She is one of the most hated, most rejected characters in dramatic literature since the Greeks, and the opera seizing her has not fixed it. It was just a century ago: it is no coincidence that it is precisely with her that the opera entered its most suspicious twilight, mid-day, dusk of bad conscience. Strauss’s Klytämnästra is much more the daughter of Hofmannsthal and already Freud than it is of Sophocles or Goethe, of Greek or German naivety. Her liver reproaches (she says so), her hands swell, she has bad nights. She is still consulting her daughter Elektra, a living image of her bad conscience: she needs a remedy for dreams, and hers are bad; everything is bad with her, moreover, faith, conscience, surely her breath; and she is ready to buy this remedy from the blood of one of her troll carriers or, why not, of the girl who remains attached to her, Chrysothemis. We have seen so much this decadent and decrepit Klytämnästra, in her arrows of gems and charms, Elisabeth Höngen more grandiose than any in her rot, her dismay, the fear that twists her stomach. Daughter of Freud in truth, Viennese who is hardly Atride any more.
The crime she committed overflows with her, like spoiled blood that she can no longer hold back. This is called remorse, re-bite, and bite in vain, for which there is no way to discharge. This hand, the perfumes of Arabia would not cleanse it. Neither this soul. Agamemnon leaving for his ten years of war had left her at home with the children. She took herself for Aegisthus lover, cowardly in combat, male in bed only; in them both the blood of Atreus and Thyestes bloomed again; with an ax, on his return, at the edge of his bath, between them they slaughtered him, the King of kings of Greece. How could Orestes, the boy miraculously preserved, hidden far abroad (his sister Electra provided for it) not think of this and that only: to do justice with the blood of Agamemnon on the body of those who have it? paid? Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. It is fair game and it is the only form of justice that is clear. We know (in advance Orestes knew) the price he will have to pay in his turn. He will take his mother’s blood, him matricide (we are among the Greeks, but the etymologies here are Latin), and this blood will fall on him. We will see him at Racine (and he is the same Orestes), driven mad by the Furies. At Aeschylus, in this Orestie of which he is the eponymous and sacrificial hero, the Erynnies, bitches who smell blood, follow him; it was Apollo, however, the God of dreams, the master of the oracles of Delphi, who had commanded him to do so. It will not be necessary less than the institution by the wise Athens of the tribunal of the Pnyx to calm the bitches, to change them into benevolent (this is what Eumenides means), so that finally cease the inappeasable revival of the blood, which in order to drown in it wants another blood.
So the Greek tragedy. Justice and revenge are the same thing, which is said with the same dreadful word: Diker. But there is no case in the tragedy (and this is what makes it precisely tragedy, marked with the sign of the inevitable, the one who launched the mechanism being in a way for nothing, anitios, out of cause, non-cause, simple circumstance) where he who sheds blood has had no good and just reason to do so. Behind all revenge (but first of all crime) there is, emphatically claimed, a sort of good law. “You are right”, “Du hast Recht” .. How terrible it is, the law which says it is right, and pleads, and with arguments. Let it be known: in the Clytemnestra of Greek Tragedy there was a grandiose, an enormous good conscience.
Clytemnestra had stayed at home with the children, as has been said. But not all children. An elder, Iphigénie, had been sacrificed. Who had sacrificed her? Agamemnon, in logic and in good law, the duty perhaps, his duty as leader of the expedition. “Une fille pour du vent” is the beautiful title of André Obey’s play on the sacrifice of Iphigénie. At a lower price the sails of the fleet will not swell, the oracle said it: and the oracle, it is the voice of the god who is just, and knows everything. He had done so without consulting the mother. Let one hear a little in Sophocles how she responds to Electra’s grievances: “Did he twist himself in pain to bring her into the world, like me to give birth to her?” What hell did the hell need ma girl ! Why didn’t we immolate Hermione? She was the daughter of this father and this mother because of whom we were fighting… ”We have wronged a mother. Her child was taken from her. Blood has flowed (Clytemnestra does not know that Artemis kidnapped, took for her, the victim). This blood calls for blood. There wouldn’t be this mékhanè, this brilliant trap in which all tragedy is tied and locked, if the criminals had only bad reasons, if they could not at least claim to be in good faith, and in good faith. At Sophocles Clytemnestra had a dream, and this dream is equivocal, as it is the nature of any dream to be. But it is with a clear soul and spirit that she goes to the temple to ask Apollo to reveal its meaning to her, she goes there to accomplish the will of God who first speaks in riddles. His step is assured, his breath pure. She would retire, if necessary. She is sure of her right. She doesn’t have bad nights.
This Clytemnestra that the crime of another, the blood of another reduce first of all to the status of royal victim, grandiose and pathetic, it is Gluck who after Sophocles (and Goethe) installs her in the truth of his suffering. and its despoilment; it is she whom Gluck makes this unique figure, of broken and pitiful nobility, in the least mythical role, the least changeable in a statue, the most palpably human that the lyrical world has yet known, too often populated by statues that cannot be changed into a statue. are that melodious. What were they looking at, the pains of Alceste worried about children she is going to leave orphans? Here the mother is crying, because her daughter is going to bleed, and bleed for the wind… It is inexpiable. One day (but not at Gluck), it will have to equalize the balance. It will only be to honor Dikè. Clytemnestra must have his fair trial, metrodicea (here the etymologies are Greek).
André Tubeuf
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