Salome

Strauss’s first decision is subtractive: he cut Wilde’s play himself and set the rest as prose, with no librettist and no verse between. The act is a chain. Narraboth looks at Salome; Salome hears the voice from the cistern; Narraboth’s longing lets her have the prophet brought up; the prophet’s refusal makes the demand; Herodes’s oath makes it payable; the dance pays the oath. Each link holds. The subtractive test finds give in three places: the quintet of the Jews halts the action, and the Nazarenes’ report of miracles halts it again; Herodes’s catalogue of what he will give instead runs past its point, though that is its point; and the Dance is the most separable music in the work, often played alone and losing little.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: desire is a way of looking, and looking refused turns to the wish to possess what refused it, even dead. The whole court looks. The Page warns Narraboth not to look at Salome, and he cannot stop; Herodes looks at her and Herodias tells him not to; Salome looks at Jochanaan, and Jochanaan alone will not look, at her or at anyone. The music discloses more than Wilde’s words: the final scene gives a girl’s longing the most tender music in the work, so that the listener feels what the horror is made of. What holds the axis below the gate: much of what the work uncovers is mood, the moon and the heat of the night, and the condition it names belongs largely to Wilde and to the age before Strauss.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Height is reached often in a hundred minutes, in the register of dread and of a terrible beauty. The opening clarinet run and Narraboth’s “Wie schön ist”
“How beautiful is” set a beauty already unstable. Jochanaan’s voice from the cistern, diatonic and hymnic, stands against it. Salome’s three addresses to his body, his hair and his mouth climb by turns. The wait for the execution is the sublime of terror reached through near-silence: a solo double bass pinched on a high note, the orchestra holding its breath. The final scene rises without a break to the chord at the kiss and the close in C minor. Off the top: the quintet, the Nazarenes and stretches of Herodes’s babble drop into the grotesque by design, and the Dance stands lower than the music around it.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The Gospels of Mark and Matthew give a dance, an oath and a head, and do not name the dancer; tradition named her from Josephus. Wilde built the archetype, and Strauss makes it bear weight in sound. Built here: the prophet as the voice from below the earth, heard before he is seen, the sacred speaking from a cistern while the court above argues over it; the moon, which every character sees as himself, so that the mirror is load-bearing; the exchange of a dance for a head; the kiss on the dead mouth, eros and death made one act. The particulars stay exact: a cistern, a platter, the blood of Narraboth’s suicide underfoot. Held at the line because the femme fatale of Moreau and Huysmans is evoked as much as built.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is Wagner’s music drama: the leitmotif web, the continuous act, the orchestra as commentator, with Strauss’s own tone poems and his two earlier operas, Guntram (1894), a failure, and Feuersnot (1901), behind it. The departures: a spoken play set nearly as written, in prose, after Debussy’s Pelléas of 1902; a single act at continuous high pressure; harmony that sets keys against one another and leaves dissonance unresolved at the climax; a Wagner orchestra used for nerves and detail; and a subject, a girl’s desire for a saint’s dead mouth, that no court opera had staged. The stake was real: censorship in Vienna, London and New York, and Strauss’s standing after two failed operas. Held below the top because the method was a proven path and Debussy had taken the literary turn first.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that desire and holiness here occupy two musical worlds that cannot meet. Jochanaan’s music is diatonic, square, hymnic and brass-coloured; Salome’s is chromatic, restless and decorative; the court’s is nervous and fragmented. Their encounter is a collision of idioms, and her three addresses are three times the same gesture of praise turned to disgust. The continuous act is the instrument: there is no exit from the night, and the pressure never drops to a number ending. The Dance is the form’s wordless centre, where the bargain is struck without language. The final scene takes the form of the Liebestod and fills it with a dead man’s head. Held below the top by the Dance’s salon orientalism and by the quintet, more container than instrument.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence over promise, and a century of it: the work has drawn writing on its sexual politics and its staging of the gaze, on decadence and the femme fatale, and on its tonal plan, whose scheme is still disputed. The questions stay open. Is Salome a monster, a victim or a child? Is the quintet of the Jews a satire of theological dispute, an anti-Jewish caricature, or both? What, harmonically, is the chord at the kiss? How should the Dance be staged, and by whom should it be danced? Performance is unsettled on the voice of the title role, between the lyric girl and the Isolde soprano the orchestra demands. Held below the top for volume and duration: the literature is substantial, of one century, and runs as much to cultural history as to the music.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work pushed tonal harmony toward its breaking point in a public, successful stage work, made the orchestra an instrument of psychology at a speed and detail Wagner had not attempted, and made the one-act music drama of extreme states a genre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Strauss’s own Elektra (1909) followed directly, and the one-act drama of extreme states after it, Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909), Zemlinsky’s Wilde operas, Schreker, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), and later Berg’s Lulu, a second girl as the object of every gaze. Discounted because Strauss himself turned back after Elektra, and because Schoenberg’s break, not Strauss’s, became the field’s decisive event.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the score is published, complete and undisputed, and the 1905 version is the one performed. Presence runs across 121 years: continuous in the German repertory from the premiere, international since the 1920s, recorded complete since the 1940s, and in every major house now. The early bans in Vienna, New York and London interrupted presence where they applied, and are charged a little. The surface fixed to its moment is real: the Jugendstil and orientalist decor of the court and the Dance, and the quintet of the Jews, whose caricature each production must now answer. And the role is rationed: few sopranos can sing it, which limits presence without threatening it. The figure stands level with Otello’s.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Command of the medium at the height of its age. The orchestra of about a hundred and five players: the heckelphone among the woodwind; the double bass’s pinched note at the execution; celesta and harmonium for the court’s glitter; the opening clarinet run, which sets an unstable tonal field in one gesture; the wings Herodes alone hears, in fluttering winds and strings; a texture thinned to chamber detail at will. The harmony sets keys against one another as drama, not effect. The German prose is declaimed fluently, without the stiffness of setting unrhymed lines, and the quintet is real five-part counterpoint in comic dress. The costs are in the score: a title role that must ride the full orchestra and seem sixteen, a balance problem since 1905, and a Dance routine by Strauss’s standard. Held below Otello’s 9.5 on those counts.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the quintet’s comic theological squabble and the final scene’s kiss. One law governs them: this is a court where everyone looks and talks and no one sees, and where the sacred is present only as a voice the court argues over. The Jews quarrel over whether anyone has seen God while the prophet sits in the cistern below them; the Nazarenes tell of miracles the court treats as gossip; Herodes fears omens and wants none of it; Salome wants only the mouth that spoke. The moon, which each character reads as himself, governs the whole. The strain is the Dance: a concert waltz in oriental dress, whose world is the salon and not the night of the rest of the score. A law broken there and kept everywhere else holds, at a cost.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The orders held: consciousness, in Salome’s desire and Herodes’s fear; the family, rotten at its centre, a tetrarch who killed his brother, married his wife and now wants her daughter; the state, in the tetrarch, a Roman envoy named and absent, and the soldiers who carry out the sentence; the sacred as revelation, rumour and institution at once, in the prophet, the Nazarenes’ report of a Messiah and the Jews’ dispute; the natural order, as the moon and the wind; and history, at the turn of an age, a new faith announced to a court that cannot hear it. They are integrated: the family’s corruption lets the state’s oath deliver the sacred’s head. What holds the axis here is scale: one terrace, one night, a hundred minutes. Labour and the crowd are absent, and the world beyond the court is reported, not held.

Score: 7.8 / 10