 |
||
 |
|
|
 |
||
|
|
|
Salome
In the ripe, decadent European culture at the end of the 19th century, Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salome dropped like a bomb, pushing the edge of the acceptable even further out from the center and daring intellectuals and tastemakers of the day to follow. French artists had already made something of a fad of the voluptuous Judean princess and her demand for the severed head of John the Baptist. Inspired especially by Gustave Moreau’s painting L’Apparition, Wilde’s play added the salacious angle of Salome’s sexual attraction to the Baptist and her vengeful fury when he spurns her. (In the biblical accounts of both Matthew and Mark, it is Herodias, the queen of Judea, who prompts her daughter to demand the head. Salome obeys like a dutiful daughter, and when she receives the head, she gives it to her mother. No meeting of Salome and John the Baptist is mentioned. Nor is Salome even named in the gospels; we know her name only from the account by the Jewish historian Josephus.)
Although he was Irish, Wilde spoke fluent French and spent much time in Paris. Salome was written in French and proposed as a vehicle for the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt. She was enthusiastic, and plans went ahead for a London presentation in English, translated by Wilde, but the Lord Chamberlain, England’s official censor, forbade the production on the grounds that biblical persons could not be depicted in a spoken play. (The British ban on the drama was not lifted until 1931.) The fall-back plan was to give the play in the original French in Paris, but by then Bernhardt had cold feet and backed out of the project. Salome was finally given in Paris, but with another actress in the part. That production was not successful, and the play did not begin to be recognized as a masterpiece until it appeared in German in Breslau in 1901, by which time Wilde was dead.
Wilde was aware of the almost musical way in which words and phrases were developed in his play, noting that it contains “refrains whose recurring motifs make it like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad.” He probably expected that it would sooner or later catch the eye of a Ravel or a Debussy and be transformed into music by a Frenchman, but it was the German composer Richard Strauss who took up the challenge.
The Viennese writer Anton Lindner sent his German adaptation of the play to Strauss, who liked the idea but not Lindner’s treatment. He felt that other musical explorations of Eastern subjects, mostly by French composers, had not gone far enough, remarking, “Previous operas based on oriental and Jewish subjects lack true oriental color and scorching sun.” Fired by the possibilities in the story, he had already begun experimenting with musical themes for the characters and situations when he saw a 1903 production of Wilde’s drama in Berlin. This solidified his conviction that the words of the play itself, with well-chosen cuts, should be his operatic libretto, using the German translation by Hedwig Lachman.
Rising through the ranks as a conductor at German opera houses, Strauss had made his name as a composer of brashly original tone poems, programmatic essays for orchestra inspired by the hot intellectual topics of the day: individualism, self-determination, heroic strife. He had tried his hand at a couple of operas – Guntram, for which he wrote his own Wagnerian libretto, and Feuersnot, based on medieval Germanic legend -– but neither was successful. Salome turned out to be the first of what Strauss’s biographer Norman Del Mar called his “stage tone poems,” operas in which the orchestra’s colors and its development of themes rival in importance and at times dominate the vocal aspects of the work.
Composition of Salome took two years, interspersed with Strauss’s conducting and production duties in Berlin and his 1904 American conducting tour. When the work was quite well along, he met Mahler in Vienna and asked him to hear it. The two went to a nearby piano shop, ignoring the curious bystanders, and Strauss played through the score for Mahler, filling in the text and action as he went. He left a gaping hole where the infamous Dance of the Seven Veils was to be inserted, saying it wasn’t written yet. Mahler had misgivings, fearing that it would be hard to recapture the heated spirit of the piece at a later time, but Strauss just laughed and said, “I’ll soon put that right.”
And he did. The Dance of the Seven Veils rightly became a highpoint of Salome and a much-performed orchestral selection on its own. If its “oriental color” has a decidedly fin de siècle Viennese flavor, Strauss nevertheless managed to raise the temperature of the play’s sultry Judean night to scorching levels. Drawing on musical motifs from throughout the opera, he crafted a sensual minidrama calculated to turn the will of any Eastern potentate to putty.
A sinuous oboe melody at the beginning accompanies the dancer, who stands almost motionless, swathed from top to toe in layers of concealing finery. A theme associated with Salome’s revenge erupts to begin the dance, all flash and hip-slinging diligence. As the veils are removed one by one, the tempo relaxes and the music becomes more lyrical, flowing into a new theme of slow, predatory seductiveness, which soon evolves into a waltz. The opening music returns briefly before the pace quickens and the dancing becomes more abandoned, more irresistibly lascivious. Suddenly, Salome freezes in place, her alluring body covered only by the final diaphanous veil, until she flings it aside and throws herself at Herod’s feet.
Strauss’s opera met the same revulsion and censorship as Wilde’s play. At the first piano rehearsal, the singers of the original Dresden cast tried to resign en mass – all except the tenor singing Herod, who had already memorized his part. The soprano delayed learning her role until Strauss threatened to give the premiere to another company. Vienna banned the work, and the composer had to employ all his persuasive charm to soft-soap the Kaiser into allowing a Berlin performance. (When he later heard of the Kaiser’s fretting that Salome would bring ruin upon its composer, he laughed and said, “That ‘ruin’ purchased my villa in Garmisch.”)
A work of genius cannot be silenced, and Salome played to sold out houses. Strauss henceforth shifted his emphasis to opera composing. (Of his tone poems, only the Alpine Symphony and the Domestic Symphony lay in the future.) Salome served as a remarkable crossover between these two streams of composition. Throughout its course, the orchestra continually takes up themes and motifs uttered by the singers and develops them symphonically, weaving them into the ongoing discourse and alluding to them at dramatically telling moments.
A distinguishing musical feature of this opera, reserved to the orchestra, is the multitude of trills. Strauss uses them to increase the foreboding atmosphere and hold our attention at moments when a dramatic pause heightens the sense of impending doom. As the teenaged Salome descends ever deeper into insanity and all-consuming desire, the trills tell the tale, seeming to lead, to compel her toward a violent end.
Having sealed her bargain with the king through her dance, Salome insists on receiving the promised reward, the head of John the Baptist (who is called by the Hebrew form of his name, Jochanaan). At the climax of the drama, she is handed the bloody head on a silver platter. Gloatingly, she speaks to it, reveling in her triumph: though Jochanaan would not allow her to kiss him, she can now kiss his mouth as she pleases. She sings that she will bite his mouth like a piece of ripe fruit, while echoing music with which Herod earlier tried to tempt her with actual fruit. Her victory has a bitter taste, however, for Jochanaan’s eyes cannot open and look upon her, and she complains that if he had really seen her he would have been hers in life. She remembers the sting of his accusing words, like the venom of a viper, but his tongue is stilled now.
Jochanaan’s head – his ivory-white skin, his scarlet-red tongue, his ebony-black hair – all are hers now, to do with as she chooses. She, a royal princess, can throw it to the dogs and the vultures. If only he had succumbed to her. She can still feel the lust he stirred in her: “When I looked at you, I heard a mysterious music.” But not even surging water can quench her burning desire now.
At last, she takes her hard-won kiss, Jochanaan’s blood smearing her face and body as she deliriously celebrates her conquest. Watching this depraved scene with mounting horror, Herod finally orders his soldiers to kill her, and they rush forward and crush her under their shields.
|
|
|
