Ken Winters [Globe and Mail, 23 April 2007]

Salome and Elektra, the two operas in which Richard Strauss made German-Expressionist, very bloody shovels out of merely lurid spades from the Bible and Sophocles, staked out a path that Strauss thereafter did not take. Perhaps he took seriously the noted critic Ernest Newman's comment that Elektra was "abominably ugly."