Other Resources on Salome

Posted by Charles T. Downey at 10:30 PM | Link to this post

Here are a few more online articles on Wilde, Strauss, and Salome:

• Nancy Thuleen, Symbolism and Decadence in Wilde's Salome (1995)
  
• Delyse Ryan, Intertextuality and Oscar Wilde's Salomé
  
• Alex Ross, The Last Emperor: Richard Strauss (The New Yorker, December 20, 1999)
  
• Strauss’s Salome: Its Arts and Its Morals
  
• Salome, from Metropolitan Opera Radio Broadcast

Wilde was certainly not the first to create a sensual story about the character of Salome. In an intermission feature for the Met broadcast of the opera (Salome: Lovable Creature of Excess, March 27, 2004), Nimet Habachy noted the following precursors of Wilde's play:

• Heinrich Heine's Atta Troll, in which Herodias, not Salome, kisses the severed head of John the Baptist
  
• Joris-Karl Huysmans's A Rebours (English translation: Against the grain), with a sensual description of Salome (1884)
  
• Gustave Flaubert's Hérodiade (English translation: Herodias), in which Herodias does the seductive dance for King Herod (the basis for Massenet's opera on this story, Hérodiade, 1880)
  
• Stéphane Mallarmé's Symbolist play Hérodiade, which he left incomplete

Wilde first conceived the role of Salome for the eccentric actress Sarah Bernhardt, who at a dinner party given by Henry Irving, asked him to write a play for her in French. Bernhardt was never able to perform the role that Wilde supposedly envisioned as divine and pure, supposedly suggested by the depiction of Bernardo Luini, Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist (c. 1525).

Richard Strauss was not the first composer to tackle the story of Salome: there had already been Massenet's Herodiade (see above), and a symphonic work by Glazunov (Salome, op. 90), which also focused on Herodias.