100 Great Operas and Their Stories: Act-By-Act Synopses (60 page)

SALOME

Opera in one act by Richard Strauss with libretto
translated (with a few excisions) into
German by Hedwig Lachmann from the French
original by Oscar Wilde

Time: about
A.D
. 30

Place: Judea

First performance at Dresden, December 9, 1905

    This one-act shocker is sometimes referred to as a “biblical drama” because the bare elements of the story are found in the New Testament. Just how bare those elements are may be discovered by reference to Matthew xiv and Mark vi, where Salome’s name is not even mentioned. She is identified simply as the daughter of Herodias, and her motivation in asking for John’s head on a charger stems from a request of her mother’s. But before Wilde wrote the French drama that serves as the libretto for the opera, the subject of Salome had been treated
by a long list of writers, including—to name but a very few-such divergent figures as Eusebius, St. Gregory, Aelfric, Heine, and Flaubert. Some of the versions of the story are even more fantastically different from the Bible’s than Wilde’s, and one of them—Flaubert’s—served as the basis of another opera, Massenet’s
Hérodiade
, which was highly successful in its day. Wilde’s version, essentially a study in neurasthenia, had an operatic setting written even before Strauss’s by the French composer Antoine Mariotte. Its success was local and it is today practically forgotten. Wilde’s conception of the character of the psychopathic princess is said to have been inspired as much by Huysmans and by Italian and French artists’ treatment of the subject as by anything else.

Be this as it may, there can be little doubt that it was written as a
fin de siècle
shocker. And shock it did. The British censors banned the dramatic version from the London stage for many years; Kaiser Wilhelm II (who, after all, was Queen Victoria’s affectionate grandson) banned the operatic version from Berlin; and the directors of the Metropolitan withdrew it after one public rehearsal and one performance on account of protests from the pulpit and press.

When Mary Garden appeared in the opera at the Manhattan Opera house two years later, one of the pulpit protesters was Billy Sunday. After his attack (delivered without hearing or seeing the performance), Miss Garden met Sunday, shared an ice-cream soda with him, and made it all up. Today’s public has made it all up analogously with composer and librettist, and it is only a rare and courageous oldster who will dare to admit that he is still shockable by what remains a willfully vivid projection of degeneracy.

Just one technical detail to indicate that this characterization is justified and that the effects were produced with clever deliberateness: In a certain passage the double-bass players are required to pinch their strings tightly with thumb and forefinger as they administer quick, hammerlike strokes of the bow. The purpose—to quote the composer’s own instructions—is to produce a noise like “the suppressed, choked moaning of a woman.”

THE OPERA

It is a beautiful, warm, moonlight night on the terrace off the banqueting hall of Herod, Tetrarch of Judea. Inside, among the banqueters, is Salome, the Tetrarch’s stepdaughter; outside, a handsome young captain of the guards named Narraboth comments passionately on the beauty of the Princess. A well-wishing page tries to warn him against this dangerous mooning, but he is scarcely listened to.

From inside the hall comes the sound of the banqueting; but from below, from a cistern on the right-hand side of the stage, comes the prophetic voice of John the Baptist—or Jokanaan, as he is known in the German libretto—speaking of the coming of Christ. The soldiers are impressed but think their prisoner probably mad.

Into the moonlit night rushes Salome, annoyed by the persistent sex-hungry glances of her stepfather. She is a pretty chit of only fifteen, but it would take no Greek dramatist or psychologically trained social worker to offer an unpromising prognosis from a glance at her case history. Her mother had murdered her father in order to marry Herod; Herod himself is a degenerate pleasure-seeker; she has been brought up in a viciously corrupt court; and Herod’s desire to sleep with his stepdaughter has been weakly veiled at the same time that it has been strengthened by her obvious aversion to him.

The voice of Jokanaan strongly attracts her, not only for its natural manliness, but, perversely, because he has cursed out her mother for wickedness and because her stepfather seems to fear him. It does not take her long to seduce the love-struck Narraboth into ordering the prophet to be brought forth; and as he, in rags but with religious passion, denounces her elders, she is more and more physically attracted. Repeatedly, in successively higher keys and with broadened versions of the musical phrase, she cries: “I want to kiss your mouth, Jokanaan!” His advice to try penance instead only inflames her the further; while her shameless behavior disturbs young Narraboth so deeply that he suddenly whips out his sword and commits
suicide. The charming girl does not even glance at the body; and Jokanaan, with a final admonition to seek Jesus, retires into his cistern cell.

The banqueting party, headed by the Tetrarch and Herodias, now adjourns to the terrace, with Herod demanding the whereabouts of Salome, and losing his balance as he slips on the blood of Narraboth. He invites her to share a piece of fruit so that he may place his lips where hers have just been. The reaction of Herodias to these undignified goings-on is one of cold contempt; but when she hears Jokanaan denouncing her from his cistern, she turns in fury on her husband and demands why he has not delivered the prisoner up to the Jews. Five Jews now come forward to demand the prisoner; but Herod argues with them at some length, maintaining that Jokanaan is really a man of God. This infuriates the suppliants, whose parts are written for four tenors and a bass and whose complex, chattering music is unflatteringly satirical. The voice of Jokanaan, heard once more from the cistern, silences them all; and then two Nazarenes discuss some of the miracles of the Saviour, whom Jokanaan has been preaching of. Herod is badly frightened once more—as he had been earlier merely of a rising wind—and his peace of mind is not further promoted when Herodias turns on him to demand that Jokanaan, who is once again denouncing her and prophesying a bad end, be silenced.

Turning away from all these unpleasant aspects of his party, Herod asks Salome to dance for him. Herodias forbids it, and Salome herself shows a decided lack of enthusiasm. However, Herod persists, promising her all sorts of things. Finally she agrees on condition that he will give her anything that she demands. Ominous winds frighten Herod further, who superstitiously thinks he hears the flapping of wings. He makes his oath, tearing a chaplet of roses from his head because, he says, they are burning him. He falls back exhausted; and as some slaves prepare Salome for her dance, the voice of Jokanaan continues to prophesy doom.

Then comes the voluptuous music of the
Dance of the
Seven Veils
, during which Salome sheds one veil after another as the dance mounts in intensity. Strauss had originally planned to have a ballerina take the place of the prima donna for this dance and did not hesitate to compose physically taxing music to follow upon it. This is the way it was performed at the premiere, and this is the way it was done most effectively in a televised performance by the NBC Opera Theatre with a dancer who bore a striking resemblance to Elaine Malbin, the Salome of the occasion. Many prima donnas nowadays, however, like to perform their own gyrations. All too seldom can these be called dancing.

Much of the dance is usually performed with the cistern of Jokanaan as a pivotal point of interest; but at its close, Salome throws herself at the feet of Herod and, with an almost childish sweetness, asks for her reward—the head of Jokanaan. Herod is horrified; but Salome, encouraged by her mother, sticks relentlessly to her demand, turning down all of Herod’s alternative offers, which include jewels, white peacocks, the mantel of the High Priest, and the veil of the temple. Finally, weary and frightened, he gives in. Herodias takes a ring from his finger as an order for the execution.

As the bloody work goes on below, Salome leans over the mouth of the cistern, demanding that the executioner hurry. Clouds begin to cover the moon, which had previously lighted the scene brightly; and in the gathering gloom the hands of the executioner emerge from the cistern bearing aloft the head of Jokanaan on a platter. Salome seizes it and, in her last powerful and revolting scene, sings of her triumph over the man who repulsed her and slobbers over the dead lips and kisses them.

A ray of moonlight breaks through the clouds, and even the degenerate Herod is revolted at the scene, which Lord Harewood has aptly termed a “psychopathic Liebestod.” “Let that woman be killed!” he orders; and the soldiers crush her under their shields.

    
Postscript for the historically curious:
According to more
sober historians, Salome did not meet the dramatically apposite end concocted for her by Oscar Wilde. She survived her dance and the execution of John the Baptist to marry, successively, her uncle, Tetrarch Philip of Trachonitus, and her cousin, King Aristobulus of Calchas.

SAMSON ET DALILA

(Samson and Delilah)

Opera in three acts by Camille Saint-Saëns
with libretto in French by Ferdinand Lemaire,
based on the Book of Judges

Time: biblical

Place: Gaza

First performance (in German) at Weimar, December 2, 1877

    Ask any music-lover to name offhand the subject that has inspired the largest number of operas, and he will probably nominate either Faust or Orpheus, or just possibly Romeo. I am not sure what the correct answer should be, never having tabulated the subjects of the scores of the 28,000 operas that lie in the
Bibliothèque Nationale
, not to mention the thousand of operas that never found their way into France in any form. But high on the list, I am sure, would be the subject of Samson. I have found records of eleven treatments antedating Saint-Saëns’s; and this does not include, of course, Handel’s great setting of Milton’s drama, which is an oratorio. Nor were all these by forgotten composers. One of them, for example, was by Rameau, whose librettist was no less a figure than Voltaire, and another was by the German Joachim Raff. Oddly enough, though each of these composers was not only a
highly respected musician in his day but also a powerful figure, neither of their Samson operas was ever produced.

Saint-Saëns also had some troubles before he ever got to see a full performance of his work, and even more before he could hear it in his own country. His cousin, Ferdinand Lemaire, delivered the libretto in 1869, and the score was well along when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. This interrupted the completion for two years, after which the score lay idle on the composer’s desk for another two. Finally, Liszt heard of the work. Ever enthusiastic about helping younger men, the Abbé took the score and gave it its world premiere in German at Weimar.
Simson und Delila
, it was called. That was in 1877; but it took the natural home for this work, the Paris Opéra, another thirteen years to see its merits. There it has been a staple ever since, being played at least once or twice a month year in year out.

In English-speaking countries it was also slow to make its way. In England there used to be a law (and in America a prejudice) against representing biblical characters on the stage. It was first heard in these countries, therefore, in the form of an oratorio. In England it never received an operatic production till 1909; while in the U.S., despite a few scattered performances in the nineties, it did not enter the regular repertoire of the Metropolitan till 1915. Then, with a cast headed by Caruso and Matzenauer, it made such an impression that it has been a semi-regular in the repertoire for many years. Nowadays, however, there is this interesting difference in standards of production: audiences insist on—and get—a Delilah who can look as well as sing like a dangerous woman.

In 1947, when Saint-Saëns’s opera was temporarily out of the repertoire, the Metropolitan produced a one-act version of the story by Bernard Rogers, entitled
The Warrior
. In this opera Samson’s eyes are put out very realistically, with a red-hot poker, right on the stage. The management had the happy thought of producing this little horror on a Saturday afternoon bill for moppets, with
Hansel und Gretel
as the lure. Naturally, poor Mr. Rogers’ work failed to win the parents’ approval, and Saint-Saëns was subsequently restored.