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Irish Studies Review

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Salome. The music and language of Oscar Wilde

and Richard Strauss
a
Tanya Touwen
a
Music Officer for the Oscar Wilde Summer School , Bray
Published online: 02 May 2008.

To cite this article: Tanya Touwen (1995) Salome. The music and language of Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss, Irish
Studies Review, 3:11, 20-23, DOI: 10.1080/09670889508455487

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09670889508455487

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 Irish Studies Review No. 11 Summer 1995
The Music and Language of
Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss
I n his Introduction to the 1975 English National
Opera's production of Strauss's Salome, Joachim
Herz wrote: 'A composer reads a work of literature and
in him music is born. It need not, however, be the
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music the poet heard'. It is also true that plenty of
libretti have butchered literature yet provided for great
opera, which leads one to think that literature is
inherently subservient to music. So what did Strauss
make of Oscar Wilde's Salome ? The two men were
cultures apart; the one Irish aesthete, decadent poet
and wit, the other German bourgeois, composer of late-
Romantic, Germanic expressionist music. What they
had in common was the fin desiecle taste for orientalism,
and if Wilde was much inspired by Gustave Moreau and
Maeterlinck, the Germanic world had Wedekind, Klimt,
and the Norwegian Edvard Munch as examples. (John
Bury, who designed Salome for Peter Hall's 1988
production, made it look 'like a Klimt inspired
nightmare'.) Both Wilde and Strauss lived at the
closing of one era and at the start of very new things to
come, and both were well aware of it.
Oscar Wilde's SaUrmevras first performed at Breslau,
Germany in 1901, in a translation by Dr Kisper. Strauss
never saw it, but was alerted into reading this
translation by the Viennese poet Anton Lindler who
also offered to write a libretto. Strauss liked the play
and accepted the offer, but rejected the libretto
eventually as being 'not in the spirit', nor did he like
the versification. He toyed with the idea of a Salome
opera till, in 1903, he saw Max Reinhardt's production
in Berlin, which persuaded him. The translation was by
Hedwig Lachmann. It is a quite accurate and
straightforward translation, and became the basis of his
opera, unadulterated but for the fact that he cut its
length by at least a third. He started composing in the
summer of 1903 and finished it in June 1905, amazingly
fast for a work of such complexity. He did not compose
the famous dance till afterwards; this certainly
surprised Mahler who, according to his wife, Alma said:
'"Isn't it rather risky, simply leaving out the dance, and
then writing it later, when you are not in the mood?"
Strauss laughed his lighthearted laugh. "I'll fix that all
right".' I am not sure that he did actually fix it; to me
the dance sounds at odds with the rest, pseudo-oriental
and saccharine, a sort of Viennese belly waltz.
The opera was first performed in Dresden on
9 December 1905. It was damned by the critics they
Salome
Tanya Touwen
particularly objected to his use of prose and became
an immediate success with the public. Performances
followed all over Europe without trouble from
censorship except in London where, during the first
performance in 1910, Beecham had to conduct a
Salome wielding an empty silver dish and kissing non-
existing dead lips. These early performances were not
without irony: Strauss, who agreed with Wilde that
Salome should be a virginal nymphet, stipulated that
she should be sung by a sixteen-year-old with the voice
of an Isolde. In fact the first performance was sung by
Marie Wittich, a matronly Wagnerian soprano. Strauss
did not mind, he was after all musician not dramaturge,
but later, under the influence of Hugo von
Hoffmansthal who, as a refined Viennese detested
'Wagnerian bawling', he agreed to a lighter, younger
voice and even reduced the orchestral score for this. In
any case, he never seems to have expected more than
forty per cent word audibility. Interestingly, the lighter
sopranos of today seem to have no problems at all with
the full orchestration.
How faithful is Strauss's opera to Wilde's play? Close,
according to Peter Hall, who remarks about the climax
of the opera: 'Oscar Wilde created extraordinary, sick
tenderness, and Strauss responded'. But one cannot
help notice the substantial cuts in Wilde's text. These
were to a great extent practical. Singing is slower than
speech, and orchestration adds to the length. Many
though not all of the numerous repetitions which
were so typical in Wilde's writing, have disappeared.
For instance, right at the beginning of the play the
Page says: 'Regardez la lune. La lune a l'air etrange. On
dirait une femme qui sort d'un tombeau. Elle
ressemble a une femme morte. On dirait qu'elle
cherche des morts.' In the opera this becomes: 'Sieh'
die Mondscheibe, wie sie seltsam aussieht. Wie eine
Frau, die aufsteigt aus dem Grab.' However, one might
argue that Strauss replaced these repetitions with
numerous short musical themes which repeat and
interweave tfiemselves throughout the opera.
Subsidiary anecdotes, such as the discussion between
the soldiers, the Nubian and the Cappadocian have
disappeared in order to tighten up the drama. In fact
Romain Rolland (who dismissed evocative repetitions
as 'literaryjargon') wrote to Strauss: 'the libretto, as
you have arranged it, is admirably suited to the stage; it
is at the same time picturesque and compact,

concentrated: it is a dramatic crescendo from
beginning to end.' Sentences have been shortened and
much of the over-rich language cut. For instance: 'Ce
sont les yeux surtout qui sont terribles. On dirait des
trous noirs laisses par des flambeaux sur une tapisserie
de Tyr. On dirait des cavernes noires ou demeurent des
dragons, des dragons d'Egypte ou les dragons trouvent
Ieur asile. On dirait des lacs noirs troubles par des lacs
fantastiques ...'. In Strauss, Salome sings: 'Seine Augen
sind vom allem das Schrecklichste. Sie sind wie die
schwarzen Hohlen, wo die Drachen hausen! Sie sind
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Josephine Barstow as Salome in the English National Opera's 1975 production of Salome
Irish Studies Review No. 11 Summer 1995
wie schwarze Seen, aus denen irres Mondlicht flackerst
...'. Strauss believed that long sentences did not suit his
musical phrasing. Such cutting out did of course
reduce the richness of Wilde's language considerably,
but it is replaced by Strauss's own musical
voluptuousness and lyricism. As he remarked about
Salome: 'truly exotic harmonies which sparkle like
taffeta, particularly in the cadences'. Silk replaces the
jewels perhaps, but it all shines.
It seems often the custom in Britain regrettably to
my mind to translate operas into English. I wonder
Photo: John earner
Courtesy: English Motional Open
 Irish Studies Review No. 11 Summer 1995
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whether the audience of Salome actually realises that
they are listening to English translated from German
which itself was translated from French. I have read two
such translations, one by Maria Massey Pelican, the
other by Tom Hammond, and neither are too-far off
the mark except for the flaws inherent in operatic
translations. Intonations vary greatly from one
language to the other; the vowels change a long
drawn-out 'fair' sounds quite different from 'shon'.
Worse, each sentence will have to keep exactly the same
number of syllables, whatever the language. For
instance, Wilde wrote 'Quelle etrange voix! Je voudrais
bien lui parler', which in the opera became 'Welch
seltsame Stimme! Ich michte mit ihm sprechen'. Fair
enough. In the respective translations this becomes:
'Oh, voice full of mystery oh, I should like to see
him', and 'How strangely he is talking. I'd rather like to
speak to him.' Since German is lengthier, the English
translation became wordier, contrary to both Wilde and
Strauss. (Of course even literary translations are rarely
totally accurate; Wilde's 'Je voudrais bien lui parler' is
rendered by Lord Alfred Douglas as 'I would speak with
him', and by Vyvyan Holland as 'I wish to speak to him',
which shows the French Salome up as a far more
Scene from the English National Opera's 1975 production of Salome
Photo: John Garner
Courtesy: English Notional Opera
sweetly polite girl than any of her English
counterparts.) In fact Strauss himself faced this
conundrum when he made a French version of the
opera, with the assistance of Romain Rolland. Being a
composer, he circumnavigated the problem by
changing the vocal lines. This French version is rarely
performed, even in France, although a compact disc
exists, although it is not available in Ireland.
Oscar Wilde wrote in De Profundis: 'Salome ...
contains refrains whose recurring motifs make it like a
piece of music and bind it together as a ballad.' Wilde
was not in the least musical but it is certainly true that
his Salome is almost incantatory, with a repetitive
lyricism that is indeed not unlike a ballad. And here, I
think, lies the real difference between the Salome of
Wilde and Strauss, because Strauss's lyricism and his
repeating and interweaving of themes are not in the
last ballad-like, and serve a very different purpose: they
give expression to characterisation. Strauss wrote about
Salome: 'I had long felt that operas about the Orient
and Judaism lacked the distinctive colours, the burning
sun of the East. The need to remedy this led me to use
exotic harmonies and strong cadences with the
iridescence of shot silk. At the same time, the desire to

achieve the strongest possible characterisation
suggested the use of bi tonality, by which I could make a
more effective contrast between Herod and the
Nazarene than would have been possible using a
merely rhythmical characterisation such as Mozart used
with such genius'.
Strauss's father, himself a musician, was more prosaic
about Salome: 'Oh God, what nervous music. It is
exactly as if one had one's trousers full of maybugs'.
Wilde would have wholeheartedly agreed with the first
two sentences, and totally disagreed with the third. Did
he not once admonish Shakespeare for being too
strong on characterisation? Wilde wanted to invoke, to
captivate with poetry in prose, to spin a gruesome tale
in the richest possible language. Strauss sought to give
the ultimate musical expression to human emotions.
One does not need to be a musicologist or even to
understand German, to hear in the music the
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development of Salome from a spoilt, wilful little
princess through angry bewilderment to a woman with
a mad sexual obsession. Jocanaan is rockhard in fanatic
belief in God to the exclusion of all else (Strauss was
anti-Christian), Herod an angst-ridden dithering
Irish Studies Review No. 11 Summer 1995
potentate and Herodias vulgar in her arrogant
stupidity. The row between the Jews and Nazarenes (the
only piece of ensemble singing in the whole opera) is
masterly in its rendering of argumentative bickering.
This is indeed far removed from Wilde; it is a work of
extraordinary strength and power, driving the
characters inexorably on to the horrific end.
Perhaps it is not fair to compare the work of two
artists expressing themselves in such different
disciplines as literature and music. Perhaps it is not
possible to compare literature and music at all. I would
like to give Wilde the last word; he may not have liked
music much ('music is the most expensive of all
noises'), but at least he understood some of its essence
when he wrote about art: 'For when the ideal is
realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery and
becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is
other than itself. This is the reason why music is the
perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate
secret'.
Tanya Touwen is Music Officerfor
the Oscar Wilde Summer School, Bray.
Scene from the English National Opera's 1975 production of Salome
Photo: John Gamer
Courtesy: Inglish National Opera