Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 5)

V: The Sweet Flesh would turn Sour

Salome was a lucrative success for Strauss. The royalties paid for his vacation home in Garmisch. He wrote it in 1905, early in his career as a composer, barely 40 years old. If today we are left with an opera that is lightly shocking, then it is even more interesting why it was accepted as more or less benign already 110 years ago. There must be any number of stories worth telling about its reception and performance history since its premiere. (The Nazis, who embraced Strauss enthusiastically, simply pretended Salome did not exist.) Somewhat independently of its shock value today, even independent of any questions of Wilde's and Strauss' aesthetic-political ambitions or lack of them, we are faced with the question we are always faced with when exhuming other centuries' art and displaying it for our own benefit: what does it mean and what can we take from it?

Shamefully inaccurate whitewashing of Strauss’ coziness under the Nazis (programme notes from a concert in Finland): here is a fuller picture of Nazi-era Strauss.

Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 4)

IV Skandalerfolg

Let me return to an earlier question: why does this opera exist, and, given its existence, why does it have so few if any successors? It is largely a work from the mind and times of Oscar Wilde, who wrote the original play, even if spectators like me are happy to overattribute to the composer and ignore his sources. Wilde must have been enraptured at pairing the bawdiness of his societal clique with the greedy piety of Victorian Bible thumpers. In turn, a Viennese society-Strauss must have been attuned to this same mix as he trafficked in Wilhelmine Berlin. Plus, Strauss-the-Wagnerian must have admired the play's morbidity.

Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 3)

III The Arrangement of Desire

The story has five core characters, whose desires all contrast and who are all a product of their competing desires. Beyond these five, there are only a few palace guards and hangers-on, plus five asexual Jewish theologians, nattering and unflatteringly robed amidst palatial splendour. The dissonance and chromatic gnarliness of Strauss’ music doubles its power by its taut sticking to a one-act storyline, stripped of subplot, with characters too crazed to see each other, so busy are they staring. Of the five – Narraboth, John the Baptist, Herod, his wife Herodias, and Salome herself – no one can have what they want, nobody is content with what they have, and each relays desire to the others in hideous ways. It is less like a story and more like a cruising park of dissatisfied id. Salome is likely the horniest opera in the repertory.

Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 2)

II The Violent Boredom of Possession

“Every dream must be awoken from – even fulfilled dreams.” (Sam Peckinpah)

If you know the story of Salome – King Herod the Great, having imprisoned John the Baptist, libidinously bids his pubescing step-daughter to dance for him, which she does, because she wants the head of John the Baptist in return, which she is granted, then kisses, as she desired him but could not get him, chaste, to bend alive – you will know that the only awakening for Salome from her dream is death. Her death returns, Greekly, Shakespearianly, order to the world. Her sex is punished, her brazenness is publicly condemned, her singular perversion is destroyed. 

(In 2017 in America, Herod would be the one punished, for desiring an underage teenager; he would be castrated, tarred and twittered, and Salome would triumphantly adorn herself with pierces and tats.)

Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 1)

Part 1: The Opera in the House

Sit in the 1100-seat Zürich opera house, ganz oben im zweiten Rang, for 35 or maybe 95 Franks, and bend your neck towards the stage, so that you can see more than just the front. No matter how far you lean in, your view of the orchestra is always better, which, depending on the opera and the production, might be an advantage. If the woman on your left is leaning farther forward than you care to, blocking your view of anything, or if the scene is set too far upstage, then your neck will after a while naturally revert to perpendicular to the opera, you’ll lean back into your seat, and you’ll look up to the ceiling of the house. It is mere meters away.