This chapter explores the cultural, intellectual, and sociopolitical context surrounding Strauss’s operas based on Greek mythology: Elektra, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die ägyptische Helena, Daphne, and Die Liebe der Danae. Offering an overview of Germany’s cultural obsession with ancient Greece from the Enlightenment through the Third Reich, it highlights the changing nature of this engagement while pointing to ways in which German Hellenism informs an understanding of Strauss’s Greek-inspired operas. These works reflect broader cultural debates related to shifting German views of ancient Greece that range from a sunnier and more idealized portrait of the Greeks to a darker, more irrational one. This fundamental opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses behind Greek tragedy plays out in these operas to one degree or another, while those composed during the Third Reich resonate with views of classical antiquity shaped by the Nazis' increasing focus on issues of race, ethnicity, and biological superiority that were tied to German identity.

This chapter explores Wagner’s use of Greek myth as a framework for his operatic reform and as the basis for key aspects of plot and character in the Ring cycle. Providing an overview of the composer’s lifelong fascination with the Greeks, it highlights Wagner’s aim of creating a new form of “music drama” that would capture the spirit of ancient Greek tragedy while constituting its rebirth in a modern Germanic guise. It further calls attention to parallels between the Ring and elements of Greek tragedy but shifts the customary focus away from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Prometheus trilogy toward the Oedipus myth and specifically the character of Antigone, who bears several similarities to Brünnhilde. Wagner’s apparent use of Antigone as a model for Brünnhilde reflects his understanding of both figures as redemptive agents who, through a self-effacing and thoroughly human kind of love, enact a symbolic destruction of the state and thereby point the way toward a more utopian future characterized by a downfall of the existing world order along with a return of the cultural and artistic significance of myth.