Salome's Power Play

door Piet De Volder, wo 4 dec 2024

‘Music Drama in One Act’ – this was Richard Strauss’s subtitle for Salome. At first glance, it seems like a contradiction in terms, as we often associate ‘music drama’ with sprawling epics and broad, sweeping narratives. The term is firmly rooted in the works of Richard Wagner, Strauss’s great idol. Yet Salome is the opposite of Wagner’s expansive music dramas. It is a compact opera with four seamlessly connected scenes. There’s no room for digressions or (philosophical) musings, nor for extended narrative passages like those we find in Wagner. Instead, Salome presents a continuous dramatic arc that unfolds in less than two hours. It can be likened to a thriller, relentlessly building tension towards a macabre climax.

The music associated with Salome is marked by rhythmic restlessness, metrical instability, and dissonant, descending intervals. Her capricious music clearly destabilises her surroundings.

Four years after the premiere of Salome in Dresden in 1905, Arnold Schoenberg composed Erwartung, a monodrama with a similarly large orchestral apparatus. Lasting around half an hour, it delivers an intensely charged experience, both in content and music. Salome and Erwartung share a brooding, unstable dramatic atmosphere, delving deep into the recesses of the human psyche. Schoenberg’s atonal one-act opera was undoubtedly inspired by Strauss’s revolutionary ‘music drama’, which was daring in its vocal style, orchestration, and harmony. In these areas, Schoenberg pushed boundaries even further with Erwartung.


Symphonic Power

For Derrick Puffett (author of Salome, Cambridge Opera Handbooks, 1989), the term ‘music drama’ applied to Salome is a deliberate statement. When Strauss adopted the term, it had a retrospective rather than forward-looking connotation, harking back to Wagner’s great music dramas such as Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. Despite this somewhat outmoded status, Wagnerian music drama would continue to exert a profound influence well into the 20th century, as seen in works like Strauss’s Elektra (1908), Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron (1930–32), and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937). Wagner’s legacy lay, above all, in creating a symphonic unity within opera, where the orchestra plays a pronounced dramatic role. Other key elements included recurring musical motifs representing characters, concepts, and moods (often referred to as Leitmotifs) and a dramatic vocal style that had already moved beyond the distinctions between aria, arioso, and recitative. Strauss himself remarked of Salome: ‘It is a symphony in the medium of drama.’ Indeed, apart from the dramatic and evocative role played by the orchestra, it adheres to a cohesive, formal structure reminiscent of symphonic form.

The four scenes of Salome can be read as movements of a symphony, where motifs are introduced, developed, and transformed, culminating in a grand finale: a synthesis and apotheosis of all that came before. This finale takes the form of Salome’s closing monologue, which, at over 15 minutes, is almost a monodrama in itself, akin to Erwartung. The interplay of various musical atmospheres – from dramatic to lyrical, and even scherzo-like during the characters’ interactions – is also reminiscent of symphonic traditions. Strauss underscores the autonomy of the orchestral narrative in the three interludes, where musical motifs intertwine, intensifying the inner and outer conflicts of the characters purely through instrumental means. The third interlude, Salome’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’, has become a standalone favourite in Strauss’s orchestral repertoire. At the time Strauss conceived Salome, he was already well-versed in the art of the symphonic tone poem, having composed works such as Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben in the 1880s and ’90s. These are dazzling, virtuoso orchestral scores that cemented Strauss’s reputation as a brilliant symphonist. This symphonic career, largely preceding his ventures into opera, left an indelible mark on Salome. It’s no wonder that fellow composer Gabriel Fauré described Salome as a ‘symphonic poem with additional voice parts’ (Le Figaro, May 1907). He also refers to the descriptive and vivid quality of Strauss’s orchestration, which complements Oscar Wilde’s rich and poetic text.


‘Empowerment’ and Transgression

The drama of Salome centres around three principal characters: Princess Salome, the Tetrarch Herod, and the prophet and preacher Jokanaan (John the Baptist). Narraboth, the captain of the palace guard, and Herod’s wife, Herodias, contribute to the unfolding drama but operate more in its margins. As the main secondary figures, they facilitate the impending disaster: Narraboth by briefly freeing Jokanaan from his underground prison, inadvertently awakening Salome’s burgeoning lust, and Herodias by encouraging her daughter to demand Jokanaan’s head as a reward for her dance. In Wilde’s version of the story, Herodias sees Salome as her instrument of revenge against the prophet, who continues to lash out at her with relentless hate speech, condemning her and her ‘sinful’ marriage to Herod. Within the central triangle of Salome, Herod, and Jokanaan, it is striking how the male characters unwittingly contribute to Salome’s personal awakening and ‘empowerment’. Herod’s lustful gaze and Jokanaan’s demonisation of her as a kind of erotic monster combine to construct Salome as a femme fatale. Jokanaan refuses even to call her by name, referring to her only as a daughter of Babylon, of Sodom, the product of Herodias’s ‘incestuous’ marriage, denying her identity as ‘the Princess of Judea’, a title Salome confidently asserts when she first addresses him. This dismissal of her individuality deeply wounds her.

Gradually, Salome becomes aware of her own sexual power and learns to wield it effectively. Her ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ is far more than a mere performance for Herod’s birthday, complete with the Orientalist clichés Strauss liberally employs. It marks the final step in a perverse form of empowerment, as she attempts to cast off the yoke of Herod’s authority and patriarchal oppression. At the same time, the dance carries an unspoken death sentence for Jokanaan, whose ostentatious rejection of her fuels her resolve. The stage direction at the end of the dance hints at Salome’s hidden agenda: ‘Salome remains for an instant in a visionary attitude near the cistern where Jokanaan is kept prisoner, then she throws herself at Herod’s feet.’ The accompanying music is eerie, with mysterious trills and ethereal strings underscoring a siren-like motif, often interpreted in musical literature as Salome’s ‘erotic call’. This motif first appears in her vocal line during her initial encounter with Jokanaan, as she murmurs, ‘He is terrible, truly terrible’ (Act I, Scene 3), disguising fascination as repulsion. The dance also incorporates Jokanaan’s personal motif and another associated with Salome’s thirst for revenge. Beneath the seductive and rousing tones of Salome’s dance lies a simmering psychodrama in sound, the culmination of an awakening that drives her toward a shocking act of moral and sexual transgression: kissing and caressing Jokanaan’s severed head.

Salome’s awakening begins during her attempt to seduce Jokanaan, when her (perhaps feigned?) revulsion at his physical appearance shifts to fascination and unbridled desire. In language reminiscent of the biblical Song of Songs, she sings of the prophet’s body, mouth, and hair. She appropriates the male gaze, adopting the perspective of a man revelling in a woman’s sexual allure. As Julia Fernelius notes in her fascinating study of gender fluidity and sexual transgression in Wilde’s play (Hysterics and Prophets, Dalarna University, 2015), Salome’s defiance of gender norms and roles is ‘unstable and fragile’, as she is ‘constantly pushed back to a feminine and subordinate position by the male characters’. The ‘monster Salome’, partly created by Herod, is ultimately crushed beneath the shields of his soldiers. This original stage direction reflects Jokanaan’s earlier curse upon Herodias in his final sermon. Fernelius’s conclusion about Wilde’s play applies equally to Strauss’s opera: ‘The destabilisation of gender representation makes Salomé dangerous; a threat to the compulsory order of patriarchal dominance, thus her transgression cannot go unpunished.’

Ephemeral Beauty vs. ‘Unyielding Fortress’

The case of the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ illustrates how intricately ‘through-composed’ Strauss’s music drama is, in line with Wagner’s legacy. The work’s musical motifs are closely intertwined with Salome’s psychological evolution, which has progressed since her first encounter with Jokanaan (though Strauss composed the dance separately, after completing the rest of the score). Salome is the only character in the opera to undergo significant inner growth.

Returning to the limited cast of central figures, of the three (Herod, Salome, and Jokanaan), only Salome and Jokanaan are characterised by distinct musical motifs. Their dramatic relationship forms the focal point of Strauss’s music drama. The opera begins in medias res with music immediately evoking Salome. The first sung words are: ‘Wie schön ist die Prinzessin Salome heute Nacht!’ (‘How fair the royal Princess Salome looks tonight!’). A transparent orchestration of rising arpeggios in the clarinets (these are chords whose notes are not played simultaneously but in quick succession, Ed.), muted strings, and the silvery tone of the celesta set the stage for Narraboth’s enraptured exclamation as he gazes longingly at Salome from a terrace. These arpeggios serve as Salome’s initial musical signature, but primarily as a reflection of how others perceive her. Narraboth’s companion, the Page, immediately links Salome to foreboding imagery, comparing her to the moon: ‘See, the moon has risen, strangely eerie, she’s like a woman who rises from her grave’, and later, ‘She’s like a lifeless woman, still gliding slowly aloft.’ From the very beginning, Salome is associated with ominous portents and death. In the music, Strauss underscores her elusive and unattainable nature. Yet the connective thread between the cascading notes is a small motif characterised by dotted rhythms and a dramatic descending interval, which later comes to define Salome’s stubbornness and fixation. These descending intervals ultimately reinforce her horrific demand to possess – and kiss – Jokanaan’s severed head.

While Salome’s instrumental and vocal signatures are fleeting, erratic, and tonally unstable, Jokanaan’s music initially comes across as rigid and angular.

The arpeggios surrounding Salome seem to form a dazzling veil over a defiant core – the initial magic and visual allure she exudes. Over time, as Salome’s opening motifs evolve, combining arpeggios with the rhythmically dotted motif, they come to symbolise her will as a creeping vine, wrapping around the other characters and gradually tightening its grip. This transformation becomes most evident in the infamous, sinister contrabassoon solo at the end of the interlude between the third and fourth scenes, with its sinuous melodic line. By then, the initial magic of Salome’s motifs has morphed into the brooding of a dark and cruel plan.

The music associated with Salome is marked by rhythmic restlessness, metrical instability, and dissonant, descending intervals. Her capricious music clearly destabilises her surroundings. However, Salome’s musical-dramatic portrait is far richer than this sketch suggests. Her character is associated with multiple motifs, including those for her desire, vengeance, and a notable waltz motif that alludes both to her physical grace and the decadent hedonism of Herod’s court. This unabashed, kitschy waltz motif, often criticised as a flaw in Strauss’s score, also plays a role in the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’.

While Salome’s instrumental and vocal signatures are fleeting, erratic, and tonally unstable, Jokanaan’s music (initially) comes across as rigid and angular. His music is grounded in tonal stability and rhythmic regularity, reminiscent of Lutheran chorales. Strauss nods to Mendelssohn’s early-Romantic oratorios (St. Paul and Elijah), bringing an anachronistic style to bear. Jokanaan’s thundering sermons are delivered in sustained, hymn-like tones, with majestic gravity. The rhetoric of his proclamations is reinforced by horns, trombones, and accents from the tam-tam, creating a sonic fortress reminiscent of the famous hymn Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’). Salome relentlessly hammers against Jokanaan’s fortress with her stubborn, lyrically exalted cry: ‘I long for your mouth’s kisses!’ The prophet’s rhetorical grandeur shrinks into a helpless, stammered ‘Never, Daughter of Babylon’, marked in the score as ‘low, in voiceless horror’.

That Salome’s act of necrophilia produces some of the most sublime, late-Romantic pages of the opera and at once represents Salome’s vocal pinnacle, is surely the work’s most unsettling aspect.

Jokanaan briefly regains strength through his zeal, insisting that Salome’s sins could be forgiven by the man ‘who is on the Sea of Galilee’, a clear reference to Christ. His music here adopts a sentimental, cliché-ridden Romantic style, sung ‘fervently’ and crowned by a recurring motif: a falling fourth interval repeated three times at progressively higher pitches. This motif, representing the coming of God’s kingdom, strongly evokes the famous opening of Also sprach Zarathustra. Yet Salome persists, driving Jokanaan to curse her emphatically before retreating into his underground prison. Beneath the bravado of this final gesture lies a defeated man. His tonal stability has been undermined by Salome’s tonally expansive, near-atonal music.

A Dionysian Apotheosis

Just as Salome’s demands to kiss the living Jokanaan were unrelenting, so too is her fanatic insistence on possessing and kissing his severed head in the opera’s climactic scene. The exalted lyricism she used to seduce the prophet reaches its grand climax in her final monologue. Here, much like Isolde at the end of Tristan und Isolde, she transcends the oppressive – and in Salome’s case, toxic – world around her. That this act of necrophilia (explicitly defined as sexual acts involving the dead, Ed.) produces some of the most sublime, late-Romantic pages of the opera and at once represents Salome’s vocal pinnacle is surely the work’s most unsettling aspect. It is a collision of extremes: the sublime and the gruesome. On one hand, there is the rapturous vocal lyricism that would become Strauss’s hallmark in later operas such as Der Rosenkavalier and Arabella, making Salome the archetypal Strauss opera heroine. On the other hand, the fractured vocal lines and extreme, dissonant intervals foreshadow Schoenberg’s Sprechgesang and warrant the label of ‘expressionism’. Destructive energy, idealised ecstasy, and erotic triumph merge into an orgiastic cocktail, abruptly shattered by Herod’s soldiers. While Herod may finally dethrone his alluring stepdaughter by branding her an Ungeheuer (‘evil monster’), Salome elevates herself through music into an untouchable, pagan goddess in a Dionysian rite. If only for a moment.

Quotes from the English translation of the libretto: Tom Hammond (Opera Guide Salome/ Elektra, Overture Publishing, London, 2011).

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