Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Salome still has the power to shock, and so it should – sensational effect was its authors’ intention. This opera has often evoked moral outrage, just as did the play by Oscar Wilde on which it is based: ‘moral stench’, ‘obscene’, ‘abhorrent’ ‘loathsome’ … epithets flew. If they don’t fly any longer that’s because since Salome was new much greater extremes have forced a greater tolerance, on stage, in films, and even in music. 

But Wilde’s real aim was not to evoke moral outrage: ‘there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book’, he wrote in the preface to The Portrait of Dorian Gray. ‘Books are well written or badly written, that is all.’ Wilde was testing the extremes to which art could go, making his audience contemplate perversity, lust, and personages with no uplifting or edifying characteristics, and to make the contemplation exciting using all the resources of artful language, setting, and dramatic effect.

Hence Wilde’s choice of subject: something curious and sensual, he told Sarah Bernhardt; the story of the 16-year-old Jewish princess Salome, whose fascination for the martyred prophet Jokanaan grows to open lust. When her advances are rejected by the prophet, Salome exploits her stepfather Herod’s lecherous interest in her; to the delight of her mother Herodias she asks and receives as reward for her dancing the head of the prophet on a platter. Salome reveals the enormity of her passion by making love to the severed head of the Baptist, causing Herod to order her death, in an ending of swift brutality.

‘…“I am already composing it”’

The play is acted by moonlight on the steps outside Herod’s palace, in an overheated atmosphere of oppressive oriental sensuality. This was typically fin de siècle art, morbidly extreme, titillating, and sensational, in which at the time Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss were artistically at one. Strauss saw the possibilities of Wilde’s Salome even before he attended the 1902 production by Max Reinhardt that made the play famous in Germany. After the performance a friend suggested to him that Salome might make a good opera. Strauss replied, ‘I am already composing it’. 

In Wilde’s mind the subject was bound up with music from the first. The night he began writing the play, he went to eat at a Paris café, where he asked the orchestra leader to play something in accord with his thoughts: of a woman dancing in bare feet in the blood of a man she had lusted after and slain. The leader played such terrifying music that conversation dried up and the diners looked at each other with blanched faces. Exactly the effect Strauss sought to repeat!

Wilde wrote his play in French

The Anglo-Irish Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé in French. This was, partly, another pose of his precious aestheticism – the sort of thing that made him recognisable as the poet Bunthorpe in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, where the satire was mainly directed at Rossetti. But Wilde chose the French language to place Salomé in an artistic movement, that of the French symbolists who found the closest of interrelationships between the visual arts, literature, and music. Thus Mallarmé’s treatment of the Salome story in the poetry of Hérodiade, and Gustave Moreau’s symbolic and decorative paintings of the subject could inspire Wilde’s drama and in turn Strauss’ music. 

Wilde’s style, a ‘neurotically shattered language’ of recurrent motivic words, phrases and images, inspired the art nouveau decorations of Aubrey Beardsley (who illustrated the English translation of Salomé). Being an essentially musical technique, it suited the symphonic and motivic style of a composer like Strauss – suited it much better than the poetic style of most opera librettos of the time. The very opening of the play and opera demonstrate Wilde’s style to perfection:

The exotic orientalism of Wilde’s subject was a challenge to a musician. Strauss considered that hitherto operas based on Oriental and Jewish subjects ‘lacked true Oriental color and scorching sun’. Strauss set the play faithfully. He made his libretto by abridging the German translation of Hedwig Lachmann.

The play takes some liberties with the biblical accounts of the death of John the Baptist, notably in deliberately conflating in one character the three Herods mentioned in the Bible. 

The story of Salome’s dance and its appalling reward has fascinated artists and writers throughout Christian history. Her asking for John’s head is usually ascribed to the influence of her mother Herodias, who resents the Baptist’s tirades against her immorality. In the mid-19^th century Heinrich Heine introduced the idea of Herodias’ own thwarted passion for the prophet, but it seems to have been Wilde’s entirely original idea to make her 16-year-old daughter Salome frustrated in her passion for John the Baptist. This love – or rather lust – is the main fascinating obsession in both play and opera. Almost certainly the first part of the opera to be composed was Salome’s final soliloquy to the severed head of Jokanaan. The rest of the music was then composed to lead up to it and foreshadow it. 

“…haunted by the head of the prophet…”

The co-existence in Salome of depravity and innocence has suggested many fantasizing interpretations of the decapitation of John the Baptist – fantasies explored by depth psychology as symbolically displacing male fear of castration. Wilde is known to have been fascinated by Gustave Moreau’s painting The Apparition showing Salome haunted by the head of the prophet and stretching her hand toward it. Salome’s immaturity and frigidity may be expressed here in a metaphor – the satisfaction she desires hovers just out of her reach, while she covets and at the same time threatens the instrument by which it must be achieved. 

How else to explain Salome’s obsession with the head? Strauss omitted from the libretto her explicit statement in the play: ‘I was a virgin, you have deflowered me. I was chaste, you have filled my veins with fire’. Even without these words, the girl’s sexual awakening is clearly implied by the music. 

Strauss’ conception of the girlish princess was almost incompatible with his wish to express every dimension of the subject, often using the orchestra unsparingly. He described his ideal Salome as ‘a 16-year-old princess with the voice of an Isolde’. Unfortunately, the Isolde voice that will cut through the orchestra often comes with a generous physique. The composer came to prefer a lighter, more lyrical kind of soprano for the title role. In an attempt to persuade Elisabeth Schumann to take the part he offered to reduce the orchestration, which he did, eventually, for a 1930 Dresden performance with Marie Rajdl.   

Gabriel Fauré, a very different composer, described Strauss’ Salome as ‘a symphonic poem with voice parts added’, putting his finger both on the difficulties of performance and on the secret of the opera’s compelling effect.  Salome gave its first audiences the impression of having been composed in a single breath, and indeed Strauss composed it in a very short time in 1904-5. Its integrated symphonic music pushes to an extreme the methods of Wagner’s operas and Liszt’s tone poems, by interrelating motives, many of them transformations of each other, and building a structure of arch-like symmetry matching that of the drama. Densely woven leitmotifs in the orchestra explain that drama. This was a technique Strauss had developed in his symphonic poems Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Ein Heldenleben, and Don Quixote, of which Salome may be seen as a continuation, so much so that it sometimes seems as if the voices are superfluous, frantically trying to adapt to the nervous intensity of an essentially instrumental language. 

Strauss’ Salome would have been impossible without Wagner, but it disconcerted audiences familiar with Wagner, and its originality stems from a fundamentally different approach. Whereas Wagner seeks to involve us in the emotions, loves and aspirations of his characters, Strauss is almost objective and detached, using music to make us grasp the full depravity of these personages, for whom no one could feel sympathy. In place of Romantic heroism in music, he gives us a new language, even more complex in texture and more minute in its attention to detail – music of sensationalism in the fullest sense of that word. 

“…to the brink of atonality”

The audience was unprepared for this opera which had invented a category of its own. The curtain rises on a strange frozen tableau, before a note of music has been heard. The characters’ neuroses and the unbearable tension between them lead Strauss into audacious effects of harmony and orchestration – musical expressionism leading to the brink of atonality. This was the most advanced style Strauss adopted, continued in Elektra before he retreated into a backward-looking idiom. This music was admired by Mahler. Schoenberg and Berg in turn learnt much from it.

Strauss tried hard to provide a contrast between the morbid decadence of Herod, Herodias, and Salome, on the one hand, and the solemn, high-minded though baffling utterances of the prophet Jokanaan. Wilde’s highly effective device of placing the cistern in which Jokanaan is imprisoned in front of the palace itself makes the prophet a continuing presence even when not speaking or unseen. Strauss’ music for him, however, is generally felt to be a failure: ‘This is how a man who is not a prophet, who cannot feel himself into the mind of a prophet, imagines and expresses with painstaking contrivance how a prophet might sing’– not an unfair judgment. 

Strauss’ other questionable success comes just where one might expect music to be most satisfying, in Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils. Strauss admitted to Gustav Mahler that he left composing this until last, and Alma Mahler claims to have warned Strauss he would not be able to recapture the impulse that created the rest. The dance, a kind of potpourri of the opera’s themes, is brilliantly orchestrated, but it shows a disconcerting tendency to lapse from Oriental into Viennese style.

These reservations, if they be granted, hardly detract from Salome’s power to fascinate while it repels. Strauss had chosen his subject with sure instinct. Salome was, and remains, a succès de scandale. The first to sing Salome, Marie Wittich, gave the score back when she came to the first rehearsal, saying ‘I won’t do it, I am a decent woman’. Many decent people have got over these scruples – they come with a curious thrill of anticipation to see what a great singing actress can do, not just in the goings-on with the head, but singing the first of Strauss’ great roles for the solo soprano voice. 

The kaiser said, ‘I really like this fellow Strauss, but Salome will do him a lot of damage’. When this was reported to him, Strauss commented with self-satisfaction: ‘the damage enabled me to build my villa at Garmisch’.

First published in Opera Australia, 1982

The Climax (1893), Aubrey Beardsley. Public Domain