Elektra

The story of Elektra

Vengeance will be hers.

King Agamemnon has been murdered by his wife Klytämnestra and her lover, Ägisth. To protect her brother Orest, Klytämnestra’s daughter, Elektra, sends him away, now living as an outcast in her mother’s home. Though her sister Chrysothemis, desperate to escape the palace, urges caution, Elektra cannot rest until she has avenged her father.

A fruitful collaboration

Elektra’s composer Richard Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal first met in 1899, at the writer Richard Dehmel’s home in Berlin. Strauss, 35, was a pre-eminent German progressive composer, while the Austrian Hofmannsthal, although ten years younger, had established himself as a leading poet and dramatist. The first surviving letter between the two is dated to 1900, when Hofmannsthal proposed a ballet scenario that he hoped might interest Strauss. The composer declined, citing his own plans to work on a ballet – which he intended to pursue after completing his opera Feuersnot. In the end, Strauss’s ballet did not materialize, but his subsequent interest in Hofmannsthal’s play Elektra (1903) – an adaptation of Sophocles’s original drama – led to further correspondence, and eventually, their first collaboration.

Menacing modernity

’Even before a note of the opera was heard, Elektra, like its predecessor, Salome, carried with it the reputation of the play on which it was based,’ writes musicologist Hugo Shirley. ’The orchestral apparatus Strauss gathered for his score – including Heckelphone, a newly-minted relative of the oboe – was unprecedented, as were the demands on the soprano singing Elektra, on stage for all but one of the opera’s seven scenes. And as with Salome, it was an opera whose subject matter placed neurosis and hysteria, brought into the public consciousness by such books as Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria (1895), centre stage.’

Indeed Strauss’s Elektra is among the most intense and uncompromising works in the operatic repertory, blending extreme emotional expression with complex orchestral language. Dense, dissonant and as Shirley notes, psychologically-driven, the score creates an immense and often stifling aural landscape: violent outbursts, fractured harmonies and relentless tension mirror the obsessive mind of the opera’s heroine, her tormented inner life laid bare in a frenzied juxtaposition of explosive climaxes and eerie stillness. The result is a landmark of modern opera: one that is as visceral as it is musically masterful.