Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 8 - Salome

19 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Power and seductive charm, utterly without accountability: alarming to contemplate, horrifying to encounter. In Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), an enchanting and glamorous youth has a piece of very good or very bad luck: his face and body show no trace of his vile, destructive, and selfish life, remaining beautiful and apparently kind — while his portrait, hidden away, tells the story of who he has really become, body and soul. (Eventually, confronting the portrait at last, he commits suicide by stabbing it in the heart.) This idea of a sensuality unfettered by accountability — and of an eventual reckoning – continued to fascinate Wilde, and in Salome (1892), he creates a female Dorian, her unchecked power over others through sensuous beauty and royal rank creating a total absence of moral concern. Because, unlike Dorian, she has no telling portrait, we (and the orchestra) must witness who she is for ourselves. Composer Richard Strauss uses Wilde’s play to create a terrifying opera, his searing and superbly crafted music imparting new depth to the play’s ideas. The opera has always elicited passionate, and contradictory, reactions. Strauss’s conservative father disliked the fraught and nervous work, saying, “It is exactly as if one had one’s trousers full of maybugs.” By contrast, composer Gustav Mahler called it “one of the greatest masterpieces of our time.” The controversy continues. Musicologist Joseph Kerman, known for his pithy put-downs, called Salome’s final monologue (admired by most critics as the work’s finest passage) a “sugary orgasm.” But on the whole Mahler’s view has prevailed: it is among Strauss’s finest works, and it deserves its secure place in the repertory. The opera’s basic story — Salome’s dance before Herod, his promise to give her whatever she asks for, her request for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and Herod’s reluctant compliance — is already told in the Gospels by both Mark and Matthew. But there she is simply called the “daughter of Herodias”: the name Salome appears only in later sources. (Ironically, the name is related to Hebrew “shalom,” “peace.”) In the Gospels it is at her mother’s bidding that she makes her fatal request and to her mother that she delivers the grisly platter. She has no personal motives, so far as we are told. Salome’s dance became famous in art and literature through the ages. Many later sources (including the 19th-century French writers Gustave Flaubert, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, all well-known to Wilde) focus on Salome’s seductive sensuality. The German poet Heinrich Heine suggested in 1843 that Salome developed a morbid fascination with the severed head, an idea that clearly influenced the playwright. In the 1870’s, the painter Gustave Moreau created a series of Salome paintings — including one of her dance and one called “The Apparition,” which, following Heine, depicts her fascination with the head. Both images are known to have obsessed the playwright, who reports that he kept dreaming about her. But the key idea that Salome’s request is motivated by frustrated desire and a thirst for revenge is Wilde’s original contribution, in pursuit of which he basically sidelines Herodias. Wilde’s drama — written in the winter of 1891-92 in French for a London production starring the great actress Sarah Bernhardt — was ultimately refused production in London by the censors, since British norms forbade the representation on stage of Biblical characters. Bernhardt said she would try to arrange a production in Paris, but this never happened. The play was published in French in 1893 to great admiration, and in English a year later — in a translation made by Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, whose French was very bad. Wilde made some essential corrections, but did not begin from scratch, and the English version we have is unsatisfactory, full of awkwardness and archaic “thees” and “thous,” a sad contrast with Wilde’s graceful French. Someone should do a new one! Meanwhile, the play was eventually mounted in Paris in 1896, though not with Bernhardt. By then, however, Wilde was in prison — sentenced to two years at hard labor for consensual sex acts with men (all in their twenties and treated by Wilde with courtesy and generosity). The trial judge, revealing British attitudes of the time, said: “It is the worst case I have ever tried.” Health broken, Wilde died in France in 1900. But while still in prison, he wrote one of his best works, in the form of a book-length letter to Douglas: De Profundis , a meditation on love, suffering, Christ’s life as paradigm, a person’s responsibility to cultivate his own soul — themes highly pertinent to his Salome, and Salome never had a strong grip on outer reality... but now she has retreated fully into her own mind.