Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 8 - Salome

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 20 to Strauss’s opera. Douglas the addressee, a beautiful young narcissist incapable of love and driven by vindictive fantasies (against his father), could be seen as a Salome prototype, though Wilde himself, loving and generous to the end, did not so see him. The play,meanwhile, had become a hit across Europe. A production at Max Reinhardt’s Kleines Theater in Berlin, in a translation by Hedwig Lachmann from Wilde’s French, was especially noteworthy. The German poet Anton Lindner had approached Strauss in 1902, proposing a verse libretto for an opera based on Wilde’s play, and he sent a few samples. But when Strauss saw the Reinhardt production, he decided to work directly from the German text of the play. He proved a wonderful librettist, judiciously cutting about one-third of the play’s dialogue, streamlining verbose language, eliminating several minor characters, and arranging the whole in the service of a tightly organized musical conception that goes beyond Wilde’s words in its emotional power. By 1905 the work had its premiere. Salome is both an opera and a dramatic tone- poem. Its psychological and dramatic themes are advanced as much by the extraordinary orchestration as by the words that are sung. Strauss, as skillfully as Wagner before him, uses musical leitmotifs to trace the evolution of themes and characters, and his virtuosic use of individual instruments — perhaps especially woodwinds — gives them a key expressive role, from the opening clarinet glissando that introduces the princess to the end of the opera — including, along the way, the first known symphonic use of the “heckelphone,” an extended bass oboe with a wider bore, known for its penetrating sound. Two aspects of Strauss’s musical realization have been panned by critics: the music for Salome’s dance, and the music written for Jochanaan (John the Baptist). The famous dance was probably written after the rest of the opera, since the version Strauss played for Mahler did not yet contain it (he said he would do it later). It is indeed, as critics say, little more than a pastiche of other parts of the opera, though it does achieve its dramatic purpose. But the attacks on Jochanaan’s music as banal and simplistic are, I believe, misguided, because Strauss made clear in letters that he fully intended to depict the prophet as an “imbecile,” “more or less a clown,” and for that reason gave him a “pedantic motif.” Beneath this creative decision lies the primary difference between Wilde and Strauss. Wilde was profoundly religious — not in the conventional high- church Victorian sense, but devoted to the personality and moral message of Christ, who, as he writes in De Profundis , “could bring peace to souls in anguish,” and cause those who had lived entirely for pleasure to hear “for the first time the voice of love.” In Wilde, then, Salome’s tragedy is that she sees only her own desires and fails entirely to hear the prophet’s powerful message. Strauss, by contrast, had no use for religion, and in the opera he turns the prophet into a banal figure whom Salome’s narcissistic Malin Byström as Salome and John Daszak as Herod in the unsettling, legendary dance at the Royal Ballet and Opera. Tristram Kenton / Royal Opera House