ABSTRACT
Richard Strauss really seems to have thought in terms of short, sharply characterised motives, each with a fixed dramatic connotation. This is borne out by the sketches. Those for Elektra – at least, those that have been published – almost have the character of a leitmotive guide. One of the attractions for Strauss of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s play, along with the opportunities it offered for characterisation, was ‘the tremendous increase in musical tension to the very end’, the famous crescendo effect which sometimes gives the impression that Elektra consists of one climax after another. When the finale takes up the music of Elektra’s monologue, the effect is simply of a final, clinching recapitulatory gesture – on the lines of Salome’s concluding monologue – rather than of ‘the last piece of the jigsaw falling into place’. The Triumph of Symmetry, as a dramatic device worked out to the last detail, is something more properly associated with Berg than with Strauss.
