Five Reasons to Love Strauss' Salome

‘I really like this fellow Strauss, but Salome will do him a lot of damage.’ Kaiser Wilhelm II summed up the scandal Richard Strauss unleashed when he set, almost word for word, Oscar Wilde’s infamous 1891 play.

Based on an episode from the Gospel of St Matthew, Salome is a tale of hedonism, violence and sexual transgression. Jokanaan (John the Baptist) has been imprisoned by Herod for insulting his wife, Herodias. Herodias’ teenage daughter, Salome, develops an infatuation with the prophet, but her advances are vehemently refused. So, when Salome’s lecherous stepfather asks her to dance for him, offering anything she wants in return, she demands Jokanaan’s head on a silver plate.

Herod is horrified but eventually relents. The gory climax of the opera sees Salome caress, kiss and sing to Jokanaan’s severed head – an act so shocking that censors in Berlin, London and Vienna banned performances of the opera. The Salome cast for the premiere, Marie Wittich, initially refused to take part (‘I won’t do it. I’m a decent woman’). Even today, the moral vacuum at the heart of Salome is difficult to digest.

Strauss was fascinated by the female psyche. His musical portrait of Salome represents one of the most complex in all opera, paving the way for other famous pathological studies such as Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The voice and vocal line is his primary tool. He uses it to propel the drama and delineate each character’s unique obsession.

Salome is a corrupted innocent in a decadent world. Bewitched by Jokanaan, she is an object of both pity and disgust – a femme fatale with necrophilic leanings.

Herod, Tetrarch of Galilee, is all superstition and neuroses. He is filled with lust for his stepdaughter Salome yet yearns for moral purity. As such, his music is awash with shifting moods and overlapping styles.

Jokanaan is Herod’s religiously fanatical prisoner, preaching from his cell right up to his sticky end.

Herodias is Herod’s wife (he murdered her first husband). Cool and calculating, she craves power.

The Moon is ever present, illuminating the drama, an omen of tragedy: ‘Has she not a strange look? She is like a mad woman, who is seeking everywhere for lovers,’ sings Herod. As Salome kisses Jokanaan’s lips, ‘a moonbeam falls, covering her with light’.

Narraboth, a young Syrian captain, is passionately in love with Salome. When he sees her desire for Jokanaan, he is overcome with grief and kills himself.

With its huge orchestra and opulent, super-descriptive scoring, Salome sits at the heady peak of late Romanticism. Yet in many ways, it heralds the start of a new musical era. Harmonically, it is the most daring opera Strauss wrote. Beneath the sweeping, lyrical vocal parts lies an ultra-dissonant framework that reflects the queasy atmosphere and thematic tensions in Wilde’s scenario.

This is summed up neatly in the opera’s opening utterance: a slithering clarinet rises quietly into the night. Made up of notes from two opposing harmonic spheres – C-sharp minor and G major – it is inherently unstable. Might it represent the clash of Salome’s violent sexuality with Johanaan’s chastity, or the irreconcilable belief systems – Roman, Jewish, Christian – of Herod’s court? The same notes return at the end of the opera in the form of a crashing, eight-note chord, just as Salome kisses Johanaan’s dead lips.

Strauss’ musical language caused a sensation. Critic Ernst Décsey declared the ‘breakup of the old tonality’, while all Europe’s musical elite – including the Mahlers, Schoenberg and Zemlinsky – flocked with ‘feverish impatience and boundless excitement’ to see this remarkable new work.

‘I really like this fellow Strauss, but Salome will do him a lot of damage.’
Kaiser Wilhelm II

Strauss composed much of Salome in his in-laws’ ironing room. Despite the unglamorous surrounds, the 40-year-old was by this point considered one of Germany’s top musical talents, having found fame in the 1890s with a series of tone-poems – including Also sprach Zarathustra with its iconic ‘sunrise’ opening – and taken up the prestigious role of conductor at Berlin’s Hofoper.

Salome was his third opera, after Guntram (1892–93) and Feuersnot (1900–01). Neither of these had been particularly successful, but Salome caught the zeitgeist: since the 1870s, when the French painter Gustave Moreau exhibited his Salome dancing before Herod, a cult had been growing in Europe around the Biblical antiheroine. Moreau had inspired Wilde to write his play, while poets Gustave Flaubert and Stéphane Mallarmé and composer Jules Massanet had already treated the story.

At the turn of the century, feminine sexuality and violence were also a hot topic for artists – explored in the plays of Frank Wedekind, for example, or in paintings by Gustav Klimt. When Strauss first read Wilde’s play in 1902, making notes of musical keys and themes in the margin, he must have known it was the perfect springboard for his operatic ambitions.

Though it was initially snubbed by critics, Salome became an instant hit. The premiere, given in Dresden in December 1905, received 38 curtain calls. Within two years, it had been performed in 50 cities, establishing Strauss as Germany’s leading opera composer.

For many, Salome stands at a pivot point in musical history. Mahler, perhaps the last great Romantic symphonist, would soon be dead, and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, one of the final works in a long, glorious line of Italian operas, would premiere the following year. Meanwhile Arnold Schoenberg – who attended a performance of Salome in Graz with six of his pupils – was on the cusp of unveiling his ‘12-tone’ revolution.

Adolf Hitler claimed to have been at that Graz performance too. His and Kaiser Wilhem II’s presence in this story offers a chilling reminder of the global upheaval just around the corner: Salome’s moon illuminates a world on the edge of an abyss.

Written by Timmy Fisher, sub-editor within the BBC Proms Publications team, co-host of The Classical Music Pod, writer and journalist.