The aim of this article is to rethink some recurring musicological topoi regarding Elektra by Hofmannsthal and Strauss, in the light of the most recent critical insights into his theatrical work and making use of Bryan Gilliam's research on the compositional genesis of Strauss's score. The hypothesis put forward here is that Hofmannsthal's "Tragodie in einem Aufzug frei nach Sophokles" encouraged the composer to create a much more complex and compact musical dramaturgy compared to the one he achieved in Salome. He was influenced by the lucid deconstruction of the cultural and literary paradigm of the Western tradition carried out by Hofmannsthal in his theatrical drama. It is sufficient to mention his criticism of the limits of Freudian thought which is evident in the way he conceives the conversation between Elektra and Clytemnestra as a failed "analytical" relationship; the ironic use of the femme fatale icon, which is central to contemporary imagination; and above all the reversal of the Nietzschean vision of Greek ideals in the dramatic finale of the opera. Elektra's "indescribable dance" not only reveals the loss of rational language, but becomes the expression of a devastated, dislocated corporeality, very far from the Pathosformeln of classical iconography. At the same time it reveals the unattainability of the Dionysian in the modern world. A detailed analysis of the compositional process makes it possible to verify how well Strauss succeeded in consciously translating the profound meaning of Hofmannsthal's tragedy into a cogent musical idiom. The search for a theatricality considered as a true "mise-en-scene of the psyche" is achieved by the composer through precise dramaturgical strategies: the rigorous, symmetrical architecture, which governs the formal construction of the work; the conception of the second scene - which includes the premonitory "vision" of vengeance - as a "microcosm" of the entire opera; the fact that most of the motivic material comes from a generating nucleus aligned with the tremendous emotional resonance of the figure of Agamemnon in Electra's psyche; the process of assimilating the principal themes of the opera to the "structural" principles of waltz metre and anapestic tactus, which fill the final pages of the score, to describe the heroine's spasmodic search for an impossible ecstatic experience.
