It would be absurd to deny, of course, that "Salome" is in many ways a noteworthy and brilliant—and, for the curious student of musical evolution—a fascinating work. Its musicianship—the sheer technical artistry which contrived it—is stupefying in its enormous and inerrant mastery. The quality of its inspiration and its success as a musico-dramatic commentary, which have been the prime considerations in this discussion, have been measured, of course, by the most exacting standards—by the standards set in other and greater works of Strauss, in comparison with which it is lamentably inferior in vitality, sincerity, and importance. In at least one respect, however, it compels the most unreserved praise; and that is in the case of its superlative orchestration. Strauss has written here for a huge and complicated body of instruments, and he has set them an appalling task. Never in the history of music has such instrumentation found its way onto the printed page. Yet, though he requires his performers to do impossible things, they never fail to contribute to the effect of the music as a whole; for the dominant and wonderful distinction of the scoring lies precisely in the splendour of its total effect, and the almost uncanny art with which it is accomplished. One finds upon every page not only new and superlative achievements in colouring, unimagined sonorities, but a keenly poetic feeling for the timbre which will most intensify the dramatic moment. The instrumentation, from beginning to end, is a gorgeous fabric of strange and novel and obsessing colours—for in such orchestral writing as this, sound becomes colour, and colour sound: it is not a single sense which is engaged, but a subtle and indescribable complex of all the senses; one not only hears, one also imagines that one sees and feels these tones, and is even fantastically aware of their possessing exotic and curious odours, vague and singular perfumes. It is when one turns from the bewildering magnificence of its orchestral surfaces to a consideration of the actual substance of the music, the fundamental ideas which lie within the dazzling instrumental envelope, that it is possible to realise why, for many of his most determined admirers, this work marks a pathetic decline from the standard set by Strauss in his former achievements. The indisputable splendour of this music, its marvellous witchery, are incurably external. It is a gorgeous and many-hued garment, but that which it clothes and glorifies is a poor and unnurtured thing. There is little vitality, little true substance, within this dazzling instrumental envelope; and for any one who is not content with its brave exterior panoply, and who seeks a more permanent and living beauty within, the thing seems but a vast and empty husk. It is not that the music is at times cacophonous in the extreme, that its ugliness ranges from that which is merely harsh and unlovely to that which is brutally and deliberately hideous; for we have not to learn anew, in these days of post-Wagnerian emancipation, that a dramatic exigency justifies any possible musical means that will appropriately express it: to-day we cheerfully concede that, when a character in music-drama tells another character that his body is "like the body of a leper, like a plastered wall where vipers crawl ... like a whitened sepulchre, full of loathsome things," the sentiment may not be uttered in music of Mendelssohnian sweetness and placidity. It is because the music is so often vulgarly sentimental, when it should be terrible and unbridled in its passion, that it seems to some a defective performance. For sheer commonness, allied with a kind of emotionalism that is the worse for being inflated in expression, it would be hard to find, in any score of the rank of "Salome," the equal of the two themes which Strauss uses so extensively that they stand almost as the dominant motives in the score: the theme which is associated with Salome's desire to kiss the lips of John, and that other theme—it has been called that of "Ecstasy"—which begins like the cantabile subject in the first movement of Tschaikowsky's "Pathetic" Symphony, and ends—well, like Strauss at his worst.
An astounding score!—music that is by turns gorgeous, banal, delicate, cataclysmic, vulgar, sentimental, insinuating, tornadic: music which is as inexplicable in its shortcomings as it is overwhelming in its occasional triumphs.
We may now consider that other aspect from which, I have said, the candid observer is compelled to regard this remarkable work.
Those over-zealous friends of Strauss who have sought to justify the offensiveness of "Salome" by alleging the case of Wagner's "Die Walküre," and the relationship that is there shown to exist between the ill-starred Volsungs, are worse than misguided; for however unhallowed that relationship may be, it conveys no hint of sexual malaise. Siegmund and Sieglinde are superbly healthful and untainted animals: to name their exuberant passion in the same breath with the horrible lust of Salome is stupid and absurd.
Let us not confuse the issue: The spectacle of a woman fondling passionately a severed and reeking head and puling over its dead lips, is not necessarily deleterious to morals, nor is it necessarily an act of impudicity; it is merely, for those whose calling does not happen to induce familiarity with mortuary things, horrible and revolting. No matter how, in practice on the stage, the thing may be ameliorated, the fact,—the situation as conceived and ordered by the dramatist,—is inescapable. It has been said that this scene is not really so sickening as it is alleged to be, since the stage directions require that Salome's kisses be bestowed in the obscurity of a darkened stage. But to that it may be replied, in the first place, that darkness does little to mitigate the horror of the scene as conveyed by the words of Salome—so little, in fact, that Herod, who was anything but a person of fastidious sensibilities, is overcome with loathing and commands her despatch; and, secondly, that the stage directions expressly declare for an illumination of the scene by a "moonbeam" ... which "covers her with light," just before the end, while she is at the climax of her ghastly libido.
Mr. Ernest Newman, a thoroughly sane and extremely able champion of all that is best in Strauss, has said, in considering this aspect of "Salome," that "the whole outcry against it comes from a number of too excitable people who are not artists, and who therefore cannot understand the attitude of the artist towards work of this kind. Human nature," he goes on, "breaks out into a variety of forms of energy that are not at all nice from the moral point of view—murder, for example, or forgery, or the struggle of the ambitious politician for power, or the desire to get rich quickly at other people's expense. But because these things are objectionable in themselves and dangerous to social well-being there is no reason why the artist should not interest us in them by the genius with which he describes them. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde was a dangerous person whom, in real life, we should want the police to lay by the heels; but sensible people who read the story do not bristle with indignation at Stevenson for creating such a character; they simply enjoy the art of it. The writing of the story did not turn Stevenson into a monster of deception and cruelty, nor does the reading of it have that effect on us. Things are different in art from what the same things would be in real life, and an artist's joy in the depiction of some dreadful phase of human nature does not necessarily mean that, as a private individual, he is depraved, or that the spectacle of his art will make for depravity in the audience. Now Wilde and Strauss have simply drawn an erotic and half-deranged Oriental woman as they imagine she may have been. They do not recommend her; they simply present her, as a specimen of what human nature can be like in certain circumstances.... The hysterical moralists who cry out against 'Salome' ... have a terrified, if rather incoherent, feeling that if women in general were suddenly to become abnormally morbid, conceive perverse passions for bishops, have these holy men decapitated when their advances were rejected, and then start kissing the severed heads in a blind fury of love and revenge in the middle of the drawing-room, the respectable £40 a year householder would feel the earth rocking beneath his feet. But women are not going to do these spicy things simply because they saw Salome on the stage do something like them, any more than men are going to walk over the bodies of little children because they read that Mr. Hyde did so, or murder their brothers because Hamlet's uncle murdered his."
Now that, of course, is irresistible. But Mr. Newman's gift of vivacious and telling statement, and his natural impatience with the cant of those who hold briefs for a facile morality, have here led him, as it seems to me, astray. To deny that an intimate and vital relationship exists between the subject chosen by an artist and its probable effect upon the public is to yield the whole case to those who hold that this relationship, in the case of the theatre (and, of course, the opera house), is merely casual and inconsequential: it is to yield it to the upholder of the stage as an agent of "relaxation," an agent either of mere entertainment or mere sensation. It is not unlikely that Mr. Newman would be the first to admit that, if the prime function of art can be postulated at all, it might be conceived to be that of enlarging the sense of life: as an agency for liberating and mellowing the spirit: as an instrument primarily quickening and emancipative. "The sadness of life is the joy of art," said Mr. George Moore. The sadness of life, yes; and the evil and tragedy, the terror and violence, of life: for the contemplation of these may, through the evoking of pity, nourish and enlarge the spirit of the beholder. But are we very greatly nourished by the contemplation of that which must inevitably arouse disgust rather than compassion? I do not speak of "morality" or "immorality," since there is nothing stable in the use or understanding of these terms. But those aspects of life which sicken the sense, which are loathsome rather than terrible—are they fit matter for the artist?
It is a much mauled and much tortured point, and I, for one, am not unwilling to leave the matter in the condition in which Dr. Johnson left the subject of a future state, concerning which a certain lady was interrogating him. "She seemed", recounts the admirable Boswell, "desirous of knowing more, but he left the matter in obscurity."
To return, in conclusion, to Strauss the musician: Where, one ends by wondering, is the earlier, the greater, Strauss?—the unparalleled maker of music, the indisputable genius who gave us a sheaf of masterpieces: who gave us "Don Quixote," "Ein Heldenleben," "Zarathustra," "Tod und Verklärung." Has he passed into that desolate region occupied in his day by Hector Berlioz, for whom a sense of the tragic futility of talent without genius did not exist—the futility of application, of ingenuity, of constructive resource, without that ultimate and unpredictable flame? Is not Strauss, in such a work as "Salome," but another Berlioz (though a Berlioz with a gleaming past)? Is he not here as one disdainfully indifferent to the ministrations of that "Eternal Spirit" which, in Milton's wonderful phrase, "sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases"?