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.
Narraboth
It begins with Narraboth. Even Herod himself praises his beauty, but Narraboth is the captain of the palace guard, a Syrian, and is entrusted with protecting Salome. He is bound by noble duty. But any Ziemßen-tier uprightness is warped with the opera’s overture-less first three measures, drenched in the warmest, roundest notes a clarinet can muster: Narraboth sings the opera’s first line, “Wie schön ist die Prinzessin Salome heute Nacht!”
The aching brilliance of Narraboth’s melodic lines comes from its rising and falling notes (erotic desire plus demise), suggesting his acceptance of the impossibility of what he wants. He will never know the Princess, never touch her, never hold her eye for long. The music shows he knows this, submits to it even valiantly, but he is totally unable to shake his desire. He will die a seppuku death before dishonour, but extracts before this death a little sweet promise from Salome, the bird-like singing of
“Ich werde dich ansehen, kann sein
ich werde dir zulächeln.”
How well they know he’ll do what she demands.
John the Baptist
John the Baptist is next. The more I hear this opera, the more ludicrous a figure he cuts. Emerging from underneath the palace floor, where he is captive to Herod and where his body-less voice is harmonically grand and deep, he arises at Salome’s bidding (Narraboth must self-destruct for allowing this) to sound like an absurd fanatic. Surely Strauss was jesting when he wrote some of the music. This John the Baptist hates women. He preaches fire and brimstone. He is a hideous basso beast, soiled and bearded and singing of how the eyes of an evil woman upon him – evil of her sex – will wake the wrath of God. A leaden Wotan meets Jerry Falwell.
His only sweetness once out his pit is when he sings of Jesus, a taboo too holy for even Strauss to treat with anything but the loveliest, most tonal of leifmotifs. When John is done offering Salome religious epiphanies, however, he goes back to caustic condemning.
Jochanaan (John the Baptist’s Hebraic name, used in Oscar Wilde’s play and Strauss’ opera) has only one desire, the same way Marxists had only one desire: the fulfillment of an absolute historical certainty. Strauss’ prophet is one so obsessed he is deranged. Musically, you can hear his derangement almost as clearly as Salome’s. But for his message of Jesus’ coming (again, announced taboo-proof with grand harmonic pallor), John serves only as a canvas for Salome’s desire.
Herodias
Herodias’ desires are, partly given her older age, purely material and status-driven. The opera alludes to her first husband as Herod’s brother, something of a stain on her honour. John the Baptist calls her a whore (most of his castigations are sex-related in this most Victorian tale). She despises her husband, shows her daughter no attention other than as a vehicle for her power against Herod, and is deeply unpoetic, to the point of denying any and all omens, signs, senses, meaning. Her depiction here, mezzo, old, without sentiment or aria, leaves her a gaudy post-sexual palace intriguer. The right singer or costume can lend her dignity, certainly when she shudders at the sound of John the Baptist. Her naked lust is for power, her motives banal and bare, and though we care not at all about her fate, we forgive her smallness on stage.
Herod
Which leaves us with Herod and Salome herself. It is Salome’s opera, but when Herod arrives to commence the intermission-less opera’s second half, his agitation a direct contrast to John the Baptist’s biblical Pomp and Certainty, he infuses the music with its only true joy (true because it is so recklessly undiluted, hedonistic). Even Salome, seventeen years old, never loses herself to sorrowlessness, her final ecstatic kiss paired with a humbled admission that John the Baptist never loved her, and that decapitating him unfortunately hadn’t managed to fix that.
Herod is a nervous man, fearing John the Baptist out of an inability to understand a word he’s saying. He steps in Narraboth’s self-spilled blood, and pronounces, hilariously but plausibly, that there shouldn’t be a corpse lying around his palace because he didn’t remember having ordered anyone killed. Like all older married men of fiction, he makes his wife looks like a miserable nag when they’re together (and like all older married women, she makes Herod sound like a miserable louse when she is criticising him). Nowhere else in Strauss’ oeuvre is his source material as numbly hateful as these scenes from a marriage; you have to go to Wotan and Fricke to find similar bourgeois lovelessness.
What Herod loves is pleasure – food, wine, song, sex. He and Narraboth both stare at Salome in desire, but Herod is bound to no law but his own. He may be a sneering windbag, but his fear of omens and his lecherous fathering more add to his narrative energy than take from it. Strauss’ fin de siècle Vienna had just the music for his kind of pleasure-seeking, and when he makes Salome dance for him, she does so in a series of waltzes for his ball. The result is more Falstaffian than thuggish, though it should be easy enough for a good tenor to bring out both.
Herod and Salome are the two most similar characters in the story, willing to use their power for their sexual demands, which emerge impulsively. The most meaningful difference between them, apart from the differing sources of their power, comes mostly through their differing reactions to being so saturated. Herod, having everything – palaces, jewels, gardens with peacocks by the hundred and wine gifted personally by Julius Caesar –wants more. (And for that he curiously receives far less condemning from John the Baptist than does Herodias, but then that’s the sexism of religion for you.) Herod wants Salome because she is a forbidden version of what he already has in spades.
In our age, desire arises as much out of saturated boredom as out of any real yearning. This desire is avaricious and nihilistic, as it is an attempt to take when one already has, destroying both the senses and Life in the process.
Salome
Salome, having everything she could but little that she wants, gives her desire to the thing/man which is so unlike herself, so apart from her lavish routines, so opposed to the premise of her power (to say nothing of her gender), that she is instantly in love, or at least in lust. Incapable of empathy but aware of her power over men, curious about love but monstrous in her expression of it, she wants only that which doesn’t want her back, and then seeks to extinguish it. Would John the Baptist show her any mildness, she would lose interest in him on the spot. Were he not attacking her wretched parents but someone else instead, she would have no incentive to desire him.
But, childlike, she is fascinated by the sheer idea of a man in a prison as dark as a tomb, so devoted to a religious conviction that is so far away – and one for which he is gleefully willing to die, for which he is able to ignore both his squalor and her beauty. Salome’s initial musical anti-seduction is extraordinary. Before Narraboth is forced to realise his mistake – how could he know how obscene young Salome is – she enters this sequence of flirting with the Prophet:
First, his skin is gloriously white. When John calls her a whore, she sings instantly that his skin is repellent, that it is his beautiful hair she so adores. When in return he calls her a daughter of Sodom and Babylon, she finds his hair grotesque, hideous, and sees that it is his mouth, yes his luscious red mouth, that is the most beautiful thing in the world, and that she must kiss it, Let me kiss it! These words are poor Narraboth’s trigger, unforeseeable as they are to an audience, much less a dutiful soldier. John’s final curse at Salome’s concupiscence is the only one that yields no retraction from her; she still wants her kiss even if she has been cursed for saying so. He returns to his prison, and her lips wait for his as her plan emerges to get them.
Let’s review: a seventeen year-old girl with daddy issues, Paris Hilton-spoiled and with a pre-Beatles libido, has just told a Biblical Prophet in front of a Rolex-wearing audience that she wants to make out with him. Under Strauss, the prophet is the killjoy, and she the heroine. It gets me every time.
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