He is the absolute pessimist who submits to the authorities and respects all rules and laws.

Herodias’s page, from the very start of the play, by using the moon metaphor attached to Salome, is the announcer of a very bad ending. Salome’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: the Need to TouchĥSalome does not only stand in herself but she is also defined by the way people look at her. It is that dimension we found fully realized in Philip Jordan and David McVicar’s Covent Garden, London, 2008 production of the opera. Strauss uses these patterns to create a comprehensive musical world.ĤOscar Wilde’s version is extremely brutal, bestial maybe even cruel, even though the poetry of the text is extremely refined. It can have a wider understanding: syntactic music, semantic music and hence symbolical music. Strauss is also using the real music of the text to transpose it into his own music.ģYet the music of a text is not only creating sound patterns and rhythmic patterns. He had it translated and reduced in German. The differences are essential and we will use them to show the conscious work of Oscar Wilde on his text in English as compared to Lord Alfred Douglas’s, and with a reference back to the French text when the two English versions show clear and significant differences.ĢThen the opera by Richard Strauss (created on December 9, 1915) appears essential because Richard Strauss knew the original play he supposedly discovered in French.

Another translation, which is essentially a corrected version of Lord Alfred Douglas’s exists under the sole name of Oscar Wilde. The English translation attributed to Lord Alfred Douglas is included in Collins’ Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. The French text is easily available since it is in the public domain. It was created in Paris in French in 1896. Haut de pageġ Oscar Wilde wrote this play in French, for Sarah Bernhardt. Richard Strauss amplifies the text and the subject with his music and his German libretto. That also leads to an end that looks like some form of expiatory justice. This exploration of the relation between Salome and John the Baptist leads to a deep reflection on the value of life when it is entirely dominated by obsessive carnal desires. And yet she is killed like a plain outlaw by some soldier on Herod’s order.

She provokes Herod, John himself and everyone else around her and pushes them to the extreme limits of decency. Salome is the archetypical monster in Christianity. Oscar Wilde uses these elements to create in French, and then in English in his own translation of the play, a style conveying and expressing these traits. Salome is deranged by an obsessive compulsive disorder that leads her to touch everything she desires, repeat things over and over again and count things around her. No female character, more than Salome, carries in herself so much power to debunk and rebut any establishment.

Salomé by oscar wilde