A scherzo with a fatal conclusion
On the scandal of “Salome”

Richard Strauss’ opera Salome has a reputation for scandal, even today. No wonder; it has been repeatedly censored, and even the leading soprano at the work's premiere initially refused to take part. 

Berlin, 15 November 1902. The curtain is about to go up on the world premiere of Oscar Wilde’s Salome at Max Reinhardt’s Kleines Theater in Berlin, a private performance to which the general public has not been admitted. Among the audience is Richard Strauss. He has been interested in Wilde's scandalous Salome for some time; he knows the text, and is already thinking about turning it into an opera. The work features obsession, incest, sexual harassment, blasphemy, violence, and murder, with a touch of necrophilia thrown in for good measure. Before he has written a note of the score, Strauss' opera will be surrounded by the whiff of scandal, a reputation that clings to it even today. Despite this fact – or perhaps precisely because of it – the opera will prove to be a triumph. It is  the composer's international breakthrough, bringing him both affluence and wealth.

Meanwhile, the curtain has gone up in the Kleines Theater. Laid out before him, Strauss can see the sprawling terrace of the palace of Herod the Great, who is celebrating with his wife Herodias and his stepdaughter Salome. Among his guests are Egyptians, Jews and Nazarenes. Salome cannot abide her stepfather’s guests, still less  his lustful gaze, and so she comes outside, where she hears the voice of a prisoner rising up from an underground dungeon. It is Jochanaan, better known as John the Baptist, who is being guarded by a young Syrian called Narraboth. Salome knows that her stepfather is afraid of the prophet, who has accused her mother of leading a life of sin. Fascinated by these things and by the “terrible” nature of what she can hear, she demands a closer look: “His skin must be very cool, like ivory.” Narraboth, the Captain of the Guard, already worships the beautiful Salome, and so it is easy for her to persuade him to release the prophet from his prison.

The Dance of the Seven Veils

When the Baptist steps on to the terrace, Salome finds that it is no longer enough for her simply to look at him. She wants to touch him, but he refuses, cursing her. Herod and Herodias now come in search of Salome. But Herod is thinking of more than a breath of fresh air. In the presence of his wife, he stares at Salome, and invites her to moisten her “little red lips” with the wine that he offers her, and to share some ripe fruit with him. As if intoxicated, he begs her to dance for him: “If you dance for me, you may ask me for anything you desire.” It proves an ill-fated offer.

Salome performs the Dance of the Seven Veils, in the course of which she gradually removes one veil after another. At the end she demands that Herod keep his word: “I want brought to me on a silver platter […] the head of Iokanaan.” Herod is appalled. Even he finds this monstrous. But Salome reminds him of his vow, and gets what she wants. She seizes the dead man’s severed head: “You did not wish to let me kiss your mouth, Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now!” Dumbfounded, Herod returns to his palace and gives orders for the “monster” Salome to be killed. The curtain falls abruptly.

Strauss was about to leave the theatre at the end of the performance when he bumped into a old acquaintance: “Strauss, this would be the perfect libretto for you.” Strauss replied: “I’ve already started work on it.” The first sketches had been set down by the end of the year. Strauss was now in his late thirties, happily married and regarded – until now – as a “reputable” composer. So why choose such a provocative subject for his next opera?

During Strauss’s own lifetime this decision was viewed from a psychoanalytical standpoint: Freud’s study Interpreting Dreams was then the height of fashion. The contemporary writer on music Richard Specht, for example, argued that Strauss had “excreted all the toxins that had been building up inside him, finally purging his system of every hellish, dark and fathomless aspect of his being, of all of mankind’s inherited fears and of all the festering desires that he had felt in fever-wracked hours. […] Only after he had endured this purifying fever could works such as Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne follow these two night-pieces [Salome and Elektra].” Strauss himself raised no objections to this idea of an act of self-liberation.

Censorship and revolt

By the end of 1905 the opera was ready to be staged at the Court Opera in Vienna. But there were problems. Although Mahler was enthusiastic about the work and spoke of a “truly brilliant, very powerful piece that is clearly one of the most significant to have been produced by our age”, objections by the censor meant that he was not allowed to perform it in Vienna. The play had already encountered similar difficulties in Berlin, and so it was the Dresden Court Opera that finally premiered the opera. Here, however, the soprano Marie Wittich initially refused to learn the leading role. “I won’t do it! I’m a respectable woman,” she declared.

It was not just the contents of the opera that caused offence; the music did too. Quite apart from its use of bitonality – two different keys employed simultaneously – and its unusually dissonant elements, the opera made physical and intellectual demands on its instrumentalists which in the words of the Dresdner Nachrichten “go far beyond anything previously expected in terms of their technique and their intelligence”. At one rehearsal, Strauss had to placate his players with the words: “Gentlemen! Take heart! You shouldn’t make matters worse than they are. Just don’t go looking for special problems and complications. My opera is basically nothing more than a scherzo with a fatal conclusion!”

An acclaimed premiere

Despite all the disputes, the first night was an unparalleled success. According to the Dresdner Nachrichten, “At the end of the performance the audience burst into enthusiastic applause that must have gone on for a quarter of an hour, during which time the soloists, Strauss and Schuch were called out in front of the curtain several dozen times”. Most of the reviews were equally acclamatory. “Our Court Opera has not witnessed a sensation like this one since Wagner’s last works were performed here. Anyone who wants to have their say on matters of ultramodern music and of the greatest artistic capability needs to see and hear this opera.”

In the end there was no scandal; only a mild outcry of indignation in the press – but this was rather of a musical character. Kaiser Wilhelm II is said to have expressed a certain scepticism towards the work and its composer: “I’m sorry, because I’m otherwise very fond of him, but with this he can only damage his own reputation.” Strauss simply noted that “I was able to built my villa at Garmisch on the proceeds of my damaged reputation!” The work’s success was to prove him right.

The femme fatale as a fashionable theme

So why did the anticipated scandal turn into an outright triumph? Was it because the stage play was already well-established? Or was it the audience’s love of sensationalism that was responsible? Critical voices accused Strauss of seeking to provoke them by hankering after empty effects. Be that as it may, it is undeniable that in writing his opera Strauss was taking advantage of a trend that was very much in vogue at the start of the twentieth century: the image of the femme fatale.

A group of men believed that they had laid bare the fundamental nature and true behavioural patterns of a particular type of woman. It was left to Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis to do the rest. The femme fatale was attractive, dominated by her physical urges, insidious, ruthless and seductive. Her only concern was to bend defenceless men to her will by means of her charms and thus to destroy them. Salome is the perfect embodiment of these qualities.

A scandal without a scandal

The contemporary writer Joris-Karl Huysmans described the Salome of Gustave Moreau’s paintings as “the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, goddess of immortal Hysteria, cursed Beauty, chosen over all for the catalepsy that stiffened her flesh and hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible, unfeeling Beast, poisoning – like the ancient Helen – all that approached her, all that saw her, all that touched her.” Unbridled lust turns to ruthless cruelty – an image of a woman that reveals men’s desires while laying bare their fears.

Did Strauss write his opera while consumed by sexual desire and dreaming about sex? Back then this was no failing. Still less were the other aspects of the work that may scandalize us today, and which are bound to invite a response when viewed from a modern perspective. Chief among these aspects are the unified and stereotypical portrayal of the “Orient”, with its multiple ethnicities, and the use of anti-Semitic clichés, most notably in the depiction of the five Jews. In short, there is plenty of explosive material in Salome  – and yet Strauss managed not to get his fingers burnt, then or now.