A portion of this essay, under the same title, was published as pan of the programme book for the Los Angeles Opera's 1991 production of Elektra, included in Performing Arts 25/2 (1991), pp. 23–6.Google Scholar I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint this material.

¹ Ford, Ford Madox, ‘Women and Men’, The Little Review, 4 (1918), 40–1Google Scholar; cited in Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York, 1986), 218.Google Scholar

² Weininger, Otto, Sex and Character (London, n.d.), 260.Google Scholar Further citations appear in the text.

³ Gilman, Sander, ‘Strauss and the Pervert’, in Reading Opera, ed. Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger (Princeton, 1988), 306–27.Google Scholar

⁴ Dijkstra, , Idols, 3–24, 160–234Google Scholar, documents the coalescence of evolutionist and misogynist thought; see also Gilman, Sander, ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century An, Literature, and Medicine’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 204–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and especially Russett, Cynthia Eagle, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).Google Scholar A conspectus of nineteenth-century primitivism can be found in Bentley, Nancy, ‘Slaves and Fauns: Hawthorne and the Uses of Primitivism’, ELH (English Literary History), 57 (1990), 901–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Brantliger, Patrick, ‘Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 166–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On primitivism and modernity, see Torgovnik, Marianna, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago and London, 1990).Google Scholar

⁵ Weber, Max, Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, Talcott (London, 1930), 13.Google Scholar

⁶ Tylor, Edward B., Primitive Culture, 2 vols (London, 1871; rpt. New York, 1920), 27Google Scholar; cited by Bentley, ‘Primitivism’ (see n. 4), 914–15.Google Scholar

⁷ Linton, E. Lynn, ‘The Panisans of the Wild Women’, The Nineteenth Century, 31 (1892), 596Google Scholar; cited in Dijkstra, , Idols, 213.Google Scholar

⁸ On Salome see Gilman's, ‘Strauss and the Pervert’Google Scholar and my ‘Culture and Musical Hermeneutics: The Salome Complex’, this journal, 2 (1990), 269–94.Google Scholar

⁹ On catharsis in Hofmannsthal see Janik, Allan and Toulmin, Stephen, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York, 1973), 82–4, 112–17.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Music and Language in Elektra’, in Richard Strauss: Elektra, ed. Puffett, Derrick (hereafter RSE), Cambridge Opera Guides (Cambridge, 1989), 107–27.Google Scholar Further citations appear in the text.

¹¹ The quoted phrase is from Kristeva, Julia, ‘About Chinese Women’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Moi, Toril (New York, 1988), 152.Google Scholar Further citations appear in the text.

¹² Dijkstra, , Idols (n. 1)Google Scholar, reproduces a large number of these paintings. A good colour reproduction of Moving Waters appears in Pre-Modern An of Vienna: 1848–1898, ed. Botstein, Leon and Weintraub, Linda (Detroit, 1987).Google Scholar On Fish-Blood and fin-de-siècle sexuality, see my Music as Cultural Practice: 1800–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 142–3.Google Scholar

¹³ On gender and post-Cartesian epistemology, see Lloyd, Genevieve, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis, 1984), 38–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bordo, Susan, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany, 1987).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Quotations from Russett, , Sexual Science (see n. 4), 148Google Scholar, 149 and 146 respectively.

¹⁵ Russet, , 149.Google Scholar

¹⁶ The term ‘primitive’ refers nonprejudicially to the absence of a legal system or the investment of custom with the force of law.

¹⁷ Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Gregory, Patrick (Baltimore, 1977).Google Scholar Further citations appear in the text.

¹⁸ Girard, (p. 292)Google Scholar observes that Aristotle's Poetics ‘is something of a manual of sacrificial practices, for the qualities that make a “good” tragic hero are precisely those required of the sacrificial victim’.

¹⁹ Clément, Catherine, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Wing, Betsy (Minneapolis, 1988).Google Scholar

²⁰ Here as in Salome, the models for this allegory are Parsifal and, more remotely, The Magic Flute, with the proviso that, if Wagner's tonal authority is decentred with respect to Mozart's, Strauss's is decentred with respect to Wagner's, and desacralised to boot. On the tonal allegory in The Magic Flute, see Cox, Renée, ‘A History of Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48 (1990), 395–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ Carpenter, Tethys, ‘The Musical Language of Elektra’, RSE, 82–3.Google Scholar

²² Carpenter, , 78–82.Google Scholar

²³ Carpenter, , 96–8.Google Scholar

²⁴ Carpenter, , 103–6.Google Scholar

²⁵ A further technical detail is worth noting in this connection. The Elektra chord and its bitonal complement form a ten-note collection, excluding only D and A. These excluded notes, as Abbate has observed, form one of Elektra's distinctive ‘voices’, heard at several crucial moments of the drama (Figs. 90, 178, 10a; an additional instance occurs at Fig. 123a). The conjuncture of E flat minor and C minor can thus be taken, in an even fuller sense than the one already noted, to represent the latent position that Elektra holds off as long as possible – but that, especially given her impulse towards chromatic saturation, cannot be held off forever.

²⁶ McClary, Susan, ‘Excess and Frame: The Musical Representation of Madwomen’, in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota, 1991), 80–111.Google Scholar

²⁷ On Agamemnon as true hero, see Overhoff, Kun, Die Elektra-Partitur von Richard Strauss: Ein Lehrbuch für die Technik der dramatischen Komposition (Salzburg, 1978)Google Scholar, and Specht, Richard, Richard Strauss and sein Werk, 2 vols (Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich, 1921), II, 165–214.Google Scholar

²⁸ For a succinct account of Winckelmann's intellectual legacy, see DeJean, Joan, ‘Sex and Philology: Sappho and the Rise of German Nationalism’, Representations, 27 (1989), 148–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁹ For an extended account of the structure of the monologue, see Puffett, Derrick, ‘The Music of Elektra: Some Preliminary Thoughts’, RSE, 33–5.Google Scholar

³⁰ Lacan, Jacques, ‘The Field and Function of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1977), 65–8.Google Scholar

³¹ Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies II: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans. Carter, Erica and Turner, Chris (Minneapolis, 1989).Google Scholar