So here, to me, is Elektra

 When asked why he refused to conduct Strauss, Nikolaus Harnoncourt replied that he thought Richard Strauss the most gifted composer since Mozart, but he used his gift for... I forget exactly how he put it but I immediately felt as though I heard what he meant.

Richard Strauss is different than the usual 'overtalents' of music: Mendelssohn, Liszt, Saint-Saens, Rachmaninov, Hindemith, it all came much too easily to them. I distrust those artists who have an overabundance of genius. If you were born with it, you never have to overcome the colossal struggle that gives you something worth saying with your gift. They're awe-inspiring musicians, but they're not great artists. Not for me at least. Mozart and Schubert had that overabundance of genius, but their brief lives were colossally difficult and their heart had something to say beyond their gift for organizing notes.

It came too easily to Richard Strauss too, and yet there was something genuinely different about him that I can never understand. The heady subject matter of his tone poems was like an impersonation of artistic depth rather than Mahler's real thing. How could a man with such a charmed life understand the purpose of artistic depth?

And yet there is a kind of neuroticism in Strauss's music that seems to intuit that this artistic gigantism was imitating his society in an unhealthy way. I have said many times before that I often think that the avant garde works are a kind of pandering pose, contemptuously giving pretentious audiences what they wanted, when what he really wanted was to use his thousands of colors to create music as beautiful as the Mozart and Mendelssohn he loved above all other music. Strauss stayed on the surface of depths And the music for which he was most passionate is the truest key into Strauss's psyche we will ever get. He wanted an untroubled life of beauty, but in order to get beauty, he had to provide the public with philosophy and noise.

Strauss stayed on the surface of depths Mahler freely plunged into: after RS's early romantic poses in Don Juan and Tod und Verklarung, so much of his music is either a kind of postromantic modernism or neoclassical, yet the two seem to combine ever so rarely. To Strauss's credit, he manages to find his own way of creating both modernism and neoclassicism. Mahler too found his way to do both neoclassicism and the avant garde, but he integrated the two modes and many others besides. The generation of Mahler and Strauss venerated Strauss's music and excoriated Mahler's, but that was because Strauss reflected the world back to them his audiences wanted to hear, whereas Mahler reflected all the facets of the world they considered detritus: popular music, tavern music, Jewish music, military music... Strauss is proof enough that nobody had a problem with Mahler's modernism, they had a problem with his populism.

But this is the contradiction of that period's Germany, indeed the contradiction of Europe's entirety. On the one hand, gemutlicher charm, on the other, a taste for violence (and yes, yes, present day America has the same problem). It's the refusal to integrate the schism in Europe's personality that resulted in its great crisis. Mahler showed a way out of the crisis, but Strauss WAS the crisis itself.

Strauss was a second-rate first-rate composer, not the other way around as he said he was. He was great enough to reflect all the problems of his epoch, not great enough to find a way through them.

Below is one of the very few performances that finds a way to integrate those strands of Strauss's personality. Hewing closely to Strauss's metronome markings as perhaps only Carlos Kleiber does besides, the ever underrated William Steinberg finds the Mendelssohn in the light speed whizz of Strauss's millions of details. It is one of the only performances in which Elektra seems to happen in a single breath, a scherzo that, for all its gigantism, passes by with fairy-like lightness. Perhaps that's what Strauss needs, in ultraserious works like Also Sprach and Elektra, to be played with kidding lightness, and with weighty soberiety in playful works like Rosenkavalier and Till Eulenspiegel. Perhaps it's the performances that misrepresent Strauss, and he composed far more psychologically integrated music than I give him credit for.

So here, to me, is Elektra.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4ZHqyp5jxg