolation, however, and her social and dramatic isolation which

stem from it, is mitigated by her relationship to the chorus. The chorus are her friends and

allies, sympathetic toward her and indeed close enough that they may gently admonish

her without coming across as hateful and critical, like Clytemnestra. In the kommic

parodos the chorus and Electra set up the foundation for their relationship throughout the

drama; they disagree about whether Electra’s continued mourning is appropriate, but

never is the language exchanged between them hostile. Instead it is respectful and

friendly, as revealed in Electra’s first address to the women:

γενέθλα γενναίων,κετ μ ν καμάτων παραμύθιον.ο δά τε κα ξυνίημι τάδ ο τί μεφυγγάνει, ο δ θέλω προλιπε ν τόδε,μ ο τ ν μ ν στενάχειν πατέρ θλιον.λλ παντοίας φιλότητος μει βόμεναι χάριν,τέ μ δ λύειν,

α α κνο μαι.

O race of noble stock,you have come as a comfort for my toils,I both know and understand this, nor does this at allescape me, but I do not wish to forsake this,nor to not lament my wretched father.But o you, returning the grace of all kinds of friendship,suffer me to grieve thus,ah me, I beseech you. (129-36)

Referring to the women as a “race of noble stock” and those who “[return] the

grace of all kinds of friendship,” Electra makes it clear that this group is one which has

her respect and good will. Moreover she recognizes explicitly that they have come to help

rather than for any other purpose. The chorus throughout the exchange display genuine

32

concern for Electra, thrice calling her “child” (τ κνον, 154, 174; πα

their motherly concern explicitly when they say, “but indeed I speak to you with good

will, just like some trustworthy mother” ( λλ ο ν ε νο γ α δ / μ τηρ σε τις πιστ

233-4). This exchange has been interpreted recently by L.A. Swift as highlighting the

inherent disagreement between Electra and the chorus over the appropriate or

inappropriate nature of her grief.54 Swift, responding primarily to the analysis of Helene

Foley before her, who argued for the total identification and alliance of the chorus with

Electra, agrees that the chorus and Electra have a close personal relationship, but asserts

that the disagreement between the two parties, rather than this relationship, is the

thematic material for the scene.55 Swift is perhaps too eager to dismiss the significance of

the friendship highlighted in the kommos. While the issue of the appropriate length of a

period of grieving is indeed significant and would resonate with an Athenian audience,

the fact that Electra has a group of close companions is, as will be shown below, essential

for her operation within the tragedy. Moreover, Swift asserts that the chorus’ capitulation

to Electra’s wishes at the end of the parodos is insincere and that the “abiding impression

we are left with is of the incompatibility between these two world-views,”56 but no

argument is made as to why this reading should be preferred over one which interprets

the chorus’ eventual agreement with Electra as friendly concession due to fondness. A

more useful reading of this scene, which is programmatic for the relationship between the

heroine and chorus, admits the importance of the disagreement about the appropriate

54 Swift (2010) 339-44.

55 Foley (2001) 149, 157.

56 Swift (2010) 344.

33

length of grieving but recognizes that this disagreement is contextualized by the sincere

companionship that the chorus offers to Electra. Their advice and gentle admonishments

come out of mutual respect and care, not from moral superiority or hateful criticism;

these women are Electra’s closest companions.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s adaptation for the operatic treatment of the story by

Richard Strauss exhibits an Elektra who has changed drastically because of the removal

of the chorus. Without the group of friendly women to offer the heroine companionship,

she is entirely alone, and in fact throughout the opera she rejects all connections that are

offered to her. In the very first scene we learn from the five serving women, perhaps

representative of the rejected chorus, as discussed above, that Elektra has rejected them

outright. The Overseer scoffs at the idea that they should do anything “for Elektra, who

pushed her bowl from our table when they ordered her to eat with us” (an Elektra, die

ihren Napf von unserm Tische stiess, als man mit uns sie essen hiess, 19)57. This reaction

is in response to the Fifth Maid Servant, who declares her love and respect for Elektra

and is promptly carried off stage to undergo a beating at the hands of her superiors. Thus

the very last shred of amiability between Elektra and the maid servants, whom we might

have expected to fill the companion function of the ancient chorus, is extinguished.

Following this scene, Elektra’s first words in the opera isolate her entirely from those

around her; she has indeed been left by herself on stage, but she speaks to a more

meaningful isolation when she claims that she is “Alone! Ah, utterly alone” (Allein!

Weh, ganz allein, 25). This isolation is preserved even through Elektra’s interactions with

57 Quotations from the libretto are taken from the Dover full score edition of 1990, which is itself areprinting of the 1916 first edition published by Adolph Fürstner in Berlin. All translations of the Germanare mine.

34

those who might be expected to be her closest companions: her sister and, later, her

brother. In her first scene with Chrysothemis, the younger sister advises Elektra that

“Were it not for you, they would let us out of here” (Wärst nicht du, sie liessen uns

hinaus, 58). This accusation, while not the epitome of friendly advice from a companion,

in fact allies the two sisters in a significant way. They together oppose the will of

Klytämnestra and Aegisth, and it is together that Chrysothemis wishes they might escape.

Chrysothemis’ entire discussion of their captivity in this scene in fact groups the two

sisters together. Despite the seeming impossibility of escape, Chrysothemis still considers

herself a companion to her sister and wishes to help. “Go quickly, hide yourself that she

does not see you!” (Geh fort, verkriech dich! Dass sie dich nicht sieht, 77), she advises

Elektra upon the approach of their mother. Nevertheless, while Chrysothemis feels this

way, Elektra, only rebuking Chrysothemis and ignoring her advice, rejects any amicable

aspect of their relationship. Similarly, in the second scene between the two sisters,

Chrysothemis once again considers them to be partners, drawing a line between everyone

else and they two when she says that “all stood around and all knew it already; only we

did not” (Alle standen herum und alle wussten es schon, nur wir nicht, 189-91). It is at

this point that Elektra finally attempts to connect with her sister, when describing the

murder of Klytämnestra and Aegisth she says “We! we both must do the deed!” (Wir!

Wir beide müssen’s tun, 202). It is Chrysothemis, however, who rejects this prospect of

cooperation. As soon as she does, Elektra rebukes her with renewed vigor and dismisses

the possibility of their companionship.

The only other potential source of affection for Elektra then enters the dramatic

scene in the form of Orest. Before Elektra even knows who he is, however, she utters two

35

foreshadowing statements. “I am up here alone” (ich hier droben allein, 258) and “I do

not want to know who you are. I want to see no one” (Ich will nicht wissen, wer du bist.

Ich will Niemand sehn, 262-3), she insists. She no longer has any desire for

companionship, though the last hope must be that upon recognizing her brother she will

accept him as her ally and renounce her complete isolation. However, almost

immediately after recognizing Orest, Elektra implores him, “No, you ought not to

embrace me! Step away, I am ashamed before you. I don’t know how you can look at me.

I am nothing more than the corpse of your sister, my poor child!” (Nein, du sollst mich

nicht umarmen! Tritt weg, ich schäme mich vor dir. Ich weiss nicht, wie du mich

ansiehst. Ich bin nur mehr der Leichnam deiner Schwester, mein armes Kind, 276-7).

Unlike Sophocles’ heroine, who rushes to embrace her long-lost brother, Elektra finally

rejects her last hope for companionship, not only because she does not feel worthy of the

affection of her brother, but also because she perceives herself as “nothing more than [a]

corpse,” further allying herself with the dead Agamemnon on whom she continues to

fixate. Thus even when Elektra and Orest collude in the plan to murder their mother and

her husband, their relationship is centered upon that revenge and its connection to the

past rather than any innate fondness or concern for each other. Elektra wishes to avenge

her father and Orest wishes to appease the gods. Despite the return and recognition of her

long-lost brother, Elektra remains totally isolated.

At many points in Sophocles’ tragedy it is with the help of the chorus alone that

Electra is able to function appropriately and interact with those around her. They are able

to bridge the gap created by Electra’s isolation. Having established their positive

relationship with her in the parodos, the chorus aid Electra in conversing with the other

36

characters in the drama and share in the extremes of her emotions.58 During Electra’s first

conversation with Chrysothemis, the chorus set themselves up as mediators for the

dialogue, urging that each sister say “nothing because of anger, by the gods, since there is

gain in the words of both, if you would learn to use hers and she again yours” (μηδ ν

πρ ς ργήν, πρ ς θε ν: ς το ς λόγοις / νεστιν μφο ν κέρδος, ε σ μ ν μάθοις / το ς

τ σδε χρ σθαι, το ς δ σο ς α τη πάλιν, 369 -71). Following this mediating request,

Electra agrees to hear her sister out rather than to reject her outright. It is then this

discussion that leads Electra to offer Chrysothemis advice about the sacrifice she has

been sent to make, advice which the chorus say reflects her “piety” (ε σ βειαν, 464), and

which Chrysothemis agrees is reasonable. Similarly, during Electra’s confrontation with

Clytemnestra, the chorus act as intermediaries, advising Clytemnestra after hearing

Electra’s speech that they “do not see [you] considering whether indeed she has justice on

her side” (ε δ σ ν δ κ ξ νεστι, το δε φροντ δ ο κετ ε σορ -11). Once more

the chorus attempts to assist Electra in her interactions with others, although this time

they are less successful, since Clytemnestra has no interest in considering the justice

behind Electra’s words. Nevertheless the chorus were once again an instrumental part of

Electra’s interactions with another character. In the next scene, after the slave has

delivered the false news of Orestes’ death, the chorus plays an essential role in sharing

the burden of grief with Electra. Their cry of “Alas! Alas!” (φε φε

disbelief that the gods could permit such a calamity (823-5) make clear their emotional

response to the news. They then offer consolation to Electra, helping her through her

58 Contrast the choruses of the Antigone, who offer the titular heroine no such aid and in factoppose her, and the Trachiniae, who are more sympathetic but do not contribute as much to theconversation between characters as the chorus of the Electra does.

37

grief by validating and empathizing with it so that she might not be lost entirely within

her despair (826-70). Having accomplished this goal, they once again serve as mediators

between Electra and Chrysothemis. When Electra reveals her plan to carry out the

murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, the chorus advise the sisters that “in such

dealings forethought is an ally both for the one speaking and the one listening” ( ν το ς

τοιο τοις στ ν προμηθ α / κα τ λ γοντι κα κλ οντι σ μμαχος, 990 -1). This advice

comes directly between the large speeches of the two sisters and effectively places them

both on the same ground; they must both think ahead and use their judgement. Thus

equating the sisters, the chorus makes Electra’s proposition something which

Chrysothemis ought to actually consider and at the same time advises Electra to carefully

consider her own speech. This bridging of the gap between the two sisters is once again

accomplished by the chorus. They then once more share in extreme emotion with Electra

so that she not become lost in it when they learn of Orestes’ arrival (1227-31). Finally,

they advise both Electra and Orestes upon Aegisthus’ return to the palace. Most

significant for their relationship with Electra is their advice that she deceive Aegisthus

with her speech in order to make sure he walk into the trap voluntarily and not be

suspicious. Thus even through the very end of the drama the chorus aids and shapes

Electra’s interactions with other characters, a task which they accomplish due to their

function as the heroine’s closest companions and which mitigates Electra’s isolation to

such a degree that she is able to participate fully in the drama.

In stark contrast, the increased isolation of Elektra in Hofmannsthal’s libretto,

natural because of his dismissal of Elektra’s only companions in Sophocles’ drama,

exacerbates the temporal isolation that can be found in Sophocles’ heroine. Without the

38

chorus to bridge the gap between the dramatic past with which she is obsessed and the

dramatic present, Elektra is wholly stuck in the past as she imagines and re-imagines her

father’s murder throughout the libretto. Hofmannsthal’s rendering of this obsession can

be viewed through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis and hysteria, the prominent

relevant contemporary psychological theory.59 Additionally, it is possible to view the

characterization of Elektra as indicative of Hofmannsthal’s own concerns about

originality and the influence of earlier literature on his own compositions. Chrysothemis,

on the other hand, does not suffer the same hysteria and can be interpreted as representing

the part of Hofmannsthal which is free to innovate within the context of tradition.

Hofmannsthal experienced around the turn of the twentieth century a crisis of language

most succinctly expressed in his prose work, Ein Brief, commonly referred to as the

“Letter of Lord Chandos.” In the letter Hofmannsthal, through his character Philip Lord

Chandos, explains that he is disillusioned with the power of language to describe the

world of the individual. He would eventually come to write, famously, that “Whenever

we open our mouths, ten thousand of the dead speak through us,” and he thus felt unable

to produce entirely new works.60 It is precisely this worry that can be read in the

characterizations of both Elektra and Chrysothemis.61 Though Hofmannsthal, just as

59 For more on the relationship between Hofmannsthal and Freud as their relationship relates toElektra, see both Ward (2002) and Scott (2005). Also of note is Bowlby (2007). It is also worth mentioningthat while the instinct of those familiar with Freud’s work to the topic of Elektra would be to discuss theElektra Complex, this idea was put forth by Jung several years after the premier of Elektra, and thereforehad no formative influence on the shaping of the opera.

60 On this topic further see Segar (1988) 55.

61 The idea of reading Hofmannsthal’s own literary anxiety in the characters of his works is caughtup in his relationship to Modernism, which is demonstrated especially in Ein Brief. See Kovach (1993) onthis matter.

39

Chrysothemis is trapped within the palace, is stuck within the framework of the

established Elektra myth, he can create new aspects to the story just as Chrysothemis can

dream of a happy future. Just as in Bloom’s theory of poetic meaning and intertextuality

discussed above, Hofmannsthal is self-consciously constrained by the tradition in which

he writes, but nonetheless capable of some innovations. Thus is Hofmannsthal able to

make alterations, including the programmatic rejection of the chorus, as well as Elektra’s

manipulative nature, Klytämnestra’s approach to Elektra for advice, and the heroine’s

climactic and un-Sophoclean death.

It has been shown above that Elektra is utterly isolated for the duration of the

opera. Her isolation in fact stems from her profound obsession with her brutal past. Her

words toward the beginning of her opening monologue recall the single event which thus

displaced her in time as she laments for “My father gone, cast down in his cold cavern”

(Der Vater fort, hinadgescheucht in seine kalten Klüfte, 25-6). After the murder of her

father, she could no longer move through time in the same way as those around her

continued to do. Obsessed, she ceased to exist in the present other than as an instrument

of her own obsession. She, like her father, is trapped in seine kalten Klüfte; she is

metaphorically frozen in time. Just as Hofmannsthal lamented that he could not so much

as open his mouth without hundreds of generations of predecessors speaking through

him, Elektra cannot act independently from the force of her grief, a force that is

inherently tied to the moment of her father’s murder.62 Indeed even Elektra’s own words

indicate this conflation of past and present; she calls out that “It is the moment, our

62 Segar (1988) 55.

40

moment, the moment when they slaughtered you” (Es ist die Stunde, unsre Stunde ist’s,

die Stunde, wo sie dich geschlachtet haben, 26-7). Though superficially Elektra might

mean that it is the time of day during which Agamemnon was murdered, the more

powerful meaning of these lines is that Elektra’s present has been fixed in that singular

moment in her past. Thus in her first utterances she establishes herself as stuck in time for

the entirety of the piece.

This apostrophic address to Agamemnon, helpfully contextualized in terms of

Freudian psychoanalysis, as will be explored below, may first be read dually; it is both

the lament of a suffering tragic heroine and also a reflection of the literary concerns of the

librettist. Elektra’s speech to her dead father indicates the primacy of that traumatic

memory within her psyche. This may be interpreted as Hofmannsthal’s cultural memory

and interaction with preceding treatments and established tradition surrounding the myth.

In the case of Elektra, the memory with which she is grappling has thrown her into a kind

of hysteria; for Hofmannsthal, the memory of tradition is not linked to a traumatic event

and therefore has less dire consequences, though it is as much a part of his creative

process as the memory of her father is part of Elektra’s psyche. The rest of her speech

within the work is set within the framework of these opening lines. In fact it is not only

Elektra who is in some way stuck in time; since her characterization is central, the piece

itself is grounded in its own formative past. Hofmannsthal’s work is constrained by the

Electra of Sophocles and all of that play’s previous influences just as Elektra is

constrained by her memory.

In the next scene Elektra is confronted with her sister, Chrysothemis, who

dominates the exchange. In her sparse interjections, however, Elektra remains firmly

41

grounded in her past. In the first few lines she speaks to her sister, she compares

Chrysothemis, who has raised her hands as if to shield herself from Elektra, to the

murdered Agamemnon, vividly picturing his defensive position at the time of the murder,

though surely she was not present to see it. Despite the fact that she does not seem to

have witnessed the murder directly in any ancient source, her intense connection to that

moment lends her the authority to speak about the specifics of the event. Further, when

Chrysothemis speaks of words heard within the house and through open doors, Elektra

warns that “Constricted breath, pah! and death rattles of the strangled – there are no other

things in these walls” (Gepresster Atem, pfui! Und Röcheln von Erwürgten, nichts andres

gibt’s in diesen Mauern, 54). Her obsession with the murder informs the way she

imagines the interior of the house; the sounds of death are all she can believe exist within

that place. Even when faced with her sister, a tangible representation of the continuation

of life after the death of Agamemnon, Elektra cannot free herself from the influence of

that one pivotal moment.

In the extensive confrontation between Elektra and her mother, Elektra’s

utterances build throughout the scene to her climactic tirade against the trembling

Klytämnestra.63 She hints at a sacrifice which will rid her mother of the terrible dreams

that plague her, and sets the sacrifice, which will actually be the murder of Klytämnestra

by Orest, within the context of the murder of Agamemnon. She assures her mother that

“this time you don’t go on the hunt with net and with axe” (Diesmal gehst du nicht auf

63 It is worth noting that this depiction of Elektra’s mother is drastically different from herSophoclean counterpart. Klytämnestra has been transformed, and in fact also exhibits classic symptoms ofFreudian hysteria, including her recurring dreams, and this new Klytämnestra also helps to shape thecharacterization of Elektra.

42

die Jagd mit Netz und mit Beil, 142-3), as she did when she killed her husband. Finally,

when Elektra lets loose on Klytämnestra, she describes with vivid detail how she

imagines her mother’s death will come. Critical for contextualizing this long speech is

Elektra’s assertion at the end that, “then I’ll have no more need for dreaming” (dann

brauche ich nicht mehr zu träumen, 172-3). The “dreaming” from which Elektra has been

suffering is her obsession with the past and the impetus for revenge spurred on by that

obsession, and this connection makes explicit the Freudian context of hysteria, of which

dreaming was a significant part.64 Thus the murder of her mother will be that which frees

her from her stationary temporal existence; only when Agamemnon’s murder has been

avenged can she theoretically escape from that crucial moment. Additionally, and most

importantly for the analysis of this scene, the frame of Freudian psychoanalysis provides

a scheme for interpreting the interaction. Klytämnestra is portrayed as quintessentially

hysterical;65 she has repressed the memory of her crime and she refuses to acknowledge

that part of her psyche. “As the repudiated, maltreated daughter, Elektra embodies

Klytämnestra’s repressed memory.”66 Elektra once more symbolizes the past and its hold

on the development of the present; it is possible to interpret her participation in this scene

as representative of not only her mother’s memory, but of Hofmannsthal’s literary

64 For the connection of dreaming to hysteria, see both Freud’s The Psychic Mechanism ofHysterical Phenomena (Preliminary Communication) and his Interpretation of Dreams, both in theStandard Edition of his collected psychological writings. It is also worth noting here that though thedramatic device of Klytämnestra’s dream is taken from Sophocles, the thematic import is an invention ofHofmnnsthal’s, spurred by his close engagement with Freud. In Sophocles’ text the dream is mentionedbriefly but does not feature in the scene between mother and daughter.

65 For Freud’s explanation of hysteria, see both his Psychic Mechanism and his Studies inHysteria.

66 Martens (1987) 43.

43

memory. She embodies the tradition from which he can never truly escape, since it is as

much a part of his work as Klytämnestra’s memory is part of her psyche.

In the next section, where Elektra converses with Chrysothemis again, it is the

means of that revenge which indicates her connection to Agamemnon’s murder. Having

learned, falsely, that Orest is dead, she insists that the two sisters must themselves be the

agents of justice and murder their mother and Aegisth, and she even suggests that they

use the very axe with which their father was killed. Chrysothemis is horrified to learn that

Elektra has kept it, but the axe serves a more important purpose than to shock and

disturb; it is a relic of the deed which has frozen Elektra in time. It is the tangible

expression of Elektra’s fixation; its presence is the physical embodiment of Elektra’s

temporal predicament. She digs up the axe, which an audience familiar with Freudian

psychoanalysis would certainly associate with abreaction, the cathartic resurfacing of a

repressed memory as a method of curing hysteria, out of the ground, the symbolic

foreshadowing of the surfacing of Elektra’s traumatic, though imagined, memory.67 Just

as she digs up her memory, however, Hofmannsthal, in inserting the axe into his text,

excavates the literary past. The use of the same murder weapon for vengeance is an

Aeschylean idea, evoking Orestes’ use of the same robe in which Agamemnon died to

kill his mother. Moreover, the axe itself evokes Clytemnestra’s call for an axe as she is

about to die in the Libation Bearers (A. Lib. 889). Thus this tangible representation of

Elektra’s imagined memory symbolizes the very real literary past of the myth as well.

67 For Freud’s first discussion of abreaction and its meaning and implementation as apsychological therapy, see again The Psychic Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena.

44

In the recognition scene, the crucial moment when Elektra and Orest recognize

each other and the hope for revenge becomes a real possibility, Elektra once more can

participate only through the prism of the moment of Agamemnon’s murder. In the first

part of the scene Elektra does not identify herself to the man whom she does not

recognize, and therefore her words do not reveal her frozen identity. This real identity she

only reveals when she exclaims that “I am this blood! I am the spilt hound-like blood of

King Agamemnon!” (Ich bin dies Blut! Ich bin das hündisch vergossene Blut des Königs

Agamemnon!, 258-9). Once more, Elektra’s speech has a dual meaning. Not only is she

the blood of Agamemnon in the sense that she is his offspring, but she identifies with the

blood itself which was “spilt;” the physical reality of the event has become part of her.

This exclamation is also significant for a continued interpretation of Hofmannsthal’s

literary thinking in the characterization of Elektra. The blood of Agamemnon is a

metaphor not only for actual, but literary genealogy as well; Hofmannsthal’s Elektra is

the offspring of the Sophoclean drama and the rest of the established tradition. Once

Elektra has recognized her brother, any inclination toward elation is immediately

extinguished by shame. She is acutely aware of her appearance, and she explains it in

terms of a metaphorical rape. At the moment when Agamemnon was murdered, “his

sighs forced entry, did his groan not force itself upon my bed?” (drangen seine Seufzer,

drang nicht sein Stöhnen an mein Bette?, 285). Even at the moment when Elektra has the

most reason to exist in the present and rejoice for the return of her brother, she can think

only of the murder and its effect on her, just as Hofmannsthal, having been faced with the

one of the most crucial scenes of the drama, is prompted by tradition to write the

traditional ending. Here more clearly than anywhere else does Elektra name her father’s

45

murder as the Freudian trauma which has inspired her hysteria. The sexual violence of

these lines highlights the event’s traumatic nature and justifies Elektra’s fixation, and the

overt parent-child sexual relationship would surely have resonated in the minds of

Hofmannsthal’s audience as a Freudian allusion. Elektra has been invaded by the

memory of that moment and now must seek to expiate that violence. Hofmannsthal’s

work has likewise been invaded by the spirit of the dead Agamemnon; the myth itself

exists as a whole entity which is a part of Hofmannsthal’s creative work, just as the

memory of her father’s murder is part of Elektra.

Following Orest’s departure to complete the murder, Elektra’s first line returns to

the axe. She cries out, “I was not able to give the axe to him!” (Ich habe ihm das Beil

nicht geben können!, 302). She could not relinquish the sole tangible artifact from the

time of her father’s murder, since to do so would be to release herself from that time, and

she is bound to it unwillingly. This changes entirely, however, with the pause before her

next line, in which Klytämnestra cries offstage as she is being murdered by Orestes.

Agamemnon’s death has been avenged, at least upon Klytämnestra, and Elektra begins to

be released from her connection to the past, as the brutal murder of her living parent by

another member of her family provides the necessary abreaction. When Chrysothemis

and the maidservants rush on stage, Elektra stands dazed, unable to answer any of them.

Once more, Freudian psychoanalysis proves a helpful context. The reemergence of the

quasi-chorus parallels the catharsis by which Elektra has finally begun to be released

from the grip of her memory. If the maidservants in fact represent the idea of the ancient

chorus, especially since they have been off stage since Hofmannsthal dispensed with

them at the outset of the work, then this is the perfect moment for their reappearance. Just

46

as Elektra begins to be cured of her hysteria, an event which evokes the significant past,

Hofmannsthal’s source material reemerges; Sophocles rears his head alongside

Agamemnon’s. Upon the arrival of Aegisth, Elektra’s speech is all deception. With his

death, however, the transformation is complete. Agamemnon has been avenged and

Elektra has been released from her temporal prison. This is not, however, positive. For

Elektra at this moment, to be tied to her past no longer is to lose the entirety of her

identity. For this reason she can speak only for a short while with her sister, dance a few

frantic steps, and collapse dead, having lost all of herself amidst the vengeance. Thus

ends not only Elektra but one side of Hofmannsthal’s creative process.

Chrysothemis, unlike her sister, suffers no hysteria. In her first encounter with

Elektra she insists that she “cannot sit and stare into darkness like you” (kann nicht sitzen

und ins Dunkel starren, wie du, 55). She protests that a happy future is possible, “were it

not for your hate, your sleepless, unruly disposition” (Wär’ nicht dein Hass, dein

schlafloses, unbändiges Gemüt, 59). Indeed she dreams, unlike Elektra, who will

eventually explicitly reject dreaming outright, of what she considers to be a proper

woman’s life: wedding a husband and raising children. The freedom of her psyche

reflects that of Hofmannsthal’s creative process. He is able to write new material for the

drama, but only in the context of the myth, just as Chrysothemis’ dreaming is physically

bound by her confinement within the palace. In her second interaction with Elektra, in

which she believes Orestes to be dead, it is not her speech, but rather Elektra’s, that is

indicative of her character. When Elektra attempts to persuade her to join in the killing of

Klytämnestra and Aegisth, she appeals to Chrysothemis’ hope for a happy future. This is

the most protracted and powerful argument Elektra could make to sway her sister; indeed

47

it aims directly at her most passionate desire. Nevertheless, Chrysothemis is not

convinced, since, believing Orest to be dead, she sees no hope for such a future. This is a

crucial aspect of the problem for Hofmannsthal: though he, like Chrysothemis, is in some

way free from the constraining hysteria which has encapsulated Elektra, he still operates

creatively within the context of the Elektra myth. If Orest is indeed dead, Chrysothemis

may obtain a different future than that which she traditionally receives, but it will no

longer be within the framework of the mythological tradition. Hofmannsthal, though

innovative, still wishes to write Elektra, and without Orest’s return, he cannot do that.

The chorus of Sophocles’ Electra performs distinct but interrelated functions,

namely the negotiation of time and the provision of companionship to Electra, that are

altered drastically in Hofmannsthal’s reimagining of the drama. The companionship is

done away with entirely, and the entire burden of temporal navigation is placed upon the

character of Elektra. Having already been somewhat isolated in Sophocles’ treatment,

and without the support of the chorus to mitigate that isolation, Hofmannsthal’s Elektra

suffers from the isolation of the Sophoclean heroine taken to the extreme. She is stuck in

time, a characterization available to Hofmannsthal in the form of Freudian psychology

and neatly contrasted in the characterization of her sister Chrysothemis. These two

characterizations can be interpreted in light of the crisis of language which Hofmannsthal

was undergoing at the time of the libretto’s composition and thus understood to be

representative of that very crisis and Hofmannsthal’s nebulous relationship to the

production of meaning in his own text. Thus the removal of the chorus from the drama

afforded Hofmannsthal the ability to express his own personal literary crisis by reflecting

it in the characterization of two major figures in the libretto.

48

CHAPTER 3:

“OB ICH DIE MUSIK NICHT HÖRE? SIE KOMMT DOCH AUS MIR.”: THE MUSIC

OF ISOLATION

Strauss and Hofmannsthal collaborated extensively on the creation of Elektra, and

thus it is no surprise that the musical texture of the piece reflects and amplifies the

intricacies of the text. As has been shown by the removal of the chorus form the

Sophoclean model of the story, the text reveals Elektra’s extreme isolation and psychotic

obsession with the past and specifically the murder of her father. Just so, the musical

ideas which surround and invade her vocal line, and indeed those which permeate the

entire opera, make this clear as well. Elektra’s extreme temporal isolation is also musical.

Moreover, the Freudian aspects of her psychology, namely the primacy of her traumatic

memory in her psyche and its presence in her reality as a discrete entity, manifested in the

physical world as the buried axe, are each also represented musically in a manner that

underscores their grip on the heroine’s participation in the drama. Any possible

companions for Elektra, such as the chorus-evoking maids in the first scene and her two

siblings, are rejected not only in the text as has been shown above, but in the music too.

The two sympathetic maids, Chrysothemis, and Orest each present musical possibilities

for connection with the outcast princess, but each time she either refuses to engage with

their musical ideas or, in the case of Chrysothemis especially, misappropriates them.

Throughout the opera the maddened internal voice of Elektra dominates, and the

49

audience is left with her crazed groaning echoing in their ears as the curtain falls. From

start to finish Elektra is the musical representation of the heroine alone, and though other

characters speak both first and last, she in fact has the first and final word.

Derrick Puffett describes the movement of Elektra as one from oppression to

liberation, which is paralleled in a shift in focus from vocal lines to an emphasis on the

orchestra.68 This interpretation, however, is problematically reductive, and fails to take

into account the tense yet complementary relationship between voices and the orchestra

in the piece, which creates an arc that is focused much more on the dissolution of self and

the extreme isolation of the characters, the dramatic product of Hofmannsthal’s literary

innovation, reflected in their vocal lines and their accompaniment throughout the drama.

Puffett also provides a reading of the end of the opera based on the metaphysics of

Schopenhauer, claiming that “one could say that Elektra dies because she can no longer

live in a world of ideas; music has led her on to higher things.”69 The portion of this

analysis that asserts that Elektra lives in a world of ideas is helpful; indeed her

psychological fixation places her firmly in a world of imaginings and constructed

memories, or put more simply, ideas. As will be shown below, however, music is not

separate from these ideas in Elektra, but inherently tied to them at all times. This is in

fact part of the Romantic tradition inherited by Strauss primarily from Richard Wagner,

and it has its expression in the proliferation of thematic motives in the music which are

tied to ideas, objects, and attitudes associated with the characters and action of the drama.

This study cannot hope to account for every motive in the piece, but will instead focus on

68 Puffett (1989) 37-8.

69 Puffet (1989) 42.

50

those which play the most significant roles in illustrating Elektra’s isolation and the

literary concerns of Hofmannsthal expounded in the previous chapter, demonstrating that

the work is a unified whole with respect to its artistic attitudes.

The opera commences with its most famous motive, that which has traditionally

been called the Agamemnon motive, and which is the most significant for this study:

Figure 1. The Agamemnon motive.70

Evidence for the naming of this plaintive figure is rather straightforward: in the

opening lines of her initial monologue, Elektra sings this phrase to the name of her

murdered father; further, Strauss in his initial sketches for the opera penciled in the name

above these four notes. That the opera begins with this motive is not insignificant, and it

bears some careful analysis in order to be properly contextualized. Scholars since the

opera’s creation have referred to the motive as the controlling presence of the ghostly

figure of Agamemnon, inserting him into the drama from beyond the grave. Carolyn

Abbate, however, made a significant contribution to scholarship on the matter in 1989 in

Derrick Puffet’s seminal volume for the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series. Abbate’s

chapter, entitled “Elektra’s voice: music and language in Strauss’ opera,” makes a crucial

argument for understanding the Agamemnon motive not as any supernatural or extra-

realistic representation of the dead king, but instead as the voice of Elektra herself given

70 All musical figures have been created with reference to Dover score, and also with attentionpaid to the thematic guide by Wintle (1988).

51

musical form.71 This idea is supported by further instances of the motive within the score,

which will be treated in order below, and also one line from the final scene in the drama

in which Elektra contextualizes the entirety of the work vis-à-vis her own psychological

state. Following Orest’s murder of both Klytämnestra and Aegisth, Chrysothemis reports

that there is rejoicing throughout the palace following the destruction of the tyrants and

asks her sister, “Don’t you hear? So then don’t you hear?” (Hörst du nicht? So horst du

den nicht?, 334-5). Elektra responds, “Do I not hear? Do I not hear the music? It comes

from me!” (Ob ich nicht höre? Ob ich die Musik nicht höre? Sie kommt doch aus mir,

335-6). Given that the entirety of the opera is centered on the psychological construction

of this one central figure, this line can only be described as metamusical. Abbate draws

attention to the fact that opera is generally built upon the conceit that the singers do not

know they are singing, except in rare circumstances, and therefore for the most part the

musical reality of their existence is solely for the benefit of the audience.72 Elektra, with

this one line, has shattered that expectation and revealed that not only does she hear the

music to which she believes Chrysothemis is referring, but it is in fact a product of her

existence.73 Even more interestingly, Chrysothemis never did in fact mention any music,

and we are given no indication that she hears the sound to which Elektra refers. The

entire opera, it would seem, has taken place inside of her mind. The action of the drama

and the utterances of the other characters we are able to understand as real, since there is

71 Abbate (1989) 111.

72 Abbate (1989) 109.

73 This is further evidence that, as argued above in Chapter 2, Elektra in fact embodies, at leastpartially, Hofmannsthal’s innovation, since the very medium through which the story is being retold iscontained within the heroine.

52

no indication that anything other than the music itself has been the production of

Elektra’s crazed mind, and in fact the question of the reality of the drama is not strictly

relevant to the question at hand about the construction of the work. The music, however,

we must now treat carefully; the motives and interludes are those which play out inside

Elektra’s mind. The effects of the music in its combination with words comprise the

action of the drama as the heroine experiences them, and this must be borne in mind

while explicating the work. Thus Elektra’s extreme isolation and temporal displacement

are supported with her own reactions and perceptions of the events of the work.

This interpretation of the music illuminates the beginning of the opera: the first

notes in the orchestra, which sound out the unsung name of Agamemnon, are in fact

Elektra’s voice, as suggested by Abbate, calling out the name of her dead father. This

introduction is programmatic; the opera will be concerned with Elektra’s obsession with

her father and specifically her attachment to the moment when he was murdered. From

start to finish we hear Elektra repeatedly cry out, “Agamemnon!” The opening scene

which follows this initial exclamation sees the five maids and their overseer at work

within the courtyard and discussing Elektra’s state. In the music, Elektra’s programmatic

call sounds twice more during the scene, 2 bars after rehearsal figure 3 and at figure 14

(7, 14).74 The first of these two instances of the motive occurs while the maids are

discussing Elektra’s recent behavior, with the Third Maid recalling how “Recently she

lay there and groaned” (Neulich lag sie da und stöhnte, 7), and the First Maid concurs

that “Always, when the sun is low, she lies and groans” (Immer, wenn die Sonne tief

74 References to the score will be made by the rehearsal figures provided by Strauss, with pagenumbers from the Dover score provided in parentheses.

53

steht, liegt sie und stöhnt, 7). The Agamemnon motive sounds in the orchestra three times

during these two lines, and the effect is clear: this is the precise moaning which the maids

describe. When the sun sets, they observe, she lies in the courtyard and calls,

“Agamemnon!” This is again the case when, in the second instance, the Third Maid,

describing an encounter with Elektra, recounts how “She just howled and threw herself

back into her corner” (Sie heulte nur und warf sich in ihren Winkel, 14). The first syllable

of heulte is held for four and a half beats, and it is during this stretch that the

Agamemnon motive sounds in the woodwinds; the maid’s description of Elektra’s

howling is accompanied by the howl itself. In addition to these instances of the

Agamemnon motive, which itself represents Elektra’s voice, the dialogue of the maids is

full of quotations of the heroine, and so her voice dominates the exchange. Thus in the

very first scene of the opera, before Elektra herself has sung, we have heard her voice

ceaselessly, including her characteristic wailing three times, and this repeated utterance

will come to play a significant role in her continued isolation and eventual death.

Also significant in the first scene is a motive which accompanies the two maids

who are sympathetic to Elektra: the Fourth and the Fifth. The motive sounds for the first

time four bars before figure 16 (15), and represents the sympathy they express:

Figure 2. The maids’ sympathy motive.

The chromatic descent from F to A at once symbolizes the outcast daughter’s fall

from grace and evokes perhaps the maids’ own sympathetic crying for their spurned

54

mistress. The motive is repeated and extended as the Fifth Maid, much more vocal in her

love for Elektra than the timidly questioning Fourth Maid, takes up her declaration of

support and fondness for the degraded princess. The sympathy motive becomes the

foundation of her musical support, and accompanies her until the Overseer cuts her off at

figure 21 (18). The Fifth Maid is then taken inside and promptly beaten, the dramatic

realization of her musical silencing. Her sympathy toward Elektra will have no benefit for

the heroine, just as she cannot provide the companionship which Hofmannsthal removed

from the text of the drama. Her music is as powerless as her words.

If, however, the music of the piece is in fact the creation of Elektra’s own mind,

the fact that the music of sympathy has no effect on her bears some explanation. She is,

after all, if we are to understand the music as the representation of her psyche, the one

whose mind produces the motive which accompanies the Fifth Maid’s declaration of

support. Thus, if the figure does represent sympathy, it must be Elektra who interprets the

words in that way and assigns them their attendant music. This need not be problematic,

however, if we concede that Elektra can detect and interpret correctly the meaning behind

the words spoken to and about her by the other characters in the piece. That is, she can

hear and understand the sympathy in the Fifth Maid’s speech, but this does not mean that

she will be affected by it. Instead the fact that ideas like sympathy are able to be

communicated to Elektra, made clear by the fact that the musical interpretation of those

ideas is inherently hers, but are still rejected, makes only more poignant the heroine’s

utter isolation from those around her. Their words and even their meanings reach her, but

still she is alone.

55

This is made undeniably clear at Elektra’s first vocal entrance in the work. The

maids have left the stage and the sounds of the Fifth Maid being beaten have been heard

as Elektra begins to sing with the line “Alone! Ah, utterly alone” (Allein! Weh, ganz

allein, 25). If there was any question about whether Elektra felt comforted or at all

consoled by the Fifth Maid’s sympathy, it is answered in these four words. She does not

consider the woman a companion in any sense; she is entirely by herself: physically,

psychologically, and indeed musically, as her accompaniment recalls nothing of the

maids’ speech. After a brief introduction to her monologue, however, it truly begins with

that which is already familiar: the Agamemnon motive, this time given name by Elektra

herself. The listener is presented with the true meaning of the figure; as the strings

present the theme once more, Elektra leads them with its verbal reality. Even more

compelling for an interpretation of the Agamemnon motive as Elektra’s voice are the two

instances of the vocal phrase in Elektra’s monologue 2 bars after figure 44 (31) and 2

bars after figure 46 (32). Both of these instances occur only in Elektra’s vocal line, not

being present in the orchestration either time she calls her father’s name in the middle of

her monologue. These two utterances, then, are essential for understanding the motive,

especially since, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Elektra’s opening speech is

programmatic for the work as a whole. The motive is presented during this speech first in

both the orchestra and the vocal line, and then twice in the vocal line alone in order to

illustrate that this musical phrase is indeed the voice of the heroine. The first instance

explains the purely orchestral instances that have come before it, and then the two purely

vocal instances in the middle of the programmatic monologue clarify the motive’s true

meaning. Finally, the monologue ends with yet another of Elektra’s harrowing cries of

56

“Agamemnon!” twice in a row, accompanied by the motive in the orchestra as well at

rehearsal figure 62 (47). The stage has been fully set for the rest of the opera; Elektra’s

lament will be foundational for the drama.

The other significant motive worth mentioning that occurs within Elektra’s

monologue is that which appears four bars before figure 43 (29), and which represents

the demand for retribution to be paid for the crimes of Klytämnestra and Aegisth:

Figure 3. The motive of retribution.

This motive is also fundamental for the musical picture of Elektra’s psychological

state. The ascending accented sixteenth notes convey a sense of undeniable urgency;

Elektra simply must ensure that the retribution be carried out upon her mother and her

mother’s lover. This motive thus clearly communicates the Freudian characteristic of

obsession and the necessity of abreaction or similar psychological cure for the psychotic

patient. That is, the retribution motive symbolizes the underlying cause of Elektra’s

57

disturbed mental state, a cause of which she is not in control. Unlike the Agamemnon

motive, which Elektra voices repeatedly through her own agency, the retribution motive

comes from her but involuntarily. This is her psychological tic, and it drives her musical

psychosis. This is illustrated by the fact that the motive, once presented at figure 43,

continues to develop through figure 47 (33), thus encompassing both of the instances of

Elektra’s unaccompanied voicings of the Agamemnon motive. The need for retribution,

represented in Figure 3, is therefore that which drives Elektra to obsessively repeat the

cry shown in Figure 1. These two motives are cause and symptom of her psychological

distress, and the pairing of the two remains significant throughout the work.

In the scene following Elektra’s monologue, Elektra converses with yet remains

isolated from her sister, as has been shown in the textual analysis above. This is

underscored musically by the presence of the Agamemnon motive three measures before

rehearsal figure 79 (57), in the middle of Chrysothemis’ first section of monologue. Just

as she reports that “…I come in as an empty room stares back at me” (…komm’ ich hin,

so stiert ein leeres Zimmer mich an, 56-7), the Agamemnon motive sounds in the

orchestra. Chrysothemis continues to describe her plight within the palace, but the motive

sounds again in the middle of her next line. The presence of the motive here is made clear

by Elektra’s next vocal entrance; when Chrysothemis asks Elektra to have pity, having

just described her miserable state, Elektra asks “for whom?” (Mit wem?, 58). While it is

possible to read this as a bitter and sarcastic question from Elektra implying that there are

none deserving of her pity, a simpler reading fits squarely into her psychological

predicament: Elektra has not been listening to her sister. The Agamemnon motive,

representing her own voice, though internalized in these two instances, indicates that

58

Elektra’s thoughts have strayed from that about which her sister is complaining to the

memory of her father, and she asks on whom Chrysothemis wishes her to have pity

because she has missed the context given just before the exhortation. This is therefore the

fundamental lapse in communication between the sisters which makes Chrysothemis’

attempts at establishing herself as her sister’s companion and ally entirely futile. Elektra

cannot connect with her sister over her present concerns because she is grounded so

firmly in her traumatic memory of the past, and the musical fabric of their dialogue

makes this clear.

Two other motives that appear during this scene are significant, one for the

understanding of Elektra, and one for Chrysothemis. At rehearsal figure 67 (51), Elektra

mentions the axe with which Agamemnon was murdered, and the music represents the

axe as well:

Figure 4. The axe motive.

The textual context for the appearance of this motive is highly significant. This is

the moment discussed in the previous chapter when Elektra asks Chrysothemis why she

has raised her hands in defense, claiming that “so did our father raise his two hands as the

axe drove down and split his flesh” (So hob der Vater seine beiden Hände, da fuhr das

Beil hinab un spaltete sein Fleisch, 51). As discussed above, this description of the

59

murder for which Elektra was likely was not present is in fact a symptom of her

psychosis. She is able to recall the memory only as a constructed product of her obsessed

psyche. The axe, however, the one detail of the memory which is expressed explicitly in

the music, and thus can be interpreted as being the most clear in Elektra’s mind itself, is

in fact not a false memory. As will be revealed in the second exchange between the

sisters, Elektra has the axe and has kept it safe in hopes of using it to carry out the

vengeance so earnestly called for by her mind. The axe finds musical expression because

it is a tangible representation of Elektra’s obsession and therefore of great importance to

her. She can imagine it clearly because she has held it and reminds herself constantly of

its existence.

The motive that is significant for an understanding of Chrysothemis, who in the

previous chapter was shown to be a contrasting figure for the psychotic Elektra, occurs

first at rehearsal figure 88 (62) and represents Chrysothemis’ desire to bear children:

Figure 5. The children motive.

The playful motive clearly indicates a happy future for Chrysothemis should she

be able to have these children, and the motive sounds as she promises that “I will warm

them with my body” (mit meinem Leib sie wärmen, 62). The warmth and joy of the

dream are played out in the orchestra as Elektra comprehends the emotions being

60

communicated by her sister, although they will have no sway on her outlook or

demeanor. Still, it is significant that just as Chrysothemis in her words looks to the future

for happiness, so does her music. The innovation within tradition that Hofmannsthal so

desperately yearned for, as discussed above, is here given expression in all aspects of the

work at once, and this idea is furthered when the motive returns and develops from figure

106 through figure 109 (69-71). The musical element expands and changes just as

Chrysothemis and Hofmannsthal desire to create meaning for themselves in alternative

futures, and this desire is so strong that Elektra cannot help but comprehend it, and so it is

given clear voice in the music.

Despite this success in communication, the attempt at connection between the

sisters fails, and Elektra is confronted with her mother, the bloated and ornate

Klytämnestra. In this scene, most significantly, Elektra’s will toward vengeance is

affirmed and is represented by a motive which in fact renders a reading of the text of the

exchange more accessible. The motive of Elektra’s will occurs between rehearsal figures

239 and 240 (161-2):

Figure 6. Elektra’s will motive.

The motive occurs during Elektra’s climactic tirade against her mother, in which

she describes in vivid detail how the murderous sacrificial revenge will be carried out.

Most significant for understanding the motive in Figure 6 is the text which Elektra sings

over its first iteration. She claims that “ and I, I, I, I, I, who sent him to you” (Und ich,

61

ich, ich, ich, ich, die ihn dir geschickt, 161-2), will participate actively in the pursuit and

sacrifice of her mother. This quintuple repetition of the first person pronoun is

conspicuous and significant. Elektra must emphasize as greatly as possible her own

personal engagement in the revenge she seeks for her father, even though she does not

imagine herself as the actual avenger, leaving that part in her mind for Orest.

Nevertheless this is still an action in which she feels compelled to be explicitly involved.

This is again her psychotic drive toward retributive resolution, and it colors the motive

which represents her own personal agency within the narrative of retribution. While the

retribution motive itself represents her intense need for resolution, the will motive

represents the necessity of her own personal agency in bringing about that retribution.

This motive reappears a short time later as her prophetic denunciation of her

mother builds to an emotional and psychological climax. This build is accompanied by

several significant motives tied to Elektra’s psychological state. The retribution motive

sounds at rehearsal figure 242 and begins the gradual build to the complete fury that will

end the rant. As Elektra comes to describe the completion of the hunt and the preparation

for the ritual sacrifice of her mother, she promises that “you [will] read with your staring

eyes the unhearable word” (liest du mit starren Aug’ das ungeheure Wort, 170) shown on

Elektra’s face. On the word ungeheure, the Agamemnon motive is played, and the

“unhearable word” is made explicit; Klytämnestra will know that her imminent death is a

direct result of Elektra’s devotion to her murdered father. This motive continues as

Elektra’s anger reaches its climax and she describes the axe which killed her father,

represented in the orchestra just before rehearsal figure 255, descending upon her mother.

62

Here again sounds the motive for her will toward vengeance, and her tirade concludes as

she asserts that the murder of Klytämnestra will be the solution to both of their concerns.

Following Klytämnestra’s departure, Elektra is again approached by her sister,

who claims that Orest has died. Elektra refuses the truth of the report several times,

culminating in a final shout that “it is not true!” (Es ist nicht wahr!, 194). This

proclamation is accompanied by the Agamemnon motive, signaling Elektra’s outright

refusal to accept and engage in the present circumstances with which she has been

presented, due primarily to their implications for her preoccupation with her father and

her plans to avenge him. With a significant hurdle, although based on false information,

thrown up for her plans of vengeance, Elektra returns to the tangible expression of what

she feels she must do; she digs up the axe out of the ground where she buried it. The axe

motive sounds clearly in the orchestra as she remembers it at rehearsal figure 45a (206).

Since her plans seem to be on the verge of falling apart, she must rely on this tangible

expression of her hopes. She also turns to Chrysothemis and beseeches her sister to join

her in carrying out the murders. Elektra here appropriates the music which Chrysothemis

had employed in their first encounter when she imagined a happy life for herself. Thus

Elektra utilizes the music which she knows is connected to her sister’s innermost desires,

since, as shown above, the meaning of Chrysothemis’ words was communicated clearly

to her psychotic sister. Elektra is addressing Chrysothemis in the same key in which she

had dreamt of better things, both figuratively and literally. Chrysothemis’ rejection of this

appeal to her emotions leaves Elektra with no reason to continue to engage with her sister

in any meaningful way. Instead, as Chrysothemis finally rejects her proposal totally and

rushes off of the stage, the music around Elektra builds with staggering intensity until she

63

screams “Damn her!” (Sei verflucht!, 242), and the exclamation point is supplied by one

of the most climactic uses of the Agamemnon motive in the entire work. Elektra’s

isolation has been set in stone, it would seem, as her father’s name rings loud and clear in

her head.

At the start of the next scene, however, it would seem that Elektra is not so alone

after all, as Orest has returned home. Not only is Orest the last viable option for a

companion for Elektra, he is in fact the very person for whom she has been waiting,

imagining over and over again how they two will together carry out the retribution owed

their father’s murderers. Upon their reunion, however, she rejects his camaraderie and

shuns him because of her own shame, explored more thoroughly above. She shuns her

brother, turning away from him, and citing “this hair, streaked, spotted, degraded” (dies

Haar versträhnt, beschmutzt, erniedrigt, 279). Her description of her physical state

introduces the Agamemnon motive again at figure 162a (279), and thus it is clear that she

connects her outward appearance to her obsession with her father. She knows that this

obsession has removed her from her once honorable position, and the music demonstrates

this awareness. Her lament for her lost beauty and lowered station build, with the

Agamemnon motive throughout, until at figure 168a she recounts the Freudian trauma of

the invasion of her bed by her father’s dying groans. In her fixation, the groans of her

father have been replaced by her own moaning, which is expressed in the music which

accompanies the retelling of her trauma. The potential reunion and partnering with Orest

instead only reinforces Elektra’s extreme psychosis, leaving her utterly isolated and

unable to join her siblings in the active present. Her obsession holds her back as her

64

thoughts ring with Agamemnon again and again; she has become lost entirely in her

psychosis. She no longer truly exists except for her temporally embedded self.

The concluding action of the drama sees this unraveling of the heroine expressed

in the music as the vengeance finally finds its realizations. At the reentrance of the maids

at figure 194a (307), the sympathy motive from Figure 2 dominates the music and

continues to do so until their exit two measures before figure 199a (312). During this time

it is as if Elektra were not even present, though she stands not far off from the maids,

staring at the doors of the palace even as they and Chrysothemis call her repeatedly. All

these attempts to reach her fail, however, as her isolation has been fully realized and she

is not in any way open to connection with the other women. Similarly, when Aegisth

enters, as mentioned above, Elektra speaks only deception, revealing nothing of her true

self, which is no longer anything more than her desire to see the vengeful murders carried

out. Thus she can only act the part that convinces Aegisth to enter the palace, as did the

heroine of Sophocles’ drama. All of Elektra has been lost save for that part of her which

is grounded in her past, both mythological and literary. Only her identity as the re-

realization of her Sophoclean counterpart remains, and so she cannot engage with the

story in any new way that is unique to Hofmannsthal’s treatment. That is, this is precisely

why she is unable to hear or respond to the maids at their reentrance and why her

conversation with Aegisth mirrors that of Sophocles’ original, the very past which she

now embodies totally.

The Agamemnon motive in the final section of the opera proves once more

thematic, now for Elektra’s entire loss of self and death, and is complemented by

instances of the retribution and axe motives. At rehearsal figure 183a (300), just after

65

Orest leaves the stage in order to murder his mother, the motive sounds as Elektra

realizes that her dedication and persistence are finally coming to a head; her mother and

Aegisth will soon be dead and her father avenged. The motive next appears at the murder

of Aegisth. Two measures after figure 216a (323), Elektra answers the dying Aegisth,

who has asked whether anyone can hear him begging for help by wailing that

“Agamemnon hears you!” (Agamemnon hört dich!, 323), and this declaration is

accompanied by the motive of her cry. It is significant that Elektra does not say that she

hears Aegisth on Agamemnon’s behalf or with him in mind; instead she has surrendered

her agency to the influence of her dead father. Agamemnon hears through her now and

she is nothing but the vessel for the expression of his retribution. This is why Elektra can

converse only briefly with her sister and then dance a few maenadic steps as the axe and

retribution motives blaze through the orchestra from three measures after figure 260a

until one before 261a (367-8), at which point she collapses lifeless to the ground. Here

the resurgence of these motives are the fatal reassertion of the only part of her which

remains: her obsession with her dead father and avenging his name. The vengeance has

been carried out; the retribution and axe motives sound for the last time as they cease to

carry any weight. She has accomplished that for which she existed and now there is

nothing left to keep her alive. She dies, and as her life ends her father’s name roars out of

the orchestra in the final moments of the opera, nearly drowning out Chrysothemis, who

calls desperately for Orest’s help. Orest of course cannot come, as he is already being

tormented by the Furies, his mind lost within its own psychological abyss. Chrysothemis

remains on the stage alone with the body of her dead sister as their father’s name rings

out one last time, the full stop at the end of the story of his vengeance. The final moment

66

of the opera is thus one overflowing with the inherent tension that pervades every aspect

of the work. The past screams deafeningly as the symbol of hope for the future stands

alone and powerless, yet still alive.

67

WORKS CITED

Abbate, C. 1989. “Elektra’s voice: music and language in Strauss’ opera.” in RichardStrauss: Elektra. Puffett, D. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Adams, S.M. 1957. Sophocles the Playwright. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Allen, Graham. 2011. Intertextuality. New York: Routledge.

Bloom, H. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bowlby, Rachel. 2007. Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Burton, R.W.B. 1980. The Chorus in Sophocles’ Tragedies. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Calame, C. 1997. Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece. London: Rowman &Littlefield.

Drews, A. 1980 [1933]. “Richard Wagner and the Greeks.” Wagner NS 1: 17-21.

Dreyfus, L. 2013. “Sunk in the ‘Mystic Abyss’: The ‘Choral’ Orchestra in Wagner’sMusic Dramas.” in Choruses, Ancient and Modern. Billings, Budelmann, andMacintosh, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dudouyt, Cécile. 2013. “Phantom Chorus: Missing Chorality on the French Eighteenth-Century Stage.” in Choruses, Ancient and Modern. Billings, Budelmann, andMacintosh, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ewans, M. 1982. Wagner and Aeschylus: The Ring and the Oresteia. New York:Cambridge University Press.

Foley, Helene. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton.

–. 2003. “Choral Identity in Greek Tragedy.” Classical Philology. 98.1: 1-30.

Freud, Sigmund. 1957. The standard edition of the complete psychological works ofSigmund Freud. London: The Hogarth press.

Gardiner, Cynthia. 1987. The Sophoclean Chorus. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

68

Goldhill, S. 2010. “Who Killed Gluck?.” in Ancient Drama in Music for the ModernStage. Brown, P. and Ograjenšek, S., eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von and Strauss, Richard. 1990. Elektra: Tragedy in One Act.Mineola, NY: Dover. Original work published 1916.

Hughes, A. 2012. Performing Greek Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jens, Walter. 1955. Hofmannsthal und die Griechen. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.

Kerman, J. 1988. Opera as Drama. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress.

Knox, Bernard. 1964. The Heroic Temper. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kovach, Thomas A. 1993. “Traditionalist Modernism or Modernist Traditionalism: TheCase of Huge von Hofmannsthal.” Philological Papers 39: 57-61.

Kronberger, Silvia. 2002. Die unerhörten Töchter: Fräulein Else und Elektra und diegesellschaftliche Funktion der Hysterie. Innsbruck: Studienverlag.

Kyriakou, Poulheria. 2011. The Past in Aeschylus and Sophocles. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Lee, M.O. 2003. Athena Sings: Wagner and the Greeks. Toronto: University of TorontoPress.

Martens, Lorna. 1987. “The Theme of Repressed Memory in Hofmannsthal’s Elektra.”The German Quarterly. 60.1: 38-51.

Palisca, C.V. 1968. “The Alterati of Florence, Pioneers in the Theory of DramaticMusic.” in New Looks at Italian Opera. Austin, W., ed. Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress.

Pirrotta, N. 1982. Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi. Eales, K., trans.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Politzer, Heinz. 1973. “Hugo von Hofmannsthals Elektra: Geburt der Tragödie aus demGeiste der Psychopathologie.” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift 47 (I): 95-119.

Puffett, D. 1989. Richard Strauss: Elektra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Savage, R. 2010. “Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts: The Institutions of Greco-RomanTheatre and the Development of European Opera.” in Ancient Drama in Music forthe Modern Stage. Brown, P. and Ograjenšek, S., eds. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

69

Savage, R. 2013. “‘Something like the Choruses of the Ancients’: The Coro Stabile andthe Chorus in European Opera, 1598-1782.” in Choruses, Ancient and Modern.Billings, Budelmann, and Macintosh, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Scott, Jill. 2005. Electra After Freud: Myth and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Segar, Kenneth. 1988. “Hofmannsthal’s ‘Elektra’: from drama to libretto.” in John,Nicholas ed. Salome/Elektra. London: John Calder.

Sophocles. Electra. Lloyd-Jones, H. ed. 1994. Cambridge, Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press.

Swift, L.A. 2010. The Hidden Chorus: Echoes of Genre in Tragic Lyric. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Urban, Bernd. 1978. Hofmannsthal, Freud, und die Psychoanalyse: QuellenkundlicheUntersuchungen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Ward, Philip. 2002. Hofmannsthal and Greek Myth: Expression and Performance.Oxford: Peter Lang.

Winkler, John. 1990. “The Ephebe’s Song: Tragōidia and Polis.” in Nothing to Do withDionysos?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context. Winkler, J. and Zeitlin, F., eds.Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wintle, C. 1988. “Elektra and the ‘Elektra Complex’.” in John, Nicholas ed.Salome/Elektra. London: John Calder.

Worbs, Michael. 1983. Nervenkunst: Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien derJahrhundertwende. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische.

Zarifi, Y. 2007. “Chorus and dance in the ancient world.” in The Cambridge Companionto Greek and Roman Theatre. McDonald, M. and Walton, J.M., eds. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.