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.

To answer this, I come back to the various depictions of desire and the effects that desire has on different characters. John the Baptist, for example, with his righteously chaste condemnations of sexual display. He is divine when he sings of Jesus, vulgar when he faces the desirous virgin Salome head-on. Is this not familiar to us now, in the form of our American religious extremists on the right and their Islamic/Orthodox pendants in the Middle East? Or Herod, and his blatant voraciousness. Flabby, arbitrary, and over-indulged. Harvey Weinstein, anyone? The best thing about Salome for him is that she is young, virginal, and the daughter of his wife. He is to Salome what Scarface was to cocaine. His sort of desire is familiar enough to us today that he is not even solely revolting. Strauss gives him terrific music to sing, and is he really much different from Baron Ochs in Der Rosenkavalier, or even the Count in Le Nozze di Figaro? But for Salome and its uniquely playful morbidity, these other roles are Herod's operatic peers. This Herod is as much your fat uncle who drinks too much at barbecues as he is an outright villain. (And the guy killed Jesus!)

And what about the girl, the one at the center? Take the answer from her immolation for her consummated lustful craze: she is in her last moments an Isolde of the gutter, an enchanted savant marveling gloriously at the revelation of Jochanaan's lips. (The music here is magnificent.) Strauss' music and Wilde's play tell a story here I have never seen before on the stage: a woman becomes alive through her sex, and her life-sex is her instant Liebestod. Her martyrdom for her desire is more beautiful than Jochanaan's religious one -- not purely despite its heedless obscenity but partially because of it. Eros, triumphant over Herod's and Herodias' material riches and Jochanaan's arrogant chastity, lends Salome an epic, saintly beauty unknowable to all of the others. (One wonders how Narraboth would have reacted to her final deed.) Yet her relevation comes at the highest cost: she is kissing a severed head, tasting the iron in the blood on his lips, an honourless, impossible crime. She has behaved as an Orpheus who, told of the injunction against seeing Eurydice, would have had her killed and loved her corpse. Salome has given her life, her whole life unlike Herod's promise of half of things, to her desire, and it is fully ruinous. Her glimpse of selfish paradise has destroyed her humanity. 

No other work I know shows via its extremes both the ecstatic pleasure of consummated desire and the poison of desire when it is wielded falsely. The wine has turned to vinegar. Salome's fulfillment of lust disgraces her, to say nothing of its devastation of others. It is this motive of Salome that makes it still today more Erfolg than Skandal, the reason we find it a little unsettling and a lot of fun. Having banished our own Jochanaans and heeded to our own Herods, we know the price of Salome's kiss, and, hearing music, blithely pay.

L'Apparition, Gustave Moreau (1876)