Category:Salome--music (subject)

2008 (Jordan)

2008 (Sweete)

2012 (Lehnhoff)

Works of music on Salome

Overview

Salome first emerged as a "singing" character in the tradition of the oratorios since the end of the 17th century. The first oratorio to be recorded as having Salome among its characters is San Giovanni Battista (St John the Baptist / 1675 Stradella / Acciaiuoli), oratorio. In the oratorios the protagonist is John the Baptist and the plot closely follows the biblical narrative.

Among the most celebrated oratorios dealing with the death of John the Baptist is Il Batista (1727 Caldara / Zeno), oratorio, which premiered in Vienna in 1727. It is the first of which the name of the interpreter of Salome is recorded--"Signora Helvertin."

The season of the "biblical" oratorios ended with St John the Baptist (1873 Macfarren / Monk), oratorio. The transition to the opera came with Hérodiade (1881). In Jules Massenet's opera the character of Salome takes central stage and a life of her own but still preserves her "biblical" innocence. In the 1880s Hérodiade" was performed in Belgium, Italy, France, Germany and in 1892 reached New Orleans.

Everything changed in 1896 with the premiere in Paris of Salomé (Salome / 1893 Wilde), play. Salome lost her innocence and became the embodiment of the femme fatale who seduces and destroys her lovers. The "Salomania" spread in every corner of Europe and America.

Based on Wilde's play, 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 Salomania hit New York again at the Manhattan Opera House in 1909 with Mary Garden.

Among the early interpreters of Strauss's Salome are Göta Ljungberg, Maria Jeritza, Maria Cebotari, and Christle Goltz, 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.

Strauss's Salome is regularly staged in the major opera theaters and is now available also in numerous sound and video recordings, featuring interpreters such as Birgitt Nilsson, Leonie Rysanek, Hildegard Behrens, Montserrat Caballé, Josephine Barstow, Catherine Malfitano, Maria Ewing, Nadja Michael, Karita Mattila and Angela Denoke.

Although overshadowed by Strauss's Salome, Massenet's Hérodiade has not ceased to be performed and recorded, offering the soprano the intriguing possibility to play the same role in two different operas.

@2017 Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan

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 often represented her in the act of dancing. 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 Oscar Wilde's play (in Paris [1896] and Berlin [1903]) and Richard Strauss's opera (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. 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 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.

The Salome craze, or Salomania, reached its peak in the years 1907-09, 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. It started in Europe with The Vision of Salome by Canadian dancer Maud Allan, which premiered in Vienna in December 1906 and then appeared in some of the major European theaters, in Budapest, Berlin, Marienbad, and finally London. In line with the new identity of the character, in November 1907 Loise Fuller performed in Paris a very different Salome from her first work on the subject, on music specifically composed by Florent Schmitt.

In the meantime, Strauss's Salome had been first performed in New York on 22 January 1907. As was common practice, dancer Bianca Froelich substituted soprano Olive Fremstad during Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils. Her realistic performance contributed to the scandal and the show was cancelled within days. By public demand, Froelich immediately began performing her opera choreography at the Lincoln Square Variety Theater before wildly enthusiastic audiences. The scandal of the New York premiere and the lasting success of Allan's performance in London inspired Gertrude Hoffman to offer her own interpretation of the Vision of Salome. In April 1908 she traveled to London with the specific goal of getting Allan's dance and on 13 July 1908 the show opened at Hammerstein's Paradise Garden Roof Theater. It was an overnight sensation and every vaudeville theatre staged its own Salome dance. In the Summer 1908 newspapers and journals in the United States denounced an outbreak of "The Salome Epidemic": "There are no many dancers appearing as the daughter of Herodias that it is impossible to make more than a guess at their number. There is hardly a vaudeville house that cannot boast its own Salome, whether it be Hammerstein's Roof Garden, the Casino, the Alhambra, or a third or four class hall" (The Sketch 63 [1908] 345). Among the most celebrated American vaudeville dancers to specialize as "Salome dancers" were Hilde Caroll, La Syplhe, Lotta Faust, Vera Olcott, Eva Tanguay, La Belle Zola, La Petite Adelaide, and Aida Overton Walker. When in 1909 Strauss's Salome returned at New York at the Manhattan Opera House, it was a triumph. Enthusiastic audiences rushed to see soprano Mary Garden performing herself a much daring version of the Dance of Seven Veils.

If the Salome epidemic was quickly over, Salome remained a fashionable presence on stage. New productions of Schmitt's ballet were performed in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s.

Many famous choreographers have recreated Salomé's Dance of the Seven Veils for productions of either the Wilde play or the Strauss opera, including Maurice Bejart, Mark Morris (Seattle Opera, 1986), and Doug Varone (Metropolitan Opera, 2004). Some have created solo performances, based on the music of Strauss or other composers. Some have choreographed ballet music composed by musicians, like Florent Schmitt and Paul Hindemith, specifically for the Salome dance.

Among the most notable actresses and dancers to perform Salome on screen are 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.

The two typologies of Salome, innocent child or perverse seductress, have continued to coexist. In more recent decades a third typology has emerged in some productions that have given a homosexual understanding of the story.

In an interview published by Solomon Volkov in 1985, two years after the death of the choreographer, George Balanchine stated that he always believed that Oscar Wilde was thinking of a pretty boy when he wrote of Salome. The first production of Salome to play up a transvestite angle was the Italian film director Luchino Visconti's production of Strauss's opera at the Spoleto Festival in 1961, under the baton of Thomas Schippers. There the Dance of the Seven Veils was performed not by the soprano (Margaret Tynes) but by a group of young men. Choreographers Lyndsay Kemp in 1977 and Maurice Bejart in 1983 even more explicitly linked the character of Salome to transvestitism by adapting the role for a male dancer. Russell's film Salome's Last Dance (1987) located the representation of Wilde's work in an all-male brothel, revealing at the climax of the Dance of the Seven Veils that the "female" protagonist (Imogen Millais-Scott) was transgender.

Other versions of the story were choreographed by

• Loie Fuller (mus. Florent Schmitt, Paris, 1907),
• < Alexander Gorsky (1871-1924), Salome's Dance (mus. R. Strauss, Moscow, 1921) >
• Kassian Goleizovsky (1924)
• Ruth St. Denis (1931)
• Lester Horton (between 1931 and 1950)
• Ruth Sorel (1933)
• Serge Lifar (1905-1986) (mus. Richard Strauss, Monte Carlo, 1946),
• Birgit Cullberg (1908-1999) (mus. H. Rosenberg, Stockholm, 1964),
• Joseph Lazzini (1968)
• Peter Durrell (mus. Hindemith, Scottish Theatre Ballet, 1970),
• Maurice Bejart (1970)
• Carmen de Lavallade and James Truitte (1973)
• Lindsay Kemp (b.1939) (mus. various, New York, 1975?) (all male version, 1977)
• Flemming Flindt (mus. Davies, Copenhagen, 1978),
• Billy Cratty (1986) Transported Salome into the roaring Twenties
• Josephine Barstow || Salome's Dance (1986 Morris / @1905 Strauss), ballet || Choreography of Mark Morris for a representation of Strauss's opera Seattle Opera House, 1986, performed by the soprano. Conductor Stefan Minde
• Graeme Murphy (b.1950), Salome (mus. various, Sydney Dance Company, 1999). (1993? and 1998?)

Bibliography

• Marlis Schweitzer, "The Salome Epidemic: Degeneracy, Disease, and Race Suicide," in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (Oxford 2015), pp.
• Debra Craine, and Judith Mackrell (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of Dance, 2010.
• Clair Rowden (ed.), Performing Salome, Revealing Stories (Routledge, 2013)
• Davinia Caddy, "Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils," Cambridge Opera Journal 17.1 (2005) 37–58 [1]
• Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven, 2002).
• William Tydeman and Steven Price, Wilde: Salome (Cambridge, 1996), 136–51
• 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
• Judith Lynne Hanna, Dance, Sex, and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire, University of Chicago Press, 1988
• "The Vulgarization of Salome," Current Literature 45 (1908) 437-440