ABSTRACT
Richard Strauss's Elektra is one of the most extreme works of expressionist art, an opera of unrelenting emotional intensity, which in performance imposes strain on everyone involved. In Elektra Hugo von Hofmannsthal created a score of extraordinary power, which responded to the visual stimulus of Schliemann's excavations at Mycenai and Tiryns. Hofmannsthal's Elektra is isolated, since her sympathizing chorus of Women of Argos in Sophocles has been replaced by serving-maids who loathe her. Elektra can be read simply as a study in obsession and mischannelled sexuality – Hofmannsthal's response to the early work of Breuer and Freud. Hofmannsthal's Elektra rebels not against Greek tragedy or against the main thrust of Sophocles' Electra, but against a particular reading of Greek tragedy – the selective emphasis on its rational and verbal elements, which dominated the neo-classicism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
