see waltraute, I don't understand what you like about Strauss' Elektra. Indeed it is very well sung and the staging is ace, but the musicality isn't all that.
Before I'll try and explain, let me just say I agree completely about
Barry Lyndon. You by any chance rate Greenaway's
The Draughtman's Contract, too?
Now, regarding your question - I'd honestly love to give you more than pure subjectivity, but I can't. Not the way the question is put - 'why do you like it'?
Because I'm sure whatever I'd put forward about Strauss (and Hofmannsthal), it would just be so much theoretical noise & it would not help in making you 'get'
Elektra.
I firmly believe there is no way you could put forward an argument that would lead a person to aesthetically appreciating a piece of music.
(Or a painting, a text, or a football team...)
What I'd say in this case though is that you owe it to yourself to at least listen to the entire opera, or preferably attend a performance.
It's extremely difficult to do justice to any opera through posting excerpts, and especially so for Wagner and Strauss. For me, having lived with
Elektra from childhood, it can be incredibly difficult to get how such a 'soundbite' may be interpreted by someone not familiar with the entire opera.
That being said - if you don't like it, you simply don't, and I'd be the last to keep pestering anyone to persist with a piece which doesn't speak to them.
And why does it speak to me? That could be the question which launched a biography
- but I'll spare you, and simply say that I find the music too beautiful for words, and so many emotions of my own reflected in the libretto, not least the in many ways impotent, but still destructive anger of Elektra.
And now of course I'll have to end with another excerpt from Elektra --
Strauss
Elektra - 'Orest!' - Rysanek under Böhm --