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.
Morbidity is a key: Spend more than a few days away from pre-Adenauer German art, and it is easy for it to slip your mind just how morbid, death-obsessed, obscurantist, Romantic in a ghoulish sense, how macabre German art could be. Strauss is for me, in terms of sensibility at least, an executor of the Germanic Cultural estates of E.T.A. Hoffmann (he of sorcery and witches) and Carl Maria von Weber (he of bullets and spells), to say nothing of his ties to Wagner's pagan pageants. If Strauss’ indebtedness to Berlioz and the fact that Wilde was a Brit who wrote Salome first in French don't fit neatly into any Teutonic cultural scheme, you might nevertheless compare the German expressionists emerging from late Belle Époque Germany to their neighboring French artistic contemporaries. Compare Salome and Elektra to Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902). The one culture's art is simply more morbid than the other's. Let the sublime richness, the sickly sensuousness of Strauss’ orchestra enclose. It may stretch both chromaticism and taste to a breaking point, but it is far more climax of a tradition than rupture with it -- both in terms of music and subject matter.
Much has been written elsewhere about how radical Strauss’ early ambitions were as a composer before he slid back into more listener-friendly, more lucrative, more politically palatable (and alas more Nazi-friendly) stances and harmonies. Strauss is probably not the philosopher-musician we wish he were, or Wagner was. More likely, he was a supremely talented opportunist, with his finger on the pulse of an extraordinary place and time, and with an ear for symphonic texture to match. Who, then, picked up the baton?
In opera, Salome’s step-cousins may be Wozzeck or Lula in terms of anti-bourgeois subject matter and harmonic edging. (Berg falls on the other side of the edge.) Listeners more informed than I can discuss who post-WWII (or pre-; perhaps Schreker with Die Gezeichneten?) built off of Strauss’ legacy, but the bigger issue may be the superfluousness of Straussian chromatic, erotic titillation given Verdun, then Auschwitz and nukes. Strauss ended his career in a decidedly less sexy time, and, far worse than that, he had a Rumsfeldian inability to see his role in these matters as a problem.
If today one regrets the collapse of Culture in the age of industrialised Spectacle, if we and Godard condemn ditties for their intellectual vacuity, it bears mentioning that critics such as Adorno viewed Strauss and his compositions as artists who create something illusory, silken, rooted in an aging musical tradition while usurping a metaphysical one. (I am sure Adorno was most displeased that Strauss was uninterested in the 12-tone harmonic Future!; I wonder if Adorno heard himself in Jochaanan). From Adorno:
"Der Gegenstand seiner Musik ist das Leben ... Überall hier soll Leben, für sich des Sinnes noch bar, selbst der letzte Sinn sein; überall hier erschöpft sich Leben in der sinnleer ablaufenden Zeit; überall hier versteht sich der Mensch nicht als Kreatur, die sich von Gott abhängig weiß, sondern setzt sich als oberstes Maß der Dinge ..."
At the risk of translating a philosopher without understanding precisely what he meant:
"The subject of Strauss’ music is life. In artwork such as this [i.e. not only with Strauss], life, devoid of greater meaning, is supposed to be in and of itself the highest meaning. In such artwork, life exhausts itself in meaninglessly diminishing time. In such artwork, the Human does not consider himself a creature, aware of any subordination to God, but positions himself as the highest measure of things."The relevance of this here: whereas Wagner and his Isolde gave their lives to an ideal of unknowable Noumenon, of unfulfillable desire, then artists such as Strauss have simply found a shortcut, and made things knowable and fulfillable. Reading any such aesthetic debates might serve us today first and foremost in our stupefaction at a lost cultural universe that once resided within our own postal codes. Furthermore, for me it has the unintended effect of making me cherish Strauss and Salome all the more -- okay, Adorno, even if Strauss was insufficient, what the hell do we have to compare him to today?
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