Performing Salome, Revealing Stories

Clair Rowden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317082262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Opera Music

With its first public live performance in Paris on 11 February 1896, Oscar Wilde's Salomé took on female embodied form that signalled the start of 'her' phenomenal journey through the history of the arts in the twentieth century. This volume explores Salome's appropriation and reincarnation across the arts - not just Wilde's heroine, nor Richard Strauss's - but Salome as a cultural icon in fin-de-siècle society, whose appeal for ever new interpretations of the biblical story still endures today. Using Salome as a common starting point, each chapter suggests new ways in which performing bodies reveal alternative stories, narratives and perspectives and offer a range and breadth of source material and theoretical approaches. The first chapter draws on the field of comparative literature to investigate the inter-artistic interpretations of Salome in a period that straddles the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the Modernist era. This chapter sets the tone for the rest of the volume, which develops specific case studies dealing with censorship, reception, authorial reputation, appropriation, embodiment and performance. As well as the Viennese premiere of Wilde's play, embodied performances of Salome from the period before the First World War are considered, offering insight into the role and agency of performers in the production and complex negotiation of meaning inherent in the role of Salome. By examining important productions of Strauss's Salome since 1945, and more recent film interpretations of Wilde's play, the last chapters explore performance as a cultural practice that reinscribes and continuously reinvents the ideas, icons, symbols and gestures that shape both the performance itself, its reception and its cultural meaning.

Chapter 1
Decadent Senses: The Dissemination of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé across the Arts

Polina Dimova

The Vicissitudes of Photography

In a 1987 article on Oscar Wilde, the French newspaper Le Monde published a photograph of the playwright, dressed up and posing as his femme fatale heroine Salome.1 The picture appeared in Richard Ellmann’s 1987 biography, captioned: ‘Wilde in costume as Salomé’2 (see Figure 1.1). In the following decade, the photograph titillated the imagination of gender critics, opening up a myriad of interpretative possibilities by alerting scholars to Wilde’s supposed transvestite tendencies. Marjorie Garber proposed that Salome’s dance should be construed as a transvestite dance: ‘the dancer is neither male nor female, but rather, transvestitic – that is the essence of the dance itself.’3 Though exposing the fetishistic tendencies of Garber’s reading, Megan Becker-Leckrone herself lovingly describes the photo in an apposition she could not resist interpolating: ‘a self-consciously staged photograph of Wilde in drag, on bended knee, reaching toward a dummy head on a platter.’4 After situating Wilde’s Salomé ‘within the Paterian tradition … [as] a male transvestite’, even Richard Dellamora, who is quick to put forward his argument about Salomé as ‘a significant document in the history of a specifically female sexuality’, continues to deal with the picture by describing it in detail: ‘a semi-nude photograph of Wilde dressed as Salomé and reaching for the decapitated head of John’.5 The picture seems to possess enormous argumentative value. As an image, an indexical sign, and an existential trace of historical truth, the photograph proves its insurmountable power.

Figure 1.1 Alice Guszalewicz as Salome

Source: Guillot de Saix Collection. © Roger-Viollet.

Not convinced of Wilde’s alleged transvestitism, Merlin Holland joined forces with the German scholar Horst Schroeder to demystify the photograph.6 Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson and co-editor of his complete letters, was lucky to be presented with a photograph of Alice Guszalewicz, the Hungarian soprano who sang Salome in Cologne in 1906/07, six years after Wilde’s death in Paris (see Figure 1.2). Her jewellery and garment appear identical to those in the ‘Wilde-in-drag’ picture. This new attribution of the photograph suggests that its identification, and our recognition of Wilde in the picture, was over-determined. Due to Salome’s professed virility, androgyny or even male homosexuality and Paterism, her identification with Wilde himself had sedimented in the critical consciousness over the years. Practices of cross-dressing in various productions, most notably Lindsay Kemp’s all-male 1977 production and Ken Russell’s film Salome’s Last Dance (1987), discussed in detail in the final chapter to this volume, made it possible for us to envision a Wilde in drag.7 Indeed, Becker-Leckrone is completely justified in pointing out the series of ‘mystifications’ informing the Salome myth, although the critic herself was caught up in them. Elaine Showalter, also fascinated with the picture of Wilde as Salome ‘in a wig and jeweled costume, slave bracelets around his arms’, realizes that the photograph is veiled in mystery. Nevertheless, while raising questions, she never doubts its authenticity; rather, she keeps weaving out its story by further asking rhetorically, ‘At what private theatricals did Wilde decide “Salomé, ç’est [sic] moi”?’8 Critics wistfully desired this image of Wilde, and their fantasy finally produced it.

The new interpretation of the photograph gives us a curious insight into what critics have come to emphasize in recent years, namely, Wilde’s homosexuality, and what they have neglected, namely, his play’s involvement with the other arts. An all-too-vulnerable photograph opens up new interpretative possibilities for the study of Wilde’s Salomé across the arts and urges us to shift our critical focus away from Wilde’s gay flamboyance toward his Salomé’s transformations on the stage, in the theatre and in the opera houses, as well as in drawings.

The resurgence of the Salome myth in fin-de-siècle literature, visual arts and music has produced a tremendous body of critical writing, which traces influences and intertextual connections in various representations of the irresistible femme fatale. While much scholarly work strives to cross disciplinary boundaries by discussing the decadent incarnations of Salome in more than one medium, intermediality,9 as an issue in itself, has been eclipsed by psychoanalysis, feminism, sexuality and gender and queer studies as a focus of investigation.10 This critical preoccupation, of course, reflects well the content of the myth of the femme fatale or ‘dragon lady’ Salome, as decadents and symbolists construed her at the turn of the twentieth century. Rather than reading Salome’s various embodiments across the arts as a mere symptom of a fin-de-siècle obsession revealing male anxieties about female sexuality or enacting a masculine wish-fulfilment, as many critics have done, this essay disentangles the discourse of gender from the discourse of intermediality.11 It shifts the focus of Salome criticism toward issues of intermedial translation, mirroring the dynamics of the ‘Wilde-in-drag’ picture.

Figure 1.2 Alice Guszalewicz as Salome

Note: Published in Horst Schroeder, Alice in Wildeland (Braunschweig, 1994), p. 33. Originally published in Bühne und Welt, 9 (1907), p. 444.

By examining the intermedial drive that has propelled the Salome tradition over the centuries, this chapter construes Wilde’s play as self-consciously looking back on its multifarious interartistic sources on the one hand, and, on the other, as looking forward to its future artistic interpretations. Over the course of this examination, I will trace the internal logic of the play’s synaesthetic principles – its interweaving of vision, voice and dance – as motivating and, in fact, necessitating Salomé’s dissemination across the arts. In order to disentangle the late-Victorian and decadent conflation of homosexuality, Wagnerism, the total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) and synaesthesia, this chapter draws attention to the interartistic transformations of Wilde’s play in Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings and in Richard Strauss’s opera. It enquires into how Wilde’s play can anticipate its future aesthetic elaborations.

The Legend of Salome across Media

Through the ages, the Salome legend has captured the imagination of Medieval, Renaissance, and fin-de-siècle visual artists, poets and composers, and has thus produced a rich, intricately layered, and resonant history of interartistic endeavours. The two compressed Biblical accounts of John the Baptist’s death in the Gospels of Saint Matthew (Chapter 14, verses 1 to 13) and Saint Mark (Chapter 6, verses 14 to 29) lay the foundations of the myth.12 But the narrative is sparse and austere, lacking in sensory detail. If anything, the story creates an aural frame, as in both biblical accounts, Herod hears about Jesus and the miracles he performs and mistakes John the Baptist for the Messiah. The interpolation emerges as a memory in Herod’s mind upon his hearing of Jesus, and Jesus’s hearing of Herod’s beheading of John the Baptist, in turn, closes the framed narrative.13 In this aural frame, sound and hearing are also associated with the Word. Still, the story appears to retain enough emblematic vividness for the artistic imagination to be kindled: Salome’s supple figure, a severed head on a silver charger, a dance which literally triggers music, rhythms and gestures in an artist’s mind, all cry out for artistic treatment. Thus, the artistic production evolving from the Biblical accounts arose out of a lack that would be perpetually elaborated upon to the point of repletion and, in fact, surfeit.

The biblical account depicts the nameless princess as a docile girl, observing the instructions of her mother Herodias. Only after the fourth century AD did Salome’s vilification commence with the growing veneration of Saint John. His spirituality was thus contrasted with the carnality Salome came to embody. The opposition between the spirit and the flesh informed also the first artistic depictions of Salome that appeared on the tympanums of cathedrals, on stained glass windows and on the pages of illuminated manuscripts during the Middle Ages.

Gradually, the accent on Salome’s notoriety faded away, as the Renaissance painters began to emphasize Salome’s idealized beauty. Italian, Flemish and German artists created a rich iconographic tradition of Salome paintings. Humanist paintings of Salome portray a graceful, dignified princess dancing before Herod at his opulent feast, or, alternatively, a pensive girl gazing at Saint John’s head. Following earlier Medieval renditions of Saint John’s martyrdom, many Renaissance Salome representations preserve the narrative entirety of the story by combining into one painting, fresco or panel a number of plot elements such as the feast, the dance, the beheading and the presentation of the Baptist’s head to Herodias.

In the nineteenth century, the interchange among the arts and the senses fascinated poets, artists, composers and philosophers alike, and informed the transmutations of the Salome legend across the arts. Figures of sensory and artistic synthesis emerged prominently in the Symbolist and Decadent most-treasured trope of synaesthesia, the mixing of sense–impressions, for instance, in the perception of sound as colour. Richard Wagner’s music dramas and theoretical writings on the Gesamtkunstwerk exalted the emotional, sensory and aesthetic potential of the multi-media artwork. The French Symbolist poets interpreted Wagner’s synthesis of the arts as a synthesis of the senses. In Charles Baudelaire’s experience, Wagner’s prelude to Lohengrin musically evoked a synaesthetic blend of visual, spatial and tactile percepts: ‘brightness’ and ‘intensity of light’, levitation and ‘increase of incandescence and heat’.14 Baudelaire called Wagner’s ability to paint space with music his ‘art of translating’, and this for him was a synaesthetic translation among the arts. Moreover, in The Renaissance, Walter Pater adopted and reformulated the German Romantic idea of Anders-streben, the artistic imp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Performing Salome, Revealing Stories
• 1 Decadent Senses: The Dissemination of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé across the Arts
• 2 Visions of Salome, Visions of Wilde: Critical Readings of Oscar Wilde’s Salome in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna
• 3 Whose/Who’s Salome? Natalia Trouhanowa, a Dancing Diva
• 4 Salome’s Slow Dance with the Lord Chamberlain, London 1909–10
• 5 Seven Veils, Seven Rooms, Four Walls and Countless Contexts
• 6 The Dirt on Salome
• 7 Outrageous Salome: Grace and Fury in Carmelo Bene’s Salomè and Ken Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance
• Bibliography
• Index