Difference between revisions of "Category:Salome--music (subject)"

2008 (Jordan)

2008 (Sweete)

2012 (Lehnhoff)

Works of music on Salome

Overview

Richard Strauss's Salome premiered in Dresden on 9 December 1905 (starring Marie Wittich in the title role). It was an immediate success. In 1906 the opera was performed in a dozen theaters, including Graz, Cologne, Berlin (starring Emmy Destinn), Turin, and Milan (under the direction of Arturo Toscanini). In spite of the composer's invitation to look at the opera as nothing more than "a scherzo with a fatal conclusion," many regarded it as a gruesome middlebrow entertainment. When the opera opened at the New York Metropolitan Opera on 22 January 1907, accusations of vulgarity and indecency led to the cancellation of the show and the opera would not be performed again at the Met until 1934. In Austria, Russia and other countries the opera was banned even before being performed.

And yet, Strauss's Salome was an unstoppable success. In March 1907 the French version of the opera premiered in Brussels, of which a scaled-down rendition was also given in Paris a few days before the German version opened there at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 8 May 1907 under the direction of the composer. Aino Ackté played Salome in the 1907 Leipzig premiere as well as in the 1910 London premiere. In spite of the Met's boycott, the Salome-mania hit New York again at the Manhattan Opera House in 1909 with Mary Garden.

Among famous Salomes are Maria Jeritza, Maria Cebotari, Christle Goltz, Birgitt Nilsson, Josephine Barstow, Hildegard Behrens, Catherine Malfitano, <Maria Ewing (1980s); Karita Mattila and Nadja Michael (2000s)>, Probably the most famous of all was the Bulgarian soprano Ljuba Welitsch, who sang it in the presence of the composer at a performance given to mark his 80th birthday in Vienna in 1944.

Performing Salome (opera)

Bibliography

• Richard Strauss's Salome: which recording is best?

Performing Salome (ballet)

In the Gospel narrative Salome "danced" before Herod Antipas and Christian iconography represented her consistently as a dancer. Hence, whoever performs Salome must be a dancer (at least to a certain extent), even when she is primarily an actress or a singer.

In 1895 Loie Fuller was the first solo dancer to present a Salome piece and she did it in linea with the old traditional view of Salome as an innocent child. But the great success of the works by Oscar Wilde (1896) and Richard Strauss (1905) changed radically the popular view of Salome, from innocent chid to femme fatale.

In Wilde and Strauss the dance of Salome became the epitome of her seductiveness--the Dance of the Seven Veils. The Salomania reached its peak at the beginning of the 20th century, especially in the years 1907-08, when the Dance of Salome attracted the attention of the most famous ballerinas, becoming for some time a fever that spread in all Europe and the United States.

Both classical and vaudeville dancers contributed to create the tragic character of a seductive and perverse woman that ultimately destroys herself with the object of her own desires. They offered a solo performances or substituted actresses and singers who were unable or unwilling (for reasons of decency) to perform the Dance of the Seven Veils. And when professional dancers were not involved, actresses and singers turned into dancers, offering some remarkable dancing performances on stage or on the screen. Among the most notable are actresses Rita Hayworth and Brigid Bazlen. Only in Pasolini's film The Gospel according to Matthew (1964), Salome, played by 12-year-old Paola Tedesco, was allowed to return an innocent child, playing an innocent, joyful dance before her parents, unaware of the consequences of her action.

Bibliography

• Richard Bizot, "The Turn-of-the-Century Salome Era: High- and Pop-Culture Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils," Choreography and Dance 2 (1992) 71–87
• William Tydeman and Steven Price, Wilde: Salome (Cambridge, 1996), 136–51
• Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven, 2002).
• Davinia Caddy, "Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils," Cambridge Opera Journal 17.1 (2005) 37–58 [1]
• Clair Rowden (ed.), Performing Salome, Revealing Stories (Routledge, 2013)