Nor is "Elektra," more sharp than "Salome," though it oftentimes is, the
musical equivalent for the massive and violent forms of archaic Greek
sculpture that Strauss intended it be. Elektra herself is perhaps more
truly incarnate fury than Salome is incarnate luxury; ugliness and
demoniacal brooding, madness and cruelty are here more sheerly
powerfully expressed than in the earlier score; the scene of
recognition between brother and sister is more large and touching than
anything in "Salome"; Elektra's paean and dance, for all its closeness
to a banal _cantilena_, its _tempo di valse_ so characteristic of the
later Strauss, is perhaps more grandiosely and balefully triumphant than
the dancer's scene with the head. Nevertheless, the work is by no means
realized. It is formally impure, a thing that none of the earlier
tone-poems are. Neither style nor shape are deeply felt. Both are
superficially and externally conceived; and nothing so conclusively
demonstrates it as the extreme ineffectually of the moments of contrast
with which Strauss has attempted to relieve the dominant mood of his
work. Just as in "Salome" the more restless and sensual passages, lazily
felt as they are, are nevertheless infinitely more significant than the
intensely contrasting silly music assigned to the Prophet, so, too, in
"Elektra," the moments when Strauss is cruel, brutal, ugly are of a much
higher expressiveness than those in which he has sought to write
beautifully.
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