That Richard Strauss the opera-maker is, for the present, summed up in Richard Strauss the composer of "Salome," would scarcely, I think, be disputed by any one who is sympathetically cognisant of his achievements in that rôle. Neither in "Guntram" nor in the later and far more characteristic "Feuersnot" is his essential quality as a musical dramatist so fully and clearly revealed as in his setting of the play of Wilde to which he has given a fugacious immortality. Yet in discussing this astonishing work, I prefer to consider it in and for itself rather than as a touchstone whereby to form a general estimate of Strauss the dramatical tone-poet; for I believe that, if he lives and produces for another decade, it will be seen that "Salome" does not furnish a just or adequate measure of Strauss' indisputable genius as a writer of music for the stage. I believe that he has not given us here a valid or completely representative account of himself in that capacity. So remarkable, though, is the work in itself, so assertive in its challenge to contemporary criticism, that it imperatively compels some attempt at appraisement in any deliberate survey of modern operatic art.
For any one who is not convinced that those ancient though occasionally reconciled adversaries, Art and Ethics, are necessarily antipodal, such a task, it must be confessed, is not one to be approached in a jaunty or easeful spirit, for it means that one must be willing, apparently, to enter the lists ranged with the hypocrites, the prudes, the short-sighted and the unwise; with frenzied and myopic champions of respectability; with all those who are as inflexible in their allegiance to the moralities as they are resourceful and tireless in their pursuit of impudicity in art. Yet that there are two standpoints from which this extraordinary work must be regarded by any candid observer I do not think is open to question: it has its purely æsthetic aspect, and its—I shall not say moral, but social—aspect. To separate them in any conscientious discussion is impossible.
Let us, to begin with, consider, in and by itself, the quality of the music which the incomparable Strauss—Strauss, the most conquering musical personality since Wagner—has conceived as a fit embodiment in tones of the tragic and maleficent and haunting tale of the Dancing Daughter of Herodias and her part in the career of the prophet John, as recounted—with non-Scriptural variations—by Oscar Wilde. We may consider, first, whether or not it achieves the prime requisite of music in its organic relation to a dramatic subject: an enforcement and heightening of the effect of the play; setting aside, for the present, those other aspects of it which have so absorbed critical attention, and of which we have heard overmuch: its remorseless complexity, its unflagging ingenuity, its superb and miraculous orchestration. These are matters of importance, but of secondary importance. The point at issue is, has Strauss, through his music, intensified and italicised the moods and situations of the drama; and, secondly, has he achieved this end through music which is in itself notable and important?
Never was music so avid in its search for the eloquent word as is the music of Strauss in this work. We are amazed at the audacity, the resourcefulness, of the expressional apparatus that is cumulatively reared in this unprecedented score. The alphabet of music is ransacked for new and undreamt-of combinations of tone: never were effects so elaborate, so cunning, so fertilely contrived, offered to the ears of men since the voice of music was heard in its pristine estate. This score challenges the music of the days that shall follow after it.
For the most part, the atmosphere of horror, of ominous suspense, of oppressive and bodeful gloom, in which the tragedy of Wilde is enwrapped, is wonderfully rendered in the music. There are beyond question overmastering pages in the score—music which has the kind of superb audacity and power of effect that Dr. Johnson discerned in the style of Sir Thomas Browne: "forcible expressions which he would never have used but by venturing to the utmost verge of propriety; and flights which would never have been reached but by one who had very little fear of the shame of falling." Of such quality is the passage which portrays the agonised suspense of Salome during the beheading of John; the passage, titanic in its expression of malignly exultant triumph, which accentuates the delivery of the head to the insensate princess; the few measures before Herod's patibulary order at the close: these things are products of genius, of the same order of genius which impelled the music of "Don Quixote," of "Ein Heldenleben," of "Zarathustra"; they are true and vital in imagination, marvellous in intensity of vision, of great and subduing potency as dramatic enforcement and as sheer music.
But when one has said that much, one comes face to face with the chief weakness of the score—its failure in the expression of the governing motive of the play: the consuming and inappeasable lust of Salome for the white body and scarlet lips of John.
"Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion. I was a princess, and thou didst scorn me. I was a virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me. I was chaste and thou didst fill my veins with fire.... Ah! ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me, Jokanaan?..."
That is the note which is sounded from beginning to end of the play—that is its focal emotion. And Strauss has not made it sound, as it should sound, in his music. When it should be wildly, barbarically, ungovernably erotic, as for the enforcement of Salome's fervid supplications in her first interview with John, the music is merely conventional in its sensuousness. It should here be febrile, vertiginous. But what, actually, do we get? We get a scene built upon a phrase in which is crystallised the desire of Salome for the lips of the Prophet; and this theme is saccharinely ardent and sentimental, rather than feverish and unbridled; a phrase which might have been a product of the amiably voluptuous inspiration of the composer of "Faust." The "Tannhäuser" Bacchanale, even in its original form, is more truly expressive of venereous abandon than is this strangely sentimentalised music. It has, no doubt, a certain effectiveness, a certain expressiveness; but the effect that is produced, and the emotion that is expressed, are far removed from the field of sensation inhabited by Wilde's remarkable Princess. Yet it would seem to be a point needing but the lightest emphasis that if the passion of Salome is not fitly and eloquently rendered by the music, the cardinal impulse, the very heart of Wilde's drama, is left unexpressed.
So it is in the music of the final scene, Salome's mad apostrophe to the severed head. Here we get, not the note of lustful abandonment which would alone remove Salome's horrible appetite from the region of the perverted and the incredible, but a kind of musical utterance which simulates the noble rapture of Wagner's dying Isolde. The discrepancy of the music in this regard has been recognised by those who praise most warmly Strauss' score. It has been said in extenuation, on the one hand, that music is incapable of expressing what are called "base" emotions, and, on the other hand, that Strauss wished to exalt, to idealise and transfigure, this scene. To the first objection it may be said simply that it is based upon an argument that is at least open to serious question. It is by no means an evident or settled truth that music is incapable of uttering anything but worthy emotions, ideas, concepts. There is music by Berlioz, by Liszt, by Wagner, by Rimsky-Korsakoff, by Strauss himself, which is, in its emotional substance, sinister, demonic, even pornographic in suggestion; and not simply by reason of a key furnished by text, motto, or dramatic subject, but in itself—in its quality and character as music. But the claim need not be elaborated, or even demonstrated, since it is beside the point. One quarrels with the music of the final scene of "Salome" on the broad ground of its inappropriateness: because the emotional note which it strikes and sustains is one of nobility, whereas the plain requirement of the scene, of the psychological moment, demands music that should be anything but noble. And here we encounter the objections of those who hold that Salome herself, at the moment of her apostrophe to the dead head, becomes transfigured, uplifted through the power of a great and purifying love. But to argue in this manner is to indulge in a particularly egregious kind of fatuity. To conceive Wilde's lubricious princess as a kind of Oriental Isolde is grotesquely to distort the vivid and wholly consistent woman of his imagining; and it is to renounce at once all possibility of justifying her culminating actions. For the only ground upon which it might be remotely possible to account for Salome's remarkable behaviour, except by regarding her as a necrophilistic maniac, is that supplied by the conditions and the environment of a lustful, decadent, and bloodshot age. Only when one conceives her as frankly and spontaneously a barbarian, nourished on blood and lechery, does she become at all comprehensible to others than pathologists, even if she does not cease to impress us as noisome, monstrous, and horrible.
The music of "Salome," then, judging it in its entirety, is deficient as an exposition, as a translation into tone, of the drama upon which it is based; for it is inadequate in its expression of the play's central and informing emotion. One listens to this music, it must be granted, with the nerves in an excessive state of tension—it is enormously exciting; but so is, under certain conditions, a determined beating upon a drum. An assault upon the nerve-centres is a vastly different thing from an emotional persuasion; yet there are many who, in listening to "Salome," will need to be convinced of it.