RICHARD STRAUSS
Salome
The Triumph of Woman
It's no accident that so much of today's popular culture is by,
for, and about teenagers. Adolescence is the stage of life when the
basic human urges for power, autonomy, sex, sensation, identity,
and love are closest to the surface. From Sophocles in
Electra to Shakespeare in Romeo and
Juliet and Hamlet, from Goethe in The
Sorrows of Young Werther to George Lucas in Star
Wars, artists have mined that rich vein of
emotion to make universal statements about the human
condition.
Late in the 19th century, European writers and painters of the
Symbolist school discovered another teenager who appears in the
Bible only briefly [Matthew 14:1-12], but long enough to inspire
extravagant fantasies of sex, violence, and spirituality. The
Gospels of Matthew and Mark refer to her only as "the daughter of
Herodias," but the early Jewish historian Josephus provides us with
her name: Salome.
It did not take long for this glimpse of a dancing princess who
asked for and got the head of John the Baptist to grow, in
Christian mythology, into every righteous man's worst nightmare:
the murderous temptress, the evil twin to virtuous Judith, who
saved her people by seducing and beheading the enemy general
Holofernes. The Symbolists, obsessed with digging underneath
everyday reality to find naked emotional truth, went still further.
To one of them, novelist J. K. Huysmans, Salome "had always
remained a dim and distant figure, lost in a mysterious ecstasy far
off in the mists of time, beyond the reach of punctilious,
pedestrian minds, and accessible only to brains shaken and
sharpened and rendered almost clairvoyant by neurosis."
The wave of literary passion over Salome had broken and receded
somewhat by the time the showman and satirist Oscar Wilde took her
up in his play Salomé, written in French for the actress
Sarah Bernhardt and published in 1893. Wilde changed the motivation
for Salome's terrible request from a conspiracy with her mother to
her own unrequited crush on the prophet. The great man is brought
down not by kings or empires, but by the simplest of human urges,
manifested in a teenage girl's fantasy of revenge.
Wilde's Salome is moody, balky, not even very interested in dancing
until she realizes it's the way to get what she wants. She is a
temptress only in the lust-clouded minds of her stepfather Herod,
the young Syrian captain of the guard Narraboth, and the other men
of the court. She seems unaware of sex herself, at least until her
feelings coalesce around Herod's strangely magnetic prisoner. Then
she becomes, as Richard Strauss would later say, "a 16-year-old
with the voice of Isolde."
Strauss first encountered Wilde's play in 1902, when the Austrian
poet Anton Lindner sent it to him with an offer to make an opera
libretto from it. Strauss was less interested in Lindner's verses
than in Wilde's original, as translated into German by Hedwig
Lachmann. (Although it was ultimately necessary, as always, to trim
and simplify the spoken play for operatic purposes, Salome
remains a rare instance of an opera created by setting the words of
the original source, without the intervention of a poet or
librettist.) Summer vacation was Strauss's time to concentrate on
composing; he completed most of Salome in sketch in 1904,
following a successful spring tour of North America (including
Cleveland), and the orchestration was finished on June 20,
1905.
Only the Dance of the Seven Veils remained to be written, and
Strauss did so on August 30, while working on a French adaptation
of the opera. After attending a performance of Salome,
Gustav Mahler later expressed "grave doubts about the whole theme
and subject matter, about the music for the dance, which we did not
like, and about a great deal else … and yet the public without
hesitation gave a verdict of success."
That verdict first came at the Court Theater in Dresden on December
9, 1905, after which Salome proceeded to stir up a
succès de scandale everywhere it played, except in
New York, where a citizens' protest against the "moral stench" of
this "loathsome, abhorrent" work closed the Metropolitan Opera
production after one performance.
Other observers were less concerned with the work's alleged
decadence or blasphemy than they were with the question: Is it an
opera? Gabriel Fauré was among the first, and certainly not the
last, to call Salome "a symphonic poem with voices
added." Before entering the opera house, Strauss had been famous
for his big orchestral works, many of which, such as Till
Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche and Don Quixote, told
vivid stories without using words. He took satisfaction in the
large role of the orchestra in Salome and his next opera,
Elektra. "That these 'symphonies' convey the kernel
of the dramatic content," he wrote, "will perhaps be completely
understood by our successors."
And yet Strauss begins this orchestrally ambitious work in the most
modest way imaginable-no grand overture or even an orchestral
prelude, just a quick rising scale on the clarinet, leading to
Narraboth's opening line, "Wie schön ist die Prinzessin Salome
heute Nacht!" ("How beautiful the Princess Salome is
tonight!"). Talk about the kernel of the dramatic content! The
entire action flows from this simple observation, and so seamlessly
that Strauss can keep us in our seats for nearly two hours without
an act break. (That may not be much to ask of today's movie-going
audiences, but it was audacious in the opera houses of 1905.)
At several fateful moments in that action, the singers fall silent
and Strauss lets the orchestra tell what's going on. The first such
moment comes when Narraboth, against his better judgment, yields to
Salome's request and has the prophet Jochanaan brought out of the
cistern where he is imprisoned, to agitated music expressing the
girl's excitement and the captain's anxiety. After the prophet
rejects Salome's advances, it is in a solely orchestral passage
that we hear the crucial turn in the drama; the disappointment of
the rejected Salome turns, before our ears, into a deadly lust for
revenge, as the music of her demand for the prophet's head is heard
for the first time.
And then, of course, there is the Dance, the moment when Salome
first asserts her womanly powers. Having reluctantly granted
Herod's request to dance, she then silences the orchestra, which
had swung into a sort of boom-boom stripper tune; she is a woman,
after all, and likes a little time to get in the mood. Her music is
at first rather mild and conventional-this must be the part that
failed to please Mahler, that lover of passionate chromaticism—but
eventually builds to an incandescent climax, with Salome's personal
leitmotif, a sort of raptor's squawk with a falling note, hovering
in triumph over it all. Although he made some notes to himself
about the action of this dance, Strauss published no stage
directions for it, and what actually takes place onstage at this
turning point in the drama has been entirely left up to the
performer and the director—and, in a concert performance such as
this one, the listener's imagination.
Speaking of leitmotifs, one should note that Strauss dips lightly
into this Wagnerian technique of composition, being far more likely
to associate a musical motive with a character than with an object
or a concept, as Wagner does in his Ring cycle. It
makes as much sense to think of this music in symphonic terms and
of Strauss as using the technique of "developing variation" of
themes that he inherited from Beethoven and Brahms. In any case,
the work's vivid musical themes do not require much explication as
they resound in our consciousness, shifting in tone and shape
according to the currents of the drama.
Strauss's gift for musical characterization is evident throughout
the work. The music of the prophet Jochanaan is sturdy and
righteous, devoid of the other characters' tortured dissonances,
and his voice—booming from the cistern like an oracle—is magnified
by a tam-tam in the orchestra. At the other extreme, the Jews at
Herod's court provide comic relief with their endless theological
debates in learned counterpoint. (Sadly, knowledge of Strauss's
later modus vivendi with the Nazi regime makes it
hard to enjoy this bit of amiable parody.)
Ultimately, although the practical-minded Strauss did not at all
mind people buying tickets by the thousands to see sensational
events enacted onstage, he was up to something else in
Salome. He had placed music—the most symbolic of the
arts—at the service of the Symbolist quest for truths that
transcend reality. To prevent Salome's final monologue with the
head of Jochanaan from becoming just a disgusting spectacle, or a
squalid image of a deluded girl who caused a heinous moral wrong,
he had to write transcendent music for it. And write it he did,
inviting us to witness the triumph of Woman over all the powers of
this world and the next.