Luogo e data di registrazione		Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Berlin (Germania) - dicembre 1990
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Produced by		Wolfgang Stengel
	Co-Producer		Pål Christian Moe
	Balance Engineer		Klaus Hiemann
	Publishers		Fürstner GmbH, Mainz, vertreten durch den Verlag B. Schott's Söhne, Mainz
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon | 431 810-2 | LC 0173 | 2 CDs - 56' 28" & 45' 18" | (p) 1991 | DDD
	Note		-

Strauss, Wilde and "Salome" Neither the literary nor the musical worldhas quite known what to make of the Salome of Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss. Although he considered it “a specious second-hand work”, Mario Praz accurately caught the ambivalence of Wilde’s play in noting that the “childish prattle employed by the characters” seems, perhaps unintentionally, to reduce decadence to parody or “the level of a nursery tale”. That Wilde’s Salomé may be the forerunner, according to Richard Ellmann, of the plays of Beckett and Yeats presents a problem for critics, since the historical importance and technical virtuosity of both play and opera have never seemed adequate to overcome the supposed depravity in Wilde and the alleged banality of Strauss’s musical material. The situation has merely been rendered more confused by the discrepancy between the opera’s immediate popularity with audiences from its first performance in Dresden on 9 December 1905 and the warnings of moral corruption which issued from authorities after the Lord Chamberlain banned the play in 1892, the year of its completion. The cast which opposed play and opera in two continents had an element of the comical; any group which united English censorship, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Archbishop Piffl of Vienna and J. P. Morgan in moral outrage already contained within itself the seeds of ridicule; the difficulties which Strauss experienced in having the work staged in Vienna or New York were ultimately minor obstacles to its triumphant progress. But the more considered charges aimed against Wilde and Strauss by serious critics, analysts and aestheticians have fully balanced the often lavish praise bestowed upon the opera by Strauss’s fellow professionals such as Schoenberg, Mahler, Busoni and a galaxy of French contemporaries. As the subject matter of Salome has lost its power to shock, critics of the opera have tended to discern kitsch rather than immorality beneath the dazzling surface of Strauss’s music, though it has never been easy to decide what portion of the blame for this may be laid at the composer’s door. Behind this lurks the awkward question whether the operatic Salome should be seen as anything more than a musical extension of Wilde’s creation. From play in prose to Literaturoper Salome’s historical significance resides in large measure in the way it marks an important stage (alongside Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and the underrated Ariane et Barbe-Bleue of Dukas) in the evolution of post-Wagnerian music drama into what German critics have termed Literatur-oper. The most obvious sign of this is the means by which Strauss solved the problem of finding a librettist, by setting Hedwig Lachmann’s translation as it stood (albeit with very substantial cuts); opera's traditional verse, which even Italian verismo lacked the nerve or inclination to discard, was rejected in favour of prose. The prose libretto thus entered the opera house not in the service of realism but in the guise of the symbolism of Maeterlinck and the “poetic” childishness of Wilde. That Wilde wrote his play in French, partly under the influence of Flaubert, Mallarmé and their treatments of the Herodias story, helps to stress the extent to which Strauss responded to a modernist, international aesthetic (a point not lost on certain critics of a more narrowly nationalist bent); when he saw Lachmann’s translation on stage in 1902, it was in Max Reinhardt’s Kleines Theater, a forum for modern theatre that already looked forward to the more experimental techniques of Expressionism. It was on this occasion that the cellist Heinrich Grünfeld suggested the possibility of an opera, to which Strauss replied that he was already composing it; the play had been sent to him in 1901 by the Viennese poet Anton Lindner, who also made some attempts to versify Lachmann’s translation as the traditional kind of libretto. But after that Strauss responded simply to Lachmann’s opening sentence, “Wie schön ist die Prinzessin Salome heute nacht!” (possibly as late as July 1903), and began to compose, while at the same time purging the play of many “purple passages”, of which he had no need, having possessed a facility with purely orchestral “purple passages” since Don Juan. The implications of Strauss`s decision to create an opera from a play in prose were diverse. Already in Wagner, the relationship between word and music had been reinterpreted, ostensibly in favour of a literary and psychological approach to opera that stood apart from both the older operatic aesthetic and the “critical” approach of present-day developments (which accord more with the central role allotted to a director than Wagner would probably have appreciated). In Salome, the drama is Wilde’s to the extent that the music reflects the text. In this critics have seen problems which go beyond Strauss’s opera. Wilde’s play is not easily translated, as the problems of its English version make plain; this is not simply a matter of the “schoolboy faults” of Lord Alfred Douglas in attempting the first translation, but rather a question of reproducing the “music” of the French original (which Wilde in De profundis insisted upon when criticizing Douglas’s misguided efforts). It is arguable that Lachmann failed similarly, though the further argument of some writers that the German language was in itself an inappropriate vehicle for Wilde’s kind of word-music seems foolish in view of the quality of the lyrics (often French-inspired) which were being created at the time by Hofmannsthal, George and Rilke. The role of Lachmann, who moved in anarchist circles both from her own convictions and from those of her poet-husband Gustav Landauer (later murdered for his part in the Bavarian Soviet of 1919), serves as a reminder not of the “music” of the original but rather that the “musicality” of Wilde was contemporary with his alignment of the cult of the aesthetically beautiful and a form of libertarianism in The Soul of Man under Socialism. But a central problem of the metamorphosis of Salome from dramatic to operatic heroine was the extent to which verbal music in Wilde’s sense was compatible with real musical values. At the heart of Strauss’s creative achievement lies the paradox of a literary work - itself characterized by the rejection of realism in favour of verbal incantation - subjected to a musico-dramatic treatment that seemed to reflect a modern blend of realism and psychology. While Wilde’s Salomé “aspired to the condition of music”, Strauss’s Salome aspired to the condition of literary drama. Leitmotif in Salome For Strauss the play was the starting-point, inasmuch as he wrote down many of his initial motivic ideas into a copy of the German text so as to suggest various correlations. But the composition of the work (which was finished, with the notorious exception of the Dance of the Seven Veils, by 20 June 1905) qualifies this in ways which are not unfamiliar from Wagner. The efforts of Wagner scholars have heavily modified the traditional picture of the leitmotif; it is no longer sufficient to explain music drama with a guidebook of representation motives. This was always apparent in the case of Tristan and Isolde, the Wagnerian music drama which Salome most resembles. Just as Wagner in Tristan avoided literalness in the complexity of his treatment of the musical motive, so Strauss in Salome evolved a technique of transformations of context that is often more remarkable than the variations of musical shape. Thus many figures in Salome make a fetish out of the interval of a third, sometimes major, more often minor. Similar figures in the later Elektra stand fairly unambiguously for the murdered Agamemnon, But in Salome many of these ideas resist definition and lead to subtle connections; the major-third motive to which Salome sings “Ich bin verliebt in deinen Leib, Jochanaan!” later sinks into the minor, adding both force and atmosphere in various timbres to the execution of the Baptist, Herod’s sense of disgust, and the final crushing of Salome beneath the soldiers’ shields. The path to this brutalization of an originally shimmering motive lies in the various other motives which begin with a minor third, notably “Ich will deinen Mund küssen, Jochanaan” and the figure to which Salome repeatedly demands the head of the Baptist. Yet it is a sign of the indirection with which Strauss treats the musico-dramatic motive that neither of these sentiments first enters in conjunction with its characteristic musical shape. Verbal and musical motives find one another as Salome’s obsession grows. Her music when demanding the head of Jochanaan is presented in almost incoherent dynamic contrasts, the first disorganized dawnings of revenge as she crouches over the cistern in which Jochanaan is imprisoned. The demand itself is presented as a laughing throwaway, the accompanying musical texture of harp, celesta and clarinet trill seeming to belong to the laugh, or to the silver salver, rather than to Jochanaan’s head and its imminent fate. It is only as the dramatic conflict between the beseeching Tetrarch and Salome degenerates into obduracy that the words “Ich fordre den Kopf des Jochanaan” move close to the musical shape for which they were seemingly predestined. By such means Strauss keeps a fairly primitive musical idea in a state of flux. Even then, however, he does not lose sight of earlier stages in the process, and the return of the original major motive of Salome’s infatuation in the final monologue after the climax at “Jochanaan, du warst schön” turns the shimmer of the motive into a texture of celesta, harps and strings whose liquidity is all the more remarkable for the immobility of the supporting harmony; at such a moment it is hard not to think ahead to the silver rose in Der Rosenkavalier. The famous motive of two fourths which at first stands for certain aspects of Jochanaan, is another instance of a musical figure which develops into something other than a mere calling-card. Ultimately it seems to evoke the “geheimnisvolle Musik” which Salome heard on seeing Jochanaan. Yet by presenting fragments of the motive before Jochanaan appears, Strauss suggests that Salome had been ready for such “secret music” before she fixed her obsession upon the prophet. The musical motive represents something inchoate in this case, an approximation to that almost impossible intangibility which earlier German Romantic writers had felt to be at once music’s true property and goal. The two fourths of this motive (which Schoenberg bracketed with advanced progressions in Mahler, Debussy and Dukas) represent a more radical novelty than the chromatic sideslips of Salome’s waltz-like entrance theme; taken together, the two types of ideas seem to represent a world of glittering surfaces and a deeper reality lying underneath. Salome’s tragedy would seem to be that she senses the reality but reaches out to grasp it in a way that is apparently superficial. Here is one significant tension between Strauss and Wilde, since the love of surfaces, the exaltation of the aesthetic sensation, was one of Wilde’s positives. What is actually offered to Salome by Jochanaan is a vision of Christ on the Sea of Galilee that is at once portentous in its announcement, bland in its harmony and insipid in its melodic line; this Galilean is pale indeed. Granted that Strauss knew his Nietzsche and had renounced conventional religion, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the music for Jochanaan and the Nazarenes is not so much the failure to which critics have repeatedly referred but a barely concealed contempt. The secret music of Salome’s imagination is of a complexity that Jochanaan cannot fathom and that Wilde’s fails to do more than name; the true climax of Jochanaan’s dialogue with Salome is not to be found in the outpourings of Strauss’s orchestra (which reaches new heights of frenzy even for him, as the Baptist retreats into the cistern cursing his antagonist) but in the “toneless shudder” of “Niemals, Tochter Babylons, Tochter Sodoms,... Niemals!” Man’s potential fear of the sensually aroused woman was never more numbingly evoked. The silence does not last long. Later, however, Salome does kiss Jochanaan’s head in a prolonged silence broken only by the soft swelling of a directionless sonority of nauseous intensity; at such moments the childish repetitions and banalities of Wilde’s play find a reflex commentary in Strauss’s orchestra. The sensuous façade Conventionally such moments in Strauss are classed as aspects of his gift for illustration. The orchestration of Salome affords numerous examples of pictorial detail, notably in the scenes of violence, where for many critics a new depth of tastelessness was plumbed by the use of short stabbing strokes on high double basses for the heroine’s irregular breathing while the execution is being carried out in the cistern. Salome abounds in such novelties. But the orchestral and harmonic daring are only one aspect of the sensuous façade of the opera. Salome is a testament to the abundance of Strauss’s melodic gifts as well as to his illustrative facility, The type of melody with which Strauss operates is often rather more traditional (or banal, as harsher critics have insisted) than his fame as Wagner’s successor would suggest. The musical motives are frequently shaped into relatively conventional periods, and this is particularly apparent in the final monologue. It was Ernest Newman’s belief that the music for this monologue was composed before earlier sections based on the same themes (such as the dialogue between Salome and Jochanaan), a view that probably influenced Norman Del Mar when he maintained that only with the final monologue do words and music seem to fit in the most natural way. The unproven theory might be crudely stated in sonata terms: the “reprise” was composed before the “exposition”. The sonata or symphonic parallel was quickly pressed into service to explain Strauss’s technique and structure in Salome. Fauré’s comment is the most famous, but also the most glib: “Salome is a symphonic poem with additional voice parts”. Strauss’s attitude to such comments was equivocal; he recognized that “unsuspecting critics” viewed Salome (like Elektra) as a“symphony with accompanying voice parts”, but felt that they did not understand the extent to which the symphonic organization “conveyed the kernel of the dramatic content”. That a symphonic intelligence might serve to shape music drama had been recognized earlier by Nietzsche in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, a judgement that had passed into the small talk of musical criticism by Strauss’s day. But Strauss had his own view of the symphonic. A page of reflections found among the sketches for Also sprach Zarathustra makes quite clear that his idea of the symphonic was not dependent upon the kind of thematic and motivic development familiar in the symphony of the 19th century; the “briefest intimations” of formal conflicts seemed to him preferable to excessive development of the type found in Liszt. As a result, the individual sections of much of Strauss’s music seem more elegantly formed than the overall structure. He refused to worry (as Mahler did) that the “Dance of the Seven Veils” would suffer for being stitched together after the composition of the rest of the work. The periodic structures of Salome’s monologue and other sections enhance the sensation of a sequence of beautifully formed episodes; if the work seems to have a larger coherence, it may simply be because the most finished episodes come towards the end. Even the conclusion is a sudden interruption: the final cadence of Salome’s ecstatic kissing of the severed head is cut short by Herod’s capricious decision to have her killed. As a result the tonal scheme, which in reality makes carefully planned use of areas relating to C and C sharp, seems no less capricious. In such a context, “symphonic” is a word which can only be used in relation to Strauss’s own very idiosyncratic interpretation, with which such contemporaries as Mahler and Sibelius would hardly have agreed. Forms are as much part of the surface as orchestration and waltz rhythms. The most striking aspect of Salome’s episodic façade is the manner in which Strauss turns the five squabbling Jews into a virtuoso scherzo, which he described on a later occasion as “pure atonality”; this seems calculated to add another dimension to the general sense of scandal and perversity which worried the cast of Ernst von Schuch’s Dresden company during rehearsals. Sander L. Gilman has pointed to the way in which Strauss’s evocation of Biblical Jews reads Wilde’s text in a contemporary spirit, thereby “subversively contravening one of the basic tenets of German anti-Semitism, which saw the Jews of the Bible, especially of the New Testament, as different from contemporary Jewry.” According to Gilman’s very subtle argument, Strauss’s liberal Jewish audience may have recognized the despised “Eastern” Jews from the ghettos in the high-pitched hysterical quintet, where character-tenors of the same kind as Herod outnumber a solitary bass. An array of stereotypes dominates Herod’s court: stage Jews, Nazarenes who sing in that pious diatonicism which 19th-century opera thought suitable to religion, and the dancing Salome, whose mild exoticisms are all too easily (if mistakenly) choreographed as a lascivious strip-tease. The sequence between Jochanaan’s cursing of Salome and her demand for his head is a diverlissement of grotesques, a representation of kitsch which can hardly help being kitsch itself, albeit of a technically superior kind. Whereas the pretension in Wilde resides in the claim of his childish sentences to being musical, Strauss exhibits the superficiality of his characters by dwelling on musical and dramatic clichés swollen to pretension by the amplifying voice of his orchestra. There are inevitably points of aesthetic contact between Wilde and Strauss, but as a whole Salome demonstrates the problems inherent in composing an opera to a text which itself aspires to music. The play is as curiously innocent in its presentation of hysteria, obsession and cruelty as Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande; whereas Debussy strove to capture the innocence as well as the cruelty, Strauss took a more robust interest in uncovering the psychology of characters who are infected by the cruelty of the theme. As a result, his opera leaves Wilde far behind in intensity, while retaining a consuming interest in the nature of the surfaces that lend even to the hysterical and depraved an aesthetic glamour. John Williamson