In this Salome, it’s the prophet who strips

william osborne says:

Yes, a calculated shocker that never shocked. Oscar Wilde, whose play forms the basis of the libretto, had very good reasons for studying what he referred to as “poison,” his term for unaccepted forms of erotic temptation in Victorian England. He even went to prison for it. Strauss simply did not have such sincere motivations. The Germans, to their credit, have never been particularly puritanical, and even during Strauss’s life, most didn’t really give a damn about what consenting adults did in their own privacy. Without Wilde’s “poison,” Salome is empty, an operatic gesture in the worst sense of the word. There was indeed a kind of sado-anal necrophilia in the darker regions of German culture at that time, but Salome doesn’t capture it. The work was, and is, a superficially calculated gesture that could only exist in the utterly stodgy world of opera.

I also wonder if it isn’t time we begin to think of at least some classical music as actually a form of ethnic music. Why do we think of the Germanic character of classical music as some sort of neutral norm? The score for Salome is so utterly Austro-Bavarian that the piece would only be plausible if Salome were wearing a Dirndl, though I suspect a clever director like Sellers could figure out some nifty way of not having Herod in Lederhosen.

The music is astounding, but theatrically speaking, we don’t see too much more than caricatures in Roman costumes chromatically bellowing over the Alpine Symphony. Even by the standards of opera, there are no real humans in the work, just one-dimensional, quasi-Biblical figures. Especially in the climatic (sic) sections, the work gives no sense of sexuality or horror, but rather programmatic Alpine tableaus: glaciers, raging streams, a stag in a meadow, timber houses with geranium flower boxes, et al. At one point, even an embarrassed Till seems to stumble onto the wrong set. Even allowing for theatrical conventions, Strauss’s Salome is far, far too beery for either ancient Israel or conflicts with British Puritanism. A calculated shocker indeed. Just the thing for the world of opera.