Jean Anouilh's Antigone and Sartre's The Flies are among its many successors. The first Freudian opera?

1909-01-25 in Dresden: Semperoper: First Pub lication. I'm merging the variety of topics I've blogged about--which include literary and film analyses, anarchism, socialism, libertarian-leaning Marxism, narcissistic abuse, and psychoanalysis--into a coherent philosophy centred on dialectical materialism, dialectical monism, and object relations theory. … German.

Strauss and Hofmannsthal were holding up a mirror to their times and many didn't like the reflection. Aeschylus's Oresteia focuses on chains of retribution and guilt. Hofmannsthal - who had reworked his own "free adaptation" of Sophocles' Electra to form the libretto - was depicted holding the Greek dramatist down while Strauss battered him to death with a cymbal stick. Strauss, searching for a follow-up to his "Salome," basically set the play verbatim but with inevitable excisions and, in a few cases (above all, Elektra's recognition of Orest), some new lines. German. Divisive political treaties were hardening into the configurations that led to the cataclysm of 1914.

Myth becomes the embodiment of psychological extremism as Hofmannsthal collides with his contemporary Freud. Elektra was the fourth of fifteen operas by Strauss and opened his successful partnership with the librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It was dedicated to his friends Natalie and Willy Levin. 1906-08 First Perf ormance. The Mayerling scandal - the double suicide of the drug-ridden heir to the Hapsburg empire and his sex-crazed mistress - would have been fresh in the memories of the opera's first audiences. A 'sexual aberration'? Much has been made of his ditching of many overt trappings of Greek drama, such as turning Sophocles' single-minded chorus into a gaggle of squabbling maids.

Sung In. Elektra, Op. 58, is a one-act opera by Richard Strauss, to a German-language libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which he adapted from his 1903 drama Elektra.The opera was the first of many collaborations between Strauss and Hofmannsthal. Nowadays, it is impossible to think of Hofmannsthal's text without Strauss's music, though the play proved influential in its own right, opening the way for later dramatists to reinvent classical myth as psychodrama. There is no divinely imposed pattern of retribution, no Furies to goad and torment his Orest, and the characters are consequently at the mercy of their own uncontrollable psyches and irrationalistic obsessions. Orestes. Photo: Tristram Kentonhen Richard Strauss's Elektra was ushered on-stage in Dresden in January 1909, it was greeted by the critical equivalent of fits and screaming. Strauss's father, a domineering man, who encouraged his son's compositions but repeatedly disparaged the results, had died in 1905, an event which in turn caused Strauss's mother (whose mental health was never less than precarious) to have a massive breakdown, necessitating confinement in a sanatorium. Those same raw nerves, however, also spilled into every bar of the opera's music and also explain the torrential savagery of the emotions it recreates in the listener. In 1909, Elektra may have been disturbing, but it was also disturbingly familiar and at the start of the 21st century, it seems so again. Each age reinvents classical mythology in its own image. This haunting in Orestes’ mind (and in the mind of Electra, who in Euripides’ play helps him kill Clytemnestra–lines 1210-1214, Since at least some of the servants celebrate the killing of the king and queen (Euripides, lines 841-848, Nonetheless, there is something for the proletarian to learn, in his or her revolutionary fervour, from the outcome of this regicide. Now, one dialectical opposition is that between the erotic and the ascetic, so accordingly, my writing encompasses the sexual as well as the philosophical; the former can be found in my publications on the Literotica website, as well as my self-published (erotic) horror writing on Amazon. Elektra does, however, anticipate not only psychoanalysis, but other developments in psychiatry.